This is a guest post from Helaine Iris, a business coach who helps overwhelmed small business owners take control of their time and finances so they can double their revenues with less stress. Click here to receive a free copy of her report 10 Top Tips to Breakthrough Overwhelm and Become a Sane and Stress-free Business Owner.

“Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion; you must set yourself on fire.” – Arnold H. Glasgow

If you’re like me, and most business owners I work with, you started your business because you have a particular talent, skill, or passion; not because you like, or want to sell. Although some sales people do start companies (I believe it’s the exception), most business owners have no experience or training in sales. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why resistance to selling quickly becomes a stumbling block to success and more immediately, the cause of much day-to-day stress and worry.

I hate to speak the obvious but; sales ARE the backbone of every businesses success. If you’re in the marketplace to make a living, you have to be out there selling – unless of course you have a sales force, and even THEN you still need to be able to sell your own product. I can’t think of a single exception to the rule. It’s kind of like what’s inevitable about life itself – nobody gets out alive. In business – no body has a successful business without having to sell.

Continue Reading

I recently lost my two ewes. For those of you who need a reminder, ewes are female sheep. The story starts two years ago when my friend and neighbor – horse breeding expert and I decided to invest in and share a small flock of sheep. The sheep would provide a source of wool for me to knit with and lamb for both of our tables. Seemed like a sweet idea.

Although neither of us had experience with sheep, I had plenty of passion and energy and was excited about the project. I had a pasture for the warm seasons and he had a barn for winter. We started with two beautiful all white females who we named Carmen and Cora. When they were old enough for breeding we bought two rams, selected carefully for their rich, brown fleece so we could introduce color into the next generation.

Continue Reading

Most of us receive more training about how to drive a car than start a micro business. A high percentage of people who start businesses do so because they have a gift or talent they want to see manifest in the world. Or, they love the idea of self employment – not because they have a burning passion for business for business sake.

Continue Reading

There’s always something special about the start of a new year. As one year comes to a close and another starts, I especially enjoy taking stock, cleaning up details and preparing a fresh slate for another year of my life to unfold. As I reflect on the past year I am indeed grateful that I am still standing tall despite many challenges and economic uncertainty.

Continue Reading

“If you feel you know how to get what you want out of life, and you have that desire to make that happen, then you have hope,” Jennifer Cheavens

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about hope. It started the night our new President was elected. I, for the first time in a long time was filled with an overwhelming sense of hope. The deep thread of worry and cynicism I had been holding about how complex and unchangeable our countries problems were was suddenly replaced with the promise of something new, something hopeful.

Continue Reading

If you live anywhere but under a rock it’s hard to avoid the recent economic reality we find ourselves in as a nation. Regardless of your political affiliation it’s overwhelming trying to decipher what it all means and stressful wondering if it’s going to be ok. Try as I do to monitor how much media I allow myself to consume, it effects me as a citizen, but even more as a small business owner.

Continue Reading

Think about the many things you do every day when you own your own business. When you wrap your mind around the staggering array of tasks to be done and the various skill sets necessary, it can seem like a miracle you’re successful at all. In the years I’ve been coaching small business owners it’s become evident that upwards of 90% of you are not in business because you love business for business sake, or have a MBA. You’re in business because you love to make candles, build websites, help people, or what ever your business offers.

Continue Reading

“For every mountain there is a miracle.” – Robert H. Schuller

Last week I was facilitating my monthly entrepreneur group. This is an impressive group of bright, inspired business folk who truly are committed to making their business a success. They apply what they learn, they continuously work on honing their skills, and they are generous and supportive with each other as they collectively move through the typical challenges all growing business owners face. They’re pretty much doing things right. What struck me however, in this particular session, was regardless of how committed and willing each owner is to learn and grow, each owner seems to have their own personal obstacle to success. An obstacle that could ultimately be their undoing!

Continue Reading

The other day I was coaching Emily, a bright and self aware woman who’s recently stepped up to a very big plate – she wants to take her business to the next level. Her decision holds the potential for many rich and fulfilling rewards, but also contains a rather steep learning curve, an increase in pressure and of course much higher stakes. Interestingly enough, as she meets her days with passion and excitement, she also notices an increase in how easily she gets triggered and upset by seemingly mundane events that throw her off and make her constantly question her ability to succeed.

Continue Reading

It bothers me that most conversations I have at this time of year contain some level of stress and anxiety about the upcoming holiday season. I’m not immune myself – every year I swing on a pendulum between being caught up in a frenzy of materialism or feeling the urge to back away and becoming cynical about the entire season. What is up with that? Shouldn’t this time of year be about peace, joy and celebration?

Continue Reading

I’ve seen it over and over – small business owners who get nervous and uncomfortable when it’s time to assume the role of salesperson. Sales are the backbone of your company’s health, and most entrepreneurs are not trained sales professionals. In fact, most business owners are reluctant, resistant sales people, worried about being perceived as pushy, or worse yet, sleazy. As a result, they don’t get out and sell.

Continue Reading

“It is not how much you do, but how much love you put in the doing.” Mother Teresa

Business owners are trained to gauge the success of their business according to the health of their “bottom line” – that is – the last line on a profit and loss statement that tells you what remains (if anything) after all your costs of doing business. This makes perfect sense – if you don’t show a profit, you don’t stay in business. But, I’m interested in what – beyond the traditional bottom line – keeps you motivated and creates that deeper and more sustaining measure of success I believe we are all seeking?

Continue Reading

I’m going to resist the temptation to jump on the New Years resolution bandwagon. Frankly, I don’t believe resolutions endure and I’d venture a guess you are saturated with messages, to tempt you to make the changes you want to make for this coming year. Instead of dangling a stale carrot in front of you, making it sound easy to succeed by resolution, I’m going to offer you something juicy. Forget resolutions. This year, LEARN to change your life.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past month socializing at holiday parties and catching up with people I don’t see but once a year. It’s astonishing how many people muse about unfulfilled dreams and express hopefulness about making more money, or improving their lifestyle, yet their lives stay the same from year to year. As a coach I can’t help but see the glaring gaps in peoples lives (that feel to them like the Grand Canyon) – simply as opportunities to learn the new skills necessary to change their lives.

Continue Reading

“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… The truly wise person is color- blind.” Albert Schweitzer

I learned a very difficult life lesson this month. Me, the eternal optimist and consummate positive thinker was blinded by my own medicine. It’s a powerful personal story and it dawned on me in the midst of recounting it to my entrepreneur group that its lesson is incredibly applicable to business.

Here goes. My husband and I just built a house. At the final accounting meeting with our builder, it came to light that we were a significant amount over budget. More than is typically expected. While I won’t go into detail about how we came to learn this so late in the game (that is a separate issue that we also had to deal with) you can imagine the impact this costly news had upon us. After our initial panicked reaction, and process with our builder something suddenly became very clear to me. The house actually cost us exactly what a house of this size and specification should cost. How could this have happened I wondered?

Continue Reading

Stress is high, your energy is low. Sound familiar? This is the common experience of most small business owners I know. Owning a business can be like running a marathon. You know you’re in it for the long haul, there’s not much time to catch your breath, yet you push on. You can easily see how this scenario can lead quickly to an out of balance life.

Despite everything you know (in theory) about taking time to care for yourself, how important it is to “pay yourself first” for some reason you don’t. You create a million reasons not to take your own good advice. Why is this? I suggest it’s because you have conflicting needs. One of your needs is to take care of business, it’s your livelihood – you need to handle details, regardless of how many hours you’ve already worked. It goes with the territory of being a business owner. It’s like getting up in the middle of the night to care for a sick child – you just do it.

Continue Reading

Overwhelm is one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs experience on a daily basis. The definition of overwhelm, according to The Brainy Dictionary is, “To cover over completely, as by a great wave; to overflow and bury beneath; to engulf; hence, figuratively, to immerse and bear down; to overpower; to crush; to bury; to oppress, etc., overpoweringly.” Whew…sound familiar? I’ve been there, too, so I understand -it’s not a fun place to be.

As a business owner, with a full personal life as well, you don’t have to look very far to understand why it’s easy to often feel over the edge. It’s not just that you’re simply juggling a lot – as an entrepreneur, you are also risking a lot – your money, your reputation, your future. Being an entrepreneur is a commendable pair of shoes to step into. And, if you don’t get a handle on understanding overwhelm you might as well buy stock in Band-Aids to deal with the painful blisters on your feet.

Believe it or not, it is possible to change your relationship with overwhelm enabling you to experience a better quality of day to day life. Here are my 10 tips for turning overwhelm around. If you want them to work – you will need to carve out the time to practice them, that’s if you agree with the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Continue Reading

I am either incredibly foolish or very fortunate. Last year my husband and I ventured to go against well meaning advice and decided to build a house. Not just any house, but a completely custom straw bale house. For those of you new to alternative building – straw bale is an incredibly efficient, well proven, green method of insulating a traditional timber frame house.

It was incredibly exciting. We found the perfect land, hired a wonderful architect, found an adventurous contractor, and broke ground last January to start on the ride of our lives. What an experience. Aside from the expected scenario everybody who’s built before you warns about – double the time and way over budget, I’m finding the real challenge is having essentially no control over most of the project. Unpredictable weather, unreliable subs, it’s a domino game of staggering proportion.

Continue Reading

Sex, death and money are three topics guaranteed to get attention. You don’t have to think about it for long to realize why. They all hold a fundamental, primal link with being human; we can’t live without any of them. Clearly, as a species, sex is how we get here; it secures the future of our kind. Understandably it occupies a good part of our western culture mind. Death, on the other hand, is inescapable and mysterious –the inevitability of it provides the grist for living, the urge for purpose and meaning.

Money on the other hand seems to trump both sex and death in terms of our obsessive relationship to it and our confusion about what it is. While necessary for survival as a participant in society, it’s not directly linked with life and death, yet, many of us relate to it as if our lives depend on it. Here’s a news flash – it’s not.

Continue Reading

Your life as an entrepreneur – hard work, dedication, taking risks, being fearless – you know what I’m talking about. It takes inspiration, willingness to be out of the comfort zone and lots and lots of energy to keep your businesses going day after day, week after week.

My life has been turned upside down this spring. In addition to building a house (which is enough excitement and stress for a lifetime) I lost a loved one, had a family member diagnosed with cancer, and have been nursing my entire family, including myself through a zapping dose of spring illness for almost a month now.

Continue Reading

I’m going to share a very personal story. My sister-in-law (who was a devoted entrepreneur herself) was recently killed in an automobile accident – clearly a tragic event that has changed me forever. As part of the healing process I’d like to share with you some of the valuable lessons I’m learning as both as a business owner and as a human being.

Being self employed, in my case as a micro business owner, can be one of the greatest freedoms imaginable. It’s why many of us start businesses. We determine our own schedules, make rules that suit our lifestyle and passions, generate revenue from our own efforts, and most importantly, are the creators of our own future. That is, until life happens – suddenly, the unimaginable happens and it all comes to a screeching halt and the flip side of being a micro business owner becomes painfully obvious.

Continue Reading