Business + Emotions = Emotional Plan

As a small business owner and entrepreneur I can safely say that the “emotional rollercoaster ride” as it is affectionately known just comes with the territory of owning and operating your own business.

Its interesting prior to starting my own business I can remember trying to read every book and find any article that would offer up insight in what it meant to be a business owner and in my case what it meant to be as a small business owner. Every book discussed business plans, financial plans, and marketing plans, these books also talked about how to set up your business….you get the idea the only thing these books never talked about was the emotional plan or the psychological plan as I call it. Out of all the books that I bought, borrowed and read not one of them ever talked about the emotions of being a business owner. This led me to believe that either the authors didn’t think it mattered or that the authors weren’t actually business owners at all or at least that they never struggled with their businesses. The Emotional Plan is an important one and for all of you out there that are planning on starting your own business or that are in business….Read On!

This podcast isn’t a step by step instruction on how to write an emotional plan but it is about how to prepare your self for the emotional ups and downs. My first three years of business were probably the worst from an emotional perspective some weeks were good and some were not, I can honestly say that in the good weeks emotionally I never felt more ambitious, together and ready to take on the world…those were the good weeks. But in the bad weeks (which in the beginning were more common) I consistently felt like a failure and I constantly questioned what I was doing and was always getting ready to quit…Sound familiar? I knew that if I was going to survive the emotional rollercoaster ride then I was going to have to develop a plan or system to help me get through the bad weeks. As in any business big or small momentum is critical and without sustaining it you will lose hence the common knowledge that most small businesses go out of business within the first year of operation I never truly understood what that meant until I started my own business and really began to understand what momentum was all about…but that is another podcast.

The main step I took to get me where I am today is that I realized that in order to achieve success in my business I needed to remember that sometimes you have to fail and you have to question yourself and that the old saying that “nothing comes easy in life” is true you must struggle and work in order to reap the benefits of being successful. Many small business owners look at large companies that started with nothing and assumed that they were just destined to be successful but in reality those same small business owners that did become a success went on the same “emotional rollercoaster ride” and also realized that they needed to have an emotional plan to get them through the bad weeks. No one business owner big or small is alone and every business owner is obligated to understand this.

I hope that by discussing this issue it will help those of you who have discovered or are about to discover that having an emotional plan is the greatest asset to your business.

This is DOTG signing off please remember to tune in regularly and to take us take us wherever your business is going!