The Foundation: 5 Ways to Develop Boundaries in business.
When you begin a business, you often find yourself so excited about the prospect of running a company based on a dream or vision you have. You can hardly wait to share your new idea, build the website (or have it built), and sell a few things. You are eager to share with everyone what you do, but then something happens! You get one order than 50 more orders, and now you’re overwhelmed. The pressure of offering customer service, quality products, and excellent buying experiences can leave you wondering what you were thinking when you started the business.
There are more than 30 million small businesses in the United States, and entrepreneurship is rapidly becoming the career path of millennials, Generation Xers, and even Baby Boomers. Over the last decade, teachers, lawyers, chefs, and artists have decided to shift gears and explore privately-owned enterprises. And, we’re celebrating all of these major business moves. Yet, there is one thing happening. The burnout for many small business owners is happening quicker than they imagined. Burnout is the mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion caused by stress, especially career-focused stress. Burnout can present itself as confusion, frustration, memory loss, concentration issues, negative attitudes, lack of motivation, and displaced appetite. In most burnout cases, business owners find themselves attempting to accommodate all of their customers’ or clients’ needs without clear and concise boundaries. This includes answering emails at all hours of the night, shifting rules and protocols to appease clients, and promising more than you can deliver.
Boundaries are imperative as you build your business. Without business boundaries, you may find yourself serving everyone else at the detriment of your own health and sanity. Boundaries are guidelines, rules, or limits you put in place to ensure you’re keeping yourself safe, accountable, and healthy. Boundaries can be either personal or business, and if you’re the person running your business, you absolutely have to have boundaries in place to protect yourself and what you share with the world.
So, the question is: how do we create boundaries? Developing boundaries begin with identifying what you truly want to do and how you want to do it. When you can answer these two major questions, then you are ready to put boundaries in place. Business boundaries focus on times you work, ways you communicate, how you handle funds, tools and resources you choose to use in your business, and why you handle business the way you do. Boundaries are the fences we build to create great clients and customers. Here are 5 ways you can develop business boundaries…
Set your work hours before you ever book a client. Always begin with the end in mind. How you want to interact with a client will begin with making sure they understand when you’re at work and when you’re not.
Determine how you like to communicate and stick to your decisions. If you want to communicate via email only, you can do that. If you don’t mind messaging on Facebook, that’s okay as well. However, be sure your clients know how to reach you and which methods are off-limits. Receiving messages from multiple platforms such as text messages, direct messages on Facebook, emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings can definitely create a breach in business etiquette
Lay out when you like to work and don’t be swayed. If you like to work in the afternoons, work in the afternoons and let your clients know you won’t be answering emails during the afternoon hours because you’ll be working. Even if you have clients who may try to sway you to switch your productivity schedule around, keep your boundaries in place.
Determine the tools and resources you use, and teach others how to use them instead of learning their systems. There are numerous ways to send a document or provide online services these days, so choosing your tools upfront will help you tremendously. Not determining your tools and resources ahead of time could cause confusion as you’ll find yourself having to send information to several different systems based on what the client uses.
Set your prices and stand firm on how you value your services. Remember your prices aren’t a direct reflection of your personal worth, but they are a direct reflection of how you value your services. Others should be able to haggle you about your prices. Set your prices, how you want to receive payment, and how money exchanges are handled. Be sure to have a contract in place to solidify your boundaries and keep your business in good standing.
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