Our increasingly demanding work culture is one of the biggest challenges to our wellbeing, so how can we create & maintain a good work-life balance? As a small business owner, myself, I’m very conscious of the impact working all the hours God sends can have on the road to success. In this blog, I’m going to share some of my top tips on how to keep your work-life balance aligned with your core business values. Many of us stepped out of the employed world to be time rich & to have the flexibility around the way we work. Yet, working dawn to dusk & beyond doesn’t fulfil this desire. How does one create a balance? A lot of the answers are hiding in plain sight! 

So, let’s get started: All of the pointers in this blog are intertwined with one another, but even if you only take one or two to implement in your business then you should see, after the initial implementation period a balancing between work & the other aspects of your life. As you create more time & build your confidence a natural balance will come to the fore

1. Be Laser Focused In Knowing Who Your Customers Are (& Aren’t).

As I mentioned in a previous blog, not everyone is going to be your customer, introducer or key referrer. Realising this is a watershed moment in building your business. It allows you to focus your energies in the right places & towards the right people. Having a clear vision of who your real audience is means you can spend less time explaining who you are, what you do & the value you bring. Your real customers will appreciate your knowledge & expertise. Your values will be aligned more easily for this fact, so business will be more straightforward to come by. Whether you are new to running your own business or have been at it a while, it never hurts to find the time to build (or review) profiles of your ideal customer. By doing this task it will create space in your business to have the right conversations with the right people & to maintain your laser focus. It is OK to leave your ‘non-customers’ behind in this process. However, make sure that all interactions leave positive impressions. Someone who is not your customer today, might be tomorrow…you never know! 

2. Have a Marketing Plan & Implement It. 

This is easy to say, but can be difficult to implement. If you have defined your customers, introducers & key referrers, then you know where they hang out, so it should be easy to create & implement your marketing & brand awareness strategies. There are so many marketing channels that it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. 

The question is, where should I choose to start; perhaps with the pay-per-click advertising option, or on social media via LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, should I go networking & then which is the best format, there’s national & local newspapers & their digital alternatives or how about one of those handy community focused magazines that regularly drops through my letterbox, I could talk with Mums at the school gates or Dad’s picking their kids up from ballet, how about an email campaign or splash-out on some radio advertising or on a billboard, I could sponsor a local sports team or invest in a great website & the associated SEO or write regular articles & blogs…this list is endless. 

All the options come with different price points, some have a hefty ticket price, while others require an investment in time rather than loads of money. I recommend keeping your plan simple & to the point, & stick to it religiously. You will need to commit. A random post here & then another one there will just not cut the mustard. It is best to pick a marketing solution & commit for a minimum of three months It takes time to build traction, brand awareness & to see a return on your investment. Make sure you allocate time across your day, your week & your month to actually implement your plan.

Set a realistic & affordable marketing budget. You may not be able to find the pennies for a full three month pay-per-click campaign or a full-page advert for three months in a community magazine right now. So, invest what you can & make maximum use of it. Building a community on Twitter or Facebook is more about finding the time rather than a spending big exercise. Use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool for some brilliant & straightforward lead generation. A top tip here is to build your customer profile using the filter categories on this application, meaning there is as close a perfect match as possible. There is often a free month trial with Sales Navigator, so use it wisely & to its full potential. 

Whatever you choose to do for your marketing, measure your outcomes, review your marketing plan regularly & make strategic changes based on the successes or the failures. Stick with the elements that work & do something different if they don’t. If your plan consistently fails to deliver the desired results or connections, it’s a safe bet that you are not targeting the right people. Document your marketing plan & as I said before “implement it fully”, if you are organised, execute the plan well & measure your outcomes, it will keep you on track, & makes sure everything you do is focused towards your business goals & at your perfect customers. 

3. Love Your Numbers. 

As I have already mentioned having a realistic marketing budget is important, but understanding your business’ numbers is equally as crucial. Let’s look at three areas:

Forecasting: Make sure that you have a forecasting spreadsheet that shows all of your predicted outgoings & your desired income. Know where your breakeven point is: how many of your products or services do you have to sell so that all of your outgoing costs are covered? Be realistic about your projected sales numbers & about where to position your product or service price point. It is great to be ambitious, but initially I recommend a conservative approach in this exercise. If you over-egg your sales numbers, you can easily over spend on non-essential expenses because you are expecting more income than actually happens. A cautious approach means you don’t get into debt unexpectedly. Remember, you can always upgrade your forecast if things go better than you anticipated. This means you need to be as comprehensive as you can when creating your spreadsheet & include all your possible outgoings

Try an include all essential bills & you will probably also have somethings for your business that are nice to have – but can you really afford those? Add the non-essential items only once you know you can cover these costs in addition to the essentials. Bills to consider when building your forecasting model should include your salary, national insurance & pension contributions, marketing costs, printing & postage, insurance, mileage, utilities, taxes & accounting services, IT, broadband & mobile phone costs, health & safety, subscriptions, training, memberships & upfront costs for stock, but you may have other specific items to include. Knowledge of how many pieces of a particular product or service you need to sell to start making a profit should be a barometer for your business. Combined with your customer avatars & knowing your value, you can be very pointed in your marketing, ensuring you are talking to the right people all the time.

Bookkeeping: Keeping tabs on your money is an important factor in running your business, therefore make sure that you record all of your expenses & outgoings. The most efficient way to do this is to use some bookkeeping software such as Xero, which makes the whole process easy & straightforward. Up to date bookkeeping gives you a realistic picture of your business financials, & an awareness of your sales, cash flow & outgoings. Being up to date with your numbers brings you clarity, focus & direction.

Cash flow: Very few of us set-up our businesses to be credit controllers, but this is a crucial aspect of running a small business. Not keeping on top of money that is due to you will have a detrimental impact on your cash flow & your ability to do more business. It can be scary to have to chase someone to pay the money they owe you, & even more daunting when you have done an amazing job for them. Getting your invoices paid on time is an inevitable obstacle we all face. Many of us find it easier to bury our heads in the sand when we don’t get paid on time. This is such an important issue that The Federation of Small Business has recently run the Fair Pay, Fair Play Campaign to help people like you & me get paid in a timely manner. If you hate picking the phone up & asking people to pay then there are a couple of options. Firstly, you can outsource your credit control. There are small business owners like you who actually specialise in collecting money for other businesses. Secondly, you could explore invoice factoring¹, where a finance provider will lend you up to 90% of the value of your invoices. The lender can also manage your sales ledger & collect payment for your invoices direct from your customers. It will then deduct the costs of the factoring service, before paying you the remaining balance. Both of these solutions should get your money into your bank account more speedily, which means you have more time & less anxiety to focus on the elements of your business that generate more sales & support your business growth.

The thought of dealing with money & loving your business numbers might seem intimidating, but it is at the heart of being in business. You won’t succeed if you don’t keep an eye on your forecasting, expenses, & invoicing. I love the adage, “Make the time to keep on top of your pennies & then the pounds will look after themselves”, because it is a truth & the benefit of good ‘accounting’ is real insight, flexibility, direction & long-term success. 

4. Know Your Value. 

Jenny Millar from Untapped Pricing is a pricing strategist & I really love her analogy about knowing the value of something:

How much is a pint of beer worth? The only correct answer to this question is ‘to whom?’. To wine lovers, the answer might be ‘nothing’. To beer lovers, the answer depends on the context. You might be very happy to pay a hefty premium for a cool beer on a hot day at the only beer stand at a festival, but you’d expect to pay much less for that same beer from a rundown grocery store. What something is worth isn’t an inherent property of a product or service; it is highly subjective & highly contextual. Value is in the eye of the beholder; it is a perception of the human mind. So, understanding your worth can be difficult to quantify. 

While you might have fixed assets in your business that have a clear value, there are many different facets to consider when defining a business’ worth. Can you quantify the value of your personal & professional reputation? What About your customers? Do you work for them on a retainer or do you employ a subscription model? What is your business’ book value? How easy is it to place a monetary value on your unique skillset, your knowledge & level of expertise or is your approach irreplaceable?  Where do you sit in the market & your sector? Of course, there is no other business quite like yours.

Knowing what sets you apart from your competition is the first step in realising your worth. Once you have established this & quantified it, it will feed nicely in to setting your prices for your product or service, which in turn contributes to you falling in love with your financials. I also love this short video from Jenny: Zinc For Sale. Once again Jenny explains that a product or service will have a different value to different people. Know that from taking time to build your customer profiles, not everyone in a universe is your customer, so you have to set your value, worth & pricing for your actual customers. 

5. Know How Your Solution Impacts.

Sophisticated sales & marketing isn’t about the hard sell. Instead, it is about finding ways to talk to your customers that are engaging & demonstrate the value you add to their business or lives. If you offer a business-to-business solution, then your marketing will need to show how you help & support other business people to overcome a particular challenge. Where consumers are your primary audience, your marketing will need to illicit an emotional response. The greater the positive response to your product or service, the more likely they are to buy. Talk about the benefits someone else will gain from doing business with you. Will it create more time? Will their customers be more satisfied? Position your business, product or service as one that helps your customers solve a problem. Confidence in your brand can only be enhanced by gathering genuine testimonials. Use these reviews to help demonstrate your skillset, your level of expertise, your competence, and the great value you bring to the table. 

6. Do Your Research. 

Undertake some primary or secondary research to identify if there is an appetite for your product or service. You shouldn’t assume there is. If you want to apply for funding, you may need to have this kind of information at your fingertips. Research can also provide insight into your customers, where to find them & the best way for you to access them. 

Let me tell you about my own experience; when I ran Buddha Travel, secondary research enabled me to identify that within 20 miles of my own front door sat some 9,000 people who fitted my ideal customer profile. The upshot meant rather than running around left, right & centre all over central England to access my customers, I was able to be more focused on targeting those within that 20-mile radius. This revelation in my business released time & it helped to reduce my overheads because everything became much more local. Less mileage & time spent behind the wheel of my car. Knowing my customers were more local & easily accessible shaped my marketing to be punchier & more direct. The consequence was that it suddenly became so much easier to get my face in front of the right people, those who were actually going to make the decision to buy. The number of quotes increased as did my conversion rate as a direct result.

Use your research data to influence your business decisions, marketing plans & financial forecasting. Review your marketplace regularly, know who your competitors are (if you have any), & be aware of how they are marketing to their customers & their prices. Keeping your finger on the pulse is essential for keeping on trend.

7. Know What Makes You Different

My good friend Angus Grady, The LinkedIn Unlocker says “everyone should be in a category of ONE on LinkedIn”. I totally agree with this sentiment. This is the only way to be yourself in a worldwide community of 810 million users². Most of us will be using LinkedIn for marketing & to try to connect with our tribe.  

So, can you explain your value proposition or your differential? Are you able to tell someone else what you do in two sentences? A concise & lucid description of why your product or service can help your potential customers is an invaluable marketing tool. Initially you want to ignite interest, so short & snappy is the answer here. 

You probably won’t get it right first time, so practice makes perfect! Read other people’s body language & adapt what you say to make their responses positive. If you are constantly asked the same question over & over, you probably need to address this by building it in to your pitch. Or maybe you embrace the question as the door opener to a more in-depth conversation. 

One of the most powerful ways to keep engaged is to use stories to demonstrate your product or service, your competence & personality. I have covered story telling in another blog. A long, unsolicited ramble about your business, product or service can deter someone else from asking more, even when they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Your core message(s) can get lost in all the waffle. Being succinct will gain you more traction.

Often when we are not confident we can get all too wrapped up in the minutiae of what we do. After all it is our own personal business comfort zone. But for our customers the intimate technical details of how we run our business or source a product or deliver a service can be boring. What your potential customer is really wanting to know is how you can help them overcome a particular pinch point in their business or in their personal lives.

I am not diminishing the importance you should place on understanding your own internal processes & workings, but explaining this outside your own business generally adds little value to your proposition. Instead, use examples of times when you have delivered a great outcome. Being able to make what you do relatable is a more powerful & engaging sales tool than discussing the detail of how you do what you do.

  8. Be Kind To Yourself. 

Let’s start here with some generalisations. Don’t judge yourself to harshly. We all make mistakes, so grasp the nettle & forgive yourself for the genuine mistakes you might make. After all, to ‘err is human’. Learn from your mistakes, as often we gain more insight when something hasn’t gone the way we’d like. Don’t hold yourself to impossibly high standards or as I have already mention be unreasonably ambitious, that you get yourself into a bit of a pickle. Don’t compare yourself to others or beat yourself up when you don’t do something the way someone else does. You should think about yourself as a category of one, where you are the expert about & in your business. 

Now for some practical suggestions. Take time out of your office that is not work. This can be simply setting time aside every day to go for a walk, put your headphones in & listen to a podcast, such as the brilliant one by Business Buzz. It is both humorous & inspirational. The combination of being outside & the feel-good factor will re-energise you.  Allowing yourself time away from your desk to have a change of scenery & move around for a minimum of 30 to 45 minutes allows you to clear the cobwebs away. Focus on working smarter rather than longer. 

Start your day with a healthy & nutritious breakfast & set aside time for a lunch break. Being hydrated & eating properly are fundamentals. Don’t compromise on them. 

It is really easy to get dehydrated. If you work from home & have the central heating on, or work in a space with air-conditioning the air around you will tend to be dry, so simple act of talking on the phone or when using Zoom, means as you exhale moisture, you can more easily become dehydrated. If you are anxious or nervous you can develop dry mouth too, which happens to be a symptom of our fight or flight survival mode & can be a contributing factor to dehydration. Always have water to hand & drink small amounts regularly. If you are feeling thirsty then you are probably already dehydrated. This in turn affects both your physical & mental agility, meaning you are less productive & less able to deal with the tasks at hand. It can take 45 minutes or more to re-hydrate. 

Lastly here, when we were in an employed role, our working week was generally between 35 & 40 hours. While being self-employed brings you more flexibility, it doesn’t mean you should work excessively long hours. Build time for yourself into your working plans. Extend deadlines to allow for ‘me time’ & to be healthy. You’ll be no use to anyone if you are burnt out & cannot deliver. 

9. Accountability.

Running your own business is not always plain sailing. You’ve built your customer avatars, come up with a stonking marketing strategy, fallen in love with your numbers, put time aside for yourself & then you’re off on the road to success. YAY! But not long down the path you hit a stumbling block that throws you completely off track & you end up stuck in a muddy field. All of your initial enthusiasm is lost in just trying to dig yourself out of an unforeseen hole. How do you maintain your direction & momentum? There is one word to use here: accountability. But to whom should you be accountable? 

For most small business owners, the answer to this question is “me, I & myself”. This can be tough. However, ‘a problem shared is a problem halved & a SMART goals shared is one that is more likely to be achieved’. So, what is the best way to share your goals & challenges? 

Let me introduce you to Katrina Sargent; Goal Mapping Practitioner Extraordinaire! Goal Mapping is about pulling together the words & images that represent your desires & goals to make them less ephemeral & more tangible. With goal mapping you can create big vision goal maps where you have laid out your final destination for yourself & your business, but also you can have many ‘smaller’ maps that represent all of the milestones along the way to your final destination. This process can be for both your business goals & your personal objectives. Part of the beauty of goal maps is that your whole brain takes part in their creation. Very simplistically, language is managed by the left side of the brain, whereas the right side tends to be more creative. Goal mapping helps make concepts visual & therefore more accessible, meaning they are more achievable.

Working with Katrina you could take most of the areas discussed in this blog & create goal maps that reflect & express your desires & your outcomes. Goal Mapping is both a brilliant & an enjoyable way to stay accountable in your business. 

Stand Out From The Crowd.

In this blog we have covered a lot of ways to be more business-nimble. What we haven’t talked about is how you start to stand out from the crowd.

So how & where do you speak your brand? What are your tag lines? How do you talk about your business & who do you talk to about it? If you are unsure of where to start then an absolutely amazing place is at a networking event, such as Business Buzz. 

I am a Business Buzz super-fan. Buzz can give you the platform to boost your brand awareness, your confidence & put you in front of your next best customer. As a no-fuss networking solution, Business Buzz is a market leader & an amazing place to connect with like-minded business people from your local business community. 

At Business Buzz there is:

• no pressure to join because Buzz is not a membership organisation, meaning our networking events are pay-as-you-go & drop-in,

• no 30, 40 or 60 second elevator pitch needed,

• no training or speaking session,

• no professional lock-out or one-seat policy, because everyone in business should have access to great networking & Business Buzz facilitates this completely.



What Business Buzz offers:

• a multi-location-based networking option,

• a superb place to come & meet like-minded business people in a relaxed environment,

• a friendly, inclusive & welcoming event,

• a place to have genuine & honest conversations in a mix & mingle format,

• a space to build lasting business relationships,

• a belief that collaboration is key,

• a business networking event that really works.



If you are ready to give Buzz a try? Visit our website to find out more or get in touch with James, who is your local Business Buzz Regional Lead. Drop him an email on james.brodie@buddhaconnect.co.uk for friendly advice on the best networking event for you. 

That concludes my small business owner survival guide. We have covered a lot of ground here, but not every possibility. I hope reading this blog has given you some practical tips to implement & allowed you some time to pause. Striking a work-life balance can be tough, but feel reassured that it is possible to achieve your goals & be time rich. For me, the phrase “work smarter rather than longer” really echoes my sentiment here. I sincerely hope this food for thought helps you to re-establish your priorities & to stick to them. As a business owner & mentor, I have learnt many things but first & foremost, it is to be kind to yourself. After all, an engine can’t run with an empty tank, & you can’t pour into someone else’s cup when your own is empty. 

1.    https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/finance-hub/invoice-finance/#moduleWhatisinvoicefinance - 24h April 2022

2.    https://about.linkedin.com/#:~:text=Welcome%20to%20LinkedIn%2C%20the%20world's,member%20of%20the%20global%20workforce.  - 24th April 2022