EPISODE 50 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: BUSINESS BURNOUT

Last month, I hit a wall big time. I don't think I realized at the time how bad it was, but I remember saying to Liv, our account manager, if a car hit me and I got to lay in hospital for a week and sleep and not have to make any decisions, I wouldn't be mad about it. You know, something has got to give when you're feeling like that.

Reflecting back on the last 12 months, it's been a lot. I broke up with my partner of seven years, headed back to Obree to just sit for a bit. Got evacuated from my first ever music festival due to fire concerns, got stuck in the middle of the bush fires on the South Coast over New Years. Got five days into a trip in Ireland where they went into lockdown and I had to scramble to get back into the country and then isolate for two weeks. Got my wisdom teeth out and made some really difficult decisions around my mum and her health before she passed away in May.

Then comes all the stuff post that, the funeral, organizing her estate, dealing with family members. Oh, and I moved. All the while, my business grew and grew and grew. Months down the track, I was feeling the effects.

To get through and combat the stress, I was exercising like a woman possessed. Every morning I'd be up at five, head out for a big run or swim, three kilometers. Get to the office, smash out the work before heading to the gym in the evening for a tough session.

I believe exercise is a fantastic way to deal with stress and keep your energy high, but what I was doing was just excessive, and at the time, it felt good. I was getting stronger and stronger, I was swimming faster and faster, and generally feeling really physically and mentally fantastic.

Looking back at it now though, I think I was operating on adrenaline and cortisol. It was like if I stopped for a second, everything would catch up with me and I would have to think about everything that had happened over the past 12 months.

Someone close to me once described me as a brick wall. Someone else called me an ice queen. I don't think that's the case. It's just a situation where you do what you've got to do to get through, and for me, it was to keep moving forward.

It has all caught up with me though. Months down the line, I was struggling to get out of bed. My body was aching constantly, and I was no longer hitting any PBs at the gym or in the pool. Complete exhaustion, no ability to make decisions or think clearly.

But once you're in that state, how do you get out of it? Because I know a lot of business owners burn the candle at both ends like I did. For me, there was so much anxiety around my business, when everything I'd worked my arse off for over the last three and a half years come to a halt.

I tried to take a step back and logically assess where my time and energy was going. How could I set up my business so I could take some time off? This by the way, has not been something that I've ever been successful at. I'm still not great at it, but I recognized that I could not go on the way I had been.

At the end of the day, I tried the meditation. I tried the exercising. I tried cutting down on caffeine, sleeping more, but the reality was the amount I tried to jam in my day was not sustainable. If I wanted to continue to grow my business, I needed to set up systems and I needed to hire more people. And that's pretty bloody scary. So, how did I go about that? And how did I mentally get over myself?

First of all, I think I was backed into a corner. I couldn't have done this unless I had hit this peak exhaustion, burnout phase. I needed to realize that I'm not a unicorn and that there are people out there that can do what I do and are perhaps better than me at it. And that they do want to be employed rather than responsible for chasing work themselves. I'd always told myself that if someone could do what I was doing, then they would be self-employed as well, right?

And right when I thought I was going to have to shut down my business for a few months, just to have a break, along came Izzy through a mutual friend. The concept of hiring on personality and desire to learn rather than a preexisting skillset is now one I'm all about. It sounds silly, but when her resume landed on my digital desk, I saw a lot of myself in her.

I sat down and made a list of all the things that I wasn't getting done in time, that I was dreading, or didn't feel that it was absolutely necessarily I was the one driving. As we'd grown, I was dropping balls and that was leading to more stress, and the putting out of spot fires.

The next step was to actually make sure I was setting up our new team member for success. We've all been thrown into roles in the past where there was no proper training, and it was so hard to find the files relevant to the work that you needed to do.

As I was going through this, it became glaringly obvious that we were due for an upgrade in some areas. Two things in particular, our project management tool and our Dropbox. As an organization, we were using Google Docs. Sometimes we were using Word Docs and then we're exporting the Google doc and saving it into our Dropbox. The Google docs were going on file in the Google Drive, which was a total mess.

So we made the decision to switch from Dropbox over to Google Drive and work with Google Docs from now on, rather than the Microsoft Office Suite. Still not a perfect system, but logically it does make sense, and we will continue to refine this.

The project management tool side of things was a little trickier. I've used Asana for six years. I also used it in one of my first ever jobs, but we were coming up against a lot of issues as the team and our contractor base grew. We needed something with more features that could have a task assigned to multiple people and integrated better with other programs we were using.

I did a lot of research before finally settling on Clicker. Actually setting it up was a completely different kettle of fish. There are so many features and options with Clicker that I was totally overwhelmed with choice in a situation where I didn't know the best way to set it up for us.

I played with about 15 different iterations before crying over my laptop one Sunday evening and accepting that I needed a Clicker expert to help me. I found someone, logged in a session for the next morning and within half an hour, I was back on track. Four days later, I had successfully set up all of our clients, and in the first week of November, I trained our team and contractors.

It's going to be a bit clunky getting used to this for the next few months, but I'm confident that once we are up and running with it, it's going to save a ton of time and fix those headaches we've been experiencing with Asana.

I just want to say though, if it is just you and your business is pretty straightforward, and you're not relying on a whole heap of different team members and tussle playing into each other, Asana is fantastic. It has worked for me for the last six years, and I have been part of businesses that have grown to millions of dollars a year using Asana. So don't discredit Asana if you are looking for a basic project management tool.

This process has also made me realize the importance of focusing on your zone of genius. And for us, that means over the next few months, I'm actually going to be cutting out a lot of our services we currently offer. We'll be focusing on organic social media management, Google and Facebook Ads and web development, with a side of marketing strategy sessions. All the other little bits and bobs that pop up from time to time, I'm learning to say no to. This will allow us to systemize and scale without me burning out every six months.

I want to stress that the hard part of business is that often you have to run yourself down, working big hours, working out what is working and what isn't before you can actually afford to hire someone like I did. The solution to burnout in business is not a bigger team. It's about looking after yourself, ensuring you're charging enough and having systems and processes in place.

But a big thing a lot of people don't talk about is having boundaries with clients. For example, my phone was going off with texts, WhatsApp calls, emails, Instagram DMs from clients, all hours of the day. That's not their fault, I've allowed this to happen, and often I was the one that instigated another communication channel first.

I'd also set up unrealistic expectations around deliverability time. They'd ask for a graphic in the morning and expect it three hours later. Now we have a 48 hour turnaround time that we give our clients. This ensures the quality of work we deliver is much better, as it actually gives me time to stop, double check the work that's been done, make any tweaks and then send it onto the client.

Whereas previously the work would be delivered and I'd shoot it straight on because the client would be going, where is this file? I need this now, and it would hurry up the process without that chance to double check anything.

Sometimes it does get to the point too that you have to fire a client. Some people are just hard to work with and you have different visions of things, where you want things to go. And that's okay. Acknowledging that you might not be a good fit is the hardest part, but once it's done and you do part amicably, the level of stress on your shoulders releases big time.

Realizing that I do have the ability to say no and let a client go is a hard one for me. But now it's not just me that a rude client impacts on. It's my team too. And if my team aren't happy, then the work we deliver to our other clients we love, suffers.

And then there's the risk of our team actually leaving the agency to work elsewhere. This has been the biggest motivator for me to start setting boundaries and not tolerating poor behavior towards our team.

And how am I feeling now? A lot better, still a little bit tired and my body is aching constantly, but the journey back from burnout is not going to happen overnight. My body and mind have gone through a lot, so now I just need to pause in order to move forward. And once I'm back to a hundred percent, you can bet there's some epic things that I've been chipping away at in the background.