How to Conquer Solopreneur Burnout

As a Soloprenuer, you’re focused on achieving many things at the same time:

• Creating and maintaining an incoming flow of new customers.
• Fulfilling products or services for multiple clients at once.
• Non-stop tracking of ongoing costs, payments, agreements.
• Addressing sudden requests or problems that affect key clients or business partners.

And for many, this results in some difficult problems:

• Addressing emergency tasks changes the priority and moves deadlines for other tasks, causing delays in everything else.
• Constantly worrying about pending, and overdue payments.
• Remembering what was said or promised 3 months ago. (You don’t) Then wasting time trying to recover that information.
• Painstakingly creating proposals that take LOTS of time, knowing many of them will not come back with a sale.

There’s a reason why these challenges never seems to end:

It’s hard to automate things when things change all the time.

Every time you change payment terms or change your offerings, the things-to-be-done keep changing. Workflows become unfamiliar, or incompatible with older offerings to older customers. New and old offerings become hard to track, and mistakes arise.

As a one man show, when you focus on one thing, other things don’t get worked on.

• There’s no one else to pick up the slack, find new customers, and address the problems of existing customers, while you work.
• Switching between different modes of work makes you less effective at improving any one aspect of your business.

No Overall Visibility on how your business is doing:

• When you’re busy working, it’s really hard to see how any one action connects to other parts of the business.
• Mistakes pile up: unpaid invoices, missing out on a customer promise, not replying to a lead, because you’re busy addressing the matter at hand.

You know you can provide great work, and you’re beating yourself up emotionally every time you don’t

• Because juggling all these things have forced you to make sacrifices.
• Because you’re constantly finding problems or unexpected obstacles.
• Because you’re good at doing some things, and not others. And there’s only you to solve them.

And that’s when BURNOUT happens.

How do you start approaching this problem?

Get Full Picture Visibility.

• Here’s the thing: It’s worth upsetting a customer in the short run if you need this space to regain control of your business. Understand the flow, different tasks your business needs, from start to finish of the customer journey.
• Note the choke points, problems, and decide what are the most deal-breaking parts.

A tool like Konigle that captures the whole lead-qtc process is much better at helping you keep everything in track, than a bunch of other tools that don’t talk to each other.

Prioritize: Work on 1 problem at a time.

• Not every problem needs to be solved. It may be tempting to accomplish many things
• “Reduce the time I take to send proposals to customers”
• The most important part of doing this is capturing these mistakes, problems as they come so you can track what are the problems that keep coming up, or keep breaking things.

Measure your progress over time. 

• Measure Measure Measure. Be objective about your approach. If it’s not working well, change things up or try something else. 
• This can be as simple as writing down a couple notes about where you are now (timestamped) on a client project. Start simple, and add more detail once your workflows get better/more familiar to you.

Don’t beat yourself up. Mistakes happen, and they create great opportunities for you. We hope this guide was helpful to you. Best of luck!