Chronic Profit

Building Your Small Business While Managing Persistent Pain

Alison Tedford

• Publisher: Self-Counsel Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781770405226
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Emprendimiento

Building a business is hard enough. Entrepreneurship while dealing with a chronic illness or condition is even harder. 'Chronic Profit: Building Your Small Business While Managing Persistent Pain' shares the story of how one entrepreneur sought freedom from cubicle life along with the flexibility to be a parent and a business owner, and learned to extend herself enough grace and compassion to excel in business while still taking care of herself.This book covers business-building strategies that will work for any entrepreneur, such as the importance of building foundations and systems; why standardizing and simplifying offerings is something we often don't do enough; and how to shift your perspective and reframe common business problems. Another important topic, especially for businesspeople dealing with chronic pain, is how to refuel and do self-care, and as author Alison Tedford shares, that can mean a lot more than taking bubble baths — it may involve developing a coping toolbox full of proven tools such as mindfulness, gratitude practices, and more.Often, we struggle when asking for help but Tedford also discusses how to do that effectively, and leaves the reader feeling there's hope and that anyone can find joy in the journey of creating their own sustainable business while managing diverse issues and persistent pain.

Chapter 1

The Early Days: Don’t Build an Unsustainable Business Like I Did

I had no idea what I was doing when I started my business, and I made a lot of mistakes. I built something unwieldy, unmanageable, and completely unsustainable. It kept the lights on and provided for us but there were months where it was very tenuous. I was terrified a lot of the time and I was working so hard I thought my body would break.

But how did I get here? Wasn’t this supposed to be my path to freedom and the way that I took care of my health? Wasn’t this supposed to be the way that I built strong relationships with my family? Wasn’t I supposed to be a better mom? Where did it all go wrong?

I asked myself that question a lot and while I didn’t yet have all of the answers, I knew where I had gone wrong, ultimately, and what had led to the undoing and almost demise of my business.

I built it wrong with no plan and thankfully it survived, but this is what I learned which hopefully can help you not make the same mistakes that I did.

Too Many Offers

My business came together based on the pain points of the people in my circle. I listened to what entrepreneurs I knew were struggling with and if I knew how to do what they didn’t enjoy doing then I would offer to do it.

As a result, I had an amazing number of offers. It was truly dizzying. While it meant that I was never bored, it was difficult to maintain.

I wasn’t able to standardize how I approached things because everything was so custom and didn’t have any structure to it that was standardized across my offers. I did social media management, email management, influencer marketing, freelance writing, content writing, graphic design, public relations, copywriting — almost anything anybody would ask, I would do just to make sure that we were keeping the lights on at home.

Beyond the fact that it was difficult to do so many different things for so many different people, the other issue was that I wasn’t really known for anything. I was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

Some might call that a full-stack marketer, but I call it a full headache. I wasn’t standing out in any way. I was barely standing at all.

I wasn’t known for things except for my writing ability. I was doing too many things and that made it difficult for people to refer other people to me appropriately. They didn’t know where to start. It was like having a Cheesecake Factory menu as a Services list.

Because I wasn’t specialized, I wasn’t able to charge premium rates for my services and it was difficult to create consistent messaging around what I do and how people work with me. The answer was very ambiguous: It depends. I would do anything for anybody, at a range of prices, and it was exhausting.

Decision fatigue was setting in because I had so many things that I was juggling in so many different ways and had so many conflicting deadlines. My offers were so small that I had to make things up in volume which meant I was working myself to the bone, exhausted and overwhelmed.

When you do the same thing in the same way you can create repeatable processes that save time. But when you have a mishmash of things it’s hard to be able to create processes so that you can deliver services consistently every single time, especially when you are a solopreneur. It also makes it really hard to delegate because the instructions are different for every single thing and there isn’t a standard operating procedure and way of handling things. There can be overarching philosophies but in terms of consistent policy application it can be really difficult when you have too many offers.

The other thing is that when you have such a big list it can be overwhelming for customers or clients, and overwhelmed or confused people tend not to buy. Too many options can make a choice difficult.

When you have too many offers it can be hard to keep track of everything on days when you have lots of pain like I often do, or when you have brain fog. You have to rely on a lot of external cues and the way of being in your business is less intuitive.

Creating an elevator pitch for what you do can be really challenging when you have too many services because it’s difficult to succinctly describe what it is that you do. It’s a bit easier when the things that you do fall into logical buckets and groupings, but it is much simpler when what you do can be easily understood by your target audience and that ease can lead to more sales and higher value sales.

Weak Policies

Something I learned the hard way was that I had to structure my policies in consideration of the target audience and how they operate and how they interact with my services.

For example, initially, I allowed for pay-as-you-go services which made it difficult to manage my inventory, which was my time.

When you provide services on an hourly basis and let people use them on a pay-as-you-go basis, then you don’t know how many hours you’ll be asked to work and if somebody asks for a specific number of hours but only pays for the portion that they actually use, you’ve reserved time on your calendar that they’re not paying for and no one else is either.

Not having control of your inventory leaves you in the unenviable position of needing to oversell your hours in order to pay the bills. This is incredibly problematic if everybody uses the number of hours they said they needed, when they don’t normally use them, and then you need to work overtime in order to make sure everybody is happy. You won’t get any sleep.

You really do need to have inventory control in place to make sure that you’re not in the position of either scrambling at the end of the month to make bank or scrambling to stay awake to make, package, or otherwise do the things that you sold because people are actually using what they said they would use.

It’s really important to understand your client demographic to be able to gauge the likelihood of each scenario. A lot of times people will hire a virtual assistant or another type of service with the intention of using the service, but they don’t. It’s like buying an agenda you never write in. You can’t always rely on clients to be motivated enough to use the services that they requested if there’s no financial incentive for them to do so.

Having weak policies that don’t compensate you for setting aside time is a good way to get in a bad way with your bank account, self-care, hours of work, relationships, and business growth. Time is your most precious resource and you need to be able to account for it so that you know how much time you have left to sell and so that you can prioritize tasks appropriately. You don’t want to end up with a month of work and everything scrunched in at the end of your month.

Likewise, it’s important to put boundaries around how long hours can be carried forward. Your circumstances could change in the future and you need to be able to protect yourself so that you’re not over committed on hours purchased months ago.

You also need to be able to have control over your time and know how much time you have left to sell to new clients. Having too many prepaid hours with no limit on when they can be used is a liability. It means you can’t guarantee quality if you’re overworking and exhausted and needing to deliver things because everyone’s calling in their hours at the same time.

Set strong policies that work for you and the way your target audience will work with you.

No Self-care

I assumed, when I started my business, I would be able to be so focused on my wellness and fitness and that I would be a healthy, balanced person because I would have the time and flexibility to do that.

Spoiler: That’s not what happened. That’s the furthest thing from what happened.

It turns out that if you want to have self-care then you need to schedule time for it and you need to have policies, procedures, and office hours in place so that you get the time that you need to take care of yourself. It isn’t enough to have the time to be able to do something, you have to actually prioritize it and make sure it happens. Having the capacity to do something is different than actually doing something — having a plan to do something and accountability in place to make sure that you follow through.

Trying to work on not enough rest, not enough food, not enough fluids, not enough free time can be detrimental to your business. It leaves you short with clients, patience, inspiration, and in your ability to enjoy your time off.

As a business owner you are your biggest business asset. It is what makes you money. You need to take care of yourself. If you had a laptop that made you money, you wouldn’t tie it to your bumper and drive it through town. You would put that in a case and keep it safe so that it doesn’t get run over.

You need to treat your body in the same way otherwise you will end up with a body that doesn’t support the business that you want to build. You will end up not well enough to participate in what you’ve built.

Self-care helps you build resilience and helps you weather the storm of entrepreneurship. Building a business can be stressful and you need to be able to have the resources available to you to manage that stress, and that comes from taking care of yourself.

When you work too long without enough breaks, when you don’t resource your body with the food or the fluids that it needs, when you don’t take time for yourself, you are writing checks your body can’t cash. This is particularly true for anyone with a chronic health condition.

In the early days, I didn’t take care of myself. I didn’t make sure that I was eating appropriately or often enough. I wasn’t feeding my body with the right foods at the right time and the right amount. I wasn’t drinking enough water so I was dehydrated and cranky. I wasn’t sleeping enough, and I was cranky with clients and with my family and I wasn’t able to focus because I was so tired.

My best work comes when I take care of myself. When I take care of myself, I can take care of my clients and my family. When I take care of myself, I can take care of my responsibilities and deliver on my promises.

That’s the whole reason I did this. I built a business so I could take care of myself and I needed to actually do it.

When I realized how much I had failed in my self-care I realized how unsustainable my business was, because my business is no more sustainable than my capacity to participate in it. I knew I had to turn it around. That’s when I decided I needed to go see my doctor and figure out what was going on with my body.

Seek a Diagnosis If You Need One

The time that passed from when I went to the doctor to finally ask for help, to when I saw the rheumatologist and got my diagnosis was about four months. It felt like forever. I went through test after test so that when I saw the specialist, they would be able to better understand what was going on.

I was really nervous and didn’t know what to expect. I had never been to a rheumatologist before and I didn’t know if the problem was in my joints, and part of me second-guessed whether I was just too heavy and maybe that was the issue causing so much body pain.

When I was finally diagnosed, I was underwhelmed in some ways. I thought that when they knew what was wrong with me, they could fix me. It never even occurred to me that there would be something wrong that nobody could fix. I was not prepared for the answer to be “take better care of yourself, try not to be stressed, sleep more, try to be more mobile,” and pain management.

The thing about having a systemic condition that affects your whole body is that all of a sudden you have context for things you couldn’t explain before. It’s like finding the box that goes with a puzzle and you can finally see where the pieces are supposed to go and what it all means when it gets put together. Those moments of realization come in spurts, like gushes coming out of a faucet.

It can be really validating in some ways to have an explanation for the way that you’re feeling. All of a sudden everything makes sense, and it wasn’t all in your head: It was real. For so many years I felt like a hypochondriac and that there was no possible way so many different things were wrong with me, but it turns out there was just one big thing that was wrong with me that caused all sorts of other things to be wrong and I finally felt less crazy.

The fact that I would be diagnosed with something for which there’s no cure and really not much in the way of treatment was something that never even crossed my mind. I just assumed it would be like it is on House where they would be able to treat and fix me and then send me home. The truth of the matter was a lot more complicated.

Grieving While Running a Business

When I finally realized what was wrong and there wasn’t a lot that could be done about it, I was so angry. I felt cheated and ripped off. I watched the life I thought I could have slip through my swollen, dislocated fingertips.

I was grieving the fact that having more kids was not recommended; that I couldn’t operate in the same full tilt 24/7 way that I had been used to and that there was a legitimate medical reason that would require me to slow down. I thought that was a limiting factor.

I went through this bargaining phase where I thought, maybe if I work really hard for a few years then I can slow down and do what the doct...