Throughout 2019, your Admin Slayer team has been providing you with the knowledge you need to create resilience in your business, and in yourself.
Why have we been harping on this concept for the past 12 months? What is it about resilience that we think is so gosh-darn important?
More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails.
That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.
~ Dean Becker, President & CEO, Adaptiv Learning Systems
Life is generally pretty tough. Add in a business venture, and you’ve got a whole extra layer of complication and stress. You’re asking much, much more of yourself. Resilience isn’t a nice-to-have when you’re a business owner. It’s a necessity. You need to have the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, or stress. Like a brand new rubber band, resiliency will help you stretch beyond what you thought possible, and bounce back stronger than ever before.
Your ability to adapt, to return powerfully after real hardship, after genuine failure - that’s the test. You’ll keep getting that test, day after day, month after month, and year after year in your business. The truth is that the hits don’t stop coming at you as your business matures, despite how relaxed those other business owners seem - you just get better at handling them. You develop a muscle you know how to flex easily, each time you face the inevitable trials of business ownership and operations.
We want you to have the skills to succeed, and that is why we’ve dedicated a year of writing to this vital topic. Now that you have read all the articles, have all the data, understand the philosophies… what are you going to do?
Take Action (A Checklist)
We may talk about lofty ideas, theories, and philosophies of business at Admin Slayer, but at the end of every day, what we do around here is execute. There’s a reason we’re called slayers.
To that end, we’ve built you a list to create the resiliency you’ve been dreaming about.
Personal & Emotional Resilience
The first place to start with any strategy or skill set is internally, with you. Yes, we know you’ll want to skip ahead to the more technical and strategic business stuff but we promise that none of that will work if you don’t deal with YOU first.
You can get deeper into the why behind these actions by reading Building Personal Resilience Part 1, Part 2, and Emotional Resilience.
Map out your breaks and vacations for the entire year ahead. Book that first, before you book your work. Seems counterintuitive? Yeah, we know. But these breaks are your goal posts and your boundaries. You will forget to build them into your life once the year gets rolling, and then you won’t take them, and then you will burn out. Stahp it. Book it now.
Understand what the rest looks like for you. If you’re introverted you may need a lot of alone time. If you’re extroverted you may actually require a few good parties throughout the year. You might need to paint, craft, build, or make music. You might need to stare blankly at a wall. All forms of rest are good. Know what allows you to slow down so that you can jazz back up.
Understand what sleep requirements you genuinely have. When we say “requirements” we mean optimal, not minimal. You may need 6 hours of sleep per night, or you may need 10. Both sets of numbers are great if they’re right for you. Know what they are. Build your days and nights around these optimal times (and your chronotype), and keep track. Compete with your peers and partners if you need to - do what you can to get that sleep.
Get an eating program that works for you. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t have time to cook or shop for yourself. Just recognize that it’s a thing and find a healthy alternative. Buying a pile of groceries that you throw out every week because you ate take-out the whole time puts you in a horrific money and health spiral. Pay the money for a healthy program you can set and forget if this area is stressful for you. We know a couple financial planners who have proved that this can actually save you money if you’ve been in that money and health spiral for a while.
Plot exercise that you like into your calendar and make it non-negotiable. Do the same with your mental health activities, whether they are exercise, massage, therapy, or anything else that works for you. You are NOT allowed to skimp on this. You are the battery that fuels your business. Take care of it.
Build learning time into your calendar as well. We know, we’re using up a lot of calendar blocks (see the systems section for how you’re going to do it). Learning is vital - innovation comes from the cross-pollination of ideas. You need to stay engaged to ensure that you and your business can keep up.
Find the right things to say “YES” to so that you know what you can say “NO” to. If you’ve got a marketing/business development strategy (see the strategy section below), you’ll know whether this speaking engagement is better than that one or whether you should invest in those Facebook and Google ads. If you have a strategy based on your ideal way of working and people you want to work with, you’ll be able to open the doors to the right folks and happily pass on the wrong ones.
Celebrate your wins - weekly. Build that into your weekly plan. Know what you did, why it was useful, and how you’ll build on it. As a forward-thinking entrepreneur, you may always be focused on what you still need to do, and forget how far you’ve come. Your optimism and confidence is sourced from knowing this. Pay attention. (Feel like passing on this one? It’s one of the most effective systems we have ever used. Ever. Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s stupid.)
Resilient Systems
Now that you’ve created your own personal resilience, let’s build out the systems that support you and your business.
We mentioned adding a lot of stuff to your calendar in the above section. While you’re in there, thinking about calendar management (or better yet, if your assistant is in there), build a calendar template - what we like to call our “perfect week”. It’s how you’d set up your life if you actually had full control - you know, that thing that people think we entrepreneurs get to do. Realistically, you know that stuff is going to come along and blow this up, but with a template that both you and your team work with, you can get right back on track.
Make sure that everything you do and your team does is supported by a written process. If you have a team, you don’t have to be the one to write and maintain the processes, but they need to exist. Great processes allow for scale, growth, training, and make room for those bad days when you just can’t think.
Protect your passwords, your wifi, your email, text, files, and data. Human beings, not the systems we use, are the weakest link in cybersecurity. Stay ahead by taking resilient action (and get a cybersecurity insurance policy in place).
Stop trying to do everything on your own. That way lies madness. Build a strong team to protect your systems and processes (and your health - trust us), and treat them well.
Oh and there’s a key part of business so many people would put in the next section on strategy, but we are going to keep it right here, in systems. It’s money, and if you put it in the “strategy” section, you may think it’s something that “may” arrive in the future. That’s no way to think. You need money today, and you need to manage it well. Create resilient finances in your business (no matter how little you have), right now, with clarity about your current financial situation, a system for your cash flow and those weird variable incomes that flow in and out with terrifying instability.
Resilient Strategy
This is the part you wanted to skip ahead to, but trust us, if you don’t have the other two, this section is just a pile of dreams. You’ve built resilience in yourself and your systems, however… this is where the rubber really hits the road.
Now that you have your systems in place, take them for a test drive - one you can afford, and have time for (it’s called “The Hudson’s Bay Start” and we love it). This test, which you’ll run again and again and again, is what you’ll use to create a resilient company that weathers the storms - and is worth something if you ever decide to sell it.
Having a resilient company means being reliable. Ignore the social media posts that tell you success comes from shiny marketing pieces, fancy locations, and snappy suits. Success comes from doing what you say, when you said you were going to do it, again and again and again. It’s trust, it’s integrity, and we know it takes an inordinate amount of time to build, but it is the most powerful business development program you can institute. Build your resilient reputation and you won’t ever have to worry about “closing a sale” again.
Speaking of sales, even if you don’t have to worry about closing them, you’d like them to start coming in with some consistency - because that cash flow system you are taking care of is happier when it’s got a full pipeline. Here are just a few strategies that will keep it stuffed with your favourite kinds of business. Oh, and don’t forget your online marketing plans.
If all of this is starting to look slightly familiar to you, you’re not wrong. Your resilience strategy is also… a business plan.
Unlike those forms you downloaded to try to convince a financial institution to lend you some cash, those ones you never really looked at again because they were pie-in-the-sky ideas intended to get someone outside of your business to do a thing you needed in the short term - this is an actual plan that will help you succeed. These are systems you can create, a lifestyle you can build, and a powerful business you can be proud of for the long term. All because you wanted to be just as resilient as a rubber band.
