You care about your business. Are you caring *for* it?

In the November/December 2024 edition:

• You know about self-care, but are you practicing business care? How to make sure you’re not pushing critical business health tasks to the back burner (and sabotaging your personal wellness in the process 👀)

• Are you a “recovering” perfectionist trying to stifle your need to succeed? I’ve got a book rec to help you use your perfectionism for good 🪄

• A playlist to close out the year, with some of my favorite songs released in 2024 🎶

**In case you missed it—I recently published a Catbird Client Case Study featuring the wonderful Meg from Alice, Ever After Books. Read about the financial and strategic results she’s seen from our work together here.

SOMETHING USEFUL

You care about your business. Are you caring for it?

Many solo business owners struggle to take time for themselves. They’re quick to respond to others’ needs while ignoring their own, which eventually impacts their health. They start to wonder whether it’s possible to have a successful business and a healthy lifestyle. (Sound familiar?)

It’s a common challenge my clients raise with me: How to create boundaries & customer policies, how to work less without losing income, how to make busy season more bearable, and so on. The common thread is understanding how to protect themselves and their health against an onslaught of external demands and stressors.

They view these business challenges through the lens of their personal health and wellness, and rightfully so. A solo business owner’s health is tied closely to the health of their business.

But the business itself also needs to be cared for in order to remain healthy, sustainable, and profitable. And paradoxically, that business care work is often pushed to the back burner.

I believe this is an issue of framing rather than intentional neglect. I want to re-frame what the work of caring for your business is, so you can give your business the care it needs.

What self-care is and what it’s for

Let’s take a quick look at the history of self-care. There are several points at which the concept was discussed in different contexts in the past.

In Ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates advocated for focusing on the “improvement of your soul” before pursuing wealth or power. Then, starting around the 1950’s, doctors presented the idea of “self-care” to help patients maintain their health independently and delay medical intervention.

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, ‘70s, and beyond, self-care was a way for activists to stay physically and psychologically healthy so they could remain active in the movement, and to correct for the failures of a white patriarchal system that did not allocate care equally. In recent years, the idea has been commercialized to sell products that promise to improve the buyer’s health and wellness.

But as the history shows, purchasing things is not necessary in the pursuit of true self-care. Self-care is not about feeling good or pampering yourself. It’s much more about understanding ourselves, supporting our communities, and building resilience—not just buying something off Instagram.

Building resilience within yourself and your business is a necessary step for long-term survival.

What is “business care”?

It’s important to note that the type of care I’m talking about is hard work. If you’ve ever cared for a child, an elder, or an animal, you know it’s not all warm and fuzzy. It can be difficult and intense and time-consuming. It’s also rewarding and a can be source of significant personal growth.

Caring for yourself sometimes feels like work, but caring for your business nearly always does. Meaningful care work aimed at getting real results isn’t easy—think going to therapy vs. taking a bubble bath. Or committing to doing your bookkeeping every two weeks vs. listening to a podcast about 10xing your revenue. The former can build real financial strength over time, while the latter doesn’t really do anything.

So what are the signs of a healthy, well cared-for business?

• It has the resources it needs to survive in good times and bad.

• It functions efficiently & effectively, and doesn’t waste time or energy.

• It exists within a supportive community of customers and industry peers.

• It is protected from internal and external risks.

In short, a healthy business has solid financial management, strong systems & processes, effective marketing within a community, and appropriate risk management.

Here’s the problem—many business owners see this type of work (finances, processes, etc.) as “admin” that’s separate or secondary to the work of serving their customers. They try to corral it into a weekly or monthly “admin day” that, more often than not, gets displaced by customer service or other external demands, leaving critical business tasks undone.

I want to change the mindset that leads to this approach. This work is not merely administrative, but essential care work to keep your business healthy and resilient. A healthy and resilient business is a profitable and sustainable business.

How to care for your business

Let’s look more closely at each the business care categories we’ve identified.

Business care: Financial management

If you want your business to be able to survive large expenses, difficult economic conditions, an upstart competitor, or a temporary closure or reduction in operation, you need to have strong financial management.

Some elements of simple, effective financial management:

• Bookkeeping tasks are completed every month. If outsourced, bookkeeping should never be “set it and forget it.” Strength and resilience come from understanding and being engaged with your finances.

• You’re able to create profit & loss reports (bookkeeping software like Quickbooks is helpful for this) so you can see where your revenue is coming from and what your expenses are.

• 25-30% of your net revenue is set aside for paying income taxes, ideally on a quarterly basis.

• You track your cash flow so you can be sure you never run out of money, even during a high-expense month.

• You have, or are actively growing, an emergency fund of cash to pay for unexpected expenses, or to cover a temporary business closure.

Business care: Systems and processes

As a solo owner, you have finite time and energy resources to spend on running your business (and everything else you do, of course.) This means that you need to make sure you’re not wasting your time and energy in ways that could hurt your business.

Saving time and energy in your business looks like:

• Creating templates for documents, emails, graphics, presentations, or anything else you are producing multiple times.

• Documenting and creating checklists for processes that are done repeatedly, especially if you tend to forget things or you have employees who need to function independently.

• Continuously setting weekly and daily priorities so you’re focused on your most important and impactful work.

• Assessing the outcomes of your work to make sure what you’re doing is effective and leading to the business results you need.

Business care: Marketing

Marketing is not just about telling the world about what you sell. It’s also about communicating who you are, what makes you special, and who you serve. Done well, marketing creates a narrative about your business and the community to which it belongs—a community of supporters, customers, and industry peers.

Some elements of marketing as part of a customer and industry community:

• You have a clear narrative about who you are and what you do, and you can explain it confidently to others. Your website communicates that narrative effectively.

• You know who your supporters and potential customers are, where to find them, and how to communicate with them (these days this is often on social media, but it may be an email list or something else.)

• You understand what makes you different or unique from your competitors, and you differentiate yourself from them without being negative towards them.

Business care: Risk management

Running a business is inherently risky, but so are plenty of other things. The key is to be aware of what the potential risks are, and how to either avoid them or recover from them if necessary.

Managing risk appropriately looks like:

• Using legally-sound contracts with clients to make the terms of an agreement clear and spell out how to resolve any problems.

• Establishing an LLC entity to protect your personal assets in the event of a legal conflict in your business.

• Insuring your business equipment or inventory, physical location, or other valuable assets against theft or damage.

• Understanding any local, state, or federal policies related to your business and staying in compliance with them. This can be everything from licensing & permits to sales tax remittance.

Focusing on the health of your business makes your business more sustainable. Sustainability makes your business stronger and more resilient to setbacks. Resilience to setbacks improves your own life and personal health, allowing you to stay in business—serving your customers’ (and your own) needs, and contributing to your community and local economy.

Care for your business, and it will take care of you.

SOMETHING NEAT

If you’re at the intersection of “if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself” and “time to curl up with a cozy book”, I’ve got a recommendation for you: The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler.

This insightful book, written by a psychotherapist who specializes in perfectionists, will teach you the difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism, and how to work with your perfectionism instead of having it wear you down. Here’s a quote that really resonated with me:

Yowza. If that’s hitting home for you, I recommend picking this one up—Schafler includes plenty of wisdom and practical strategies for how to rewire common perfectionist tendencies to build self-compassion without losing that innate drive for excellence.

A LITTLE TREAT

One of my favorite end-of-year traditions is reading the best-of lists to find all the music, books, TV shows, etc. that I missed in the last 12 months (at the cutting edge of culture, I am not 😅)

Here’s a Spotify playlist with some of my favorite songs of 2024—hit reply and let me know what else I should be listening to!

WORK WITH ME

This newsletter is for everyone, but a one-on-one consulting engagement is tailored to you and your business. Here’s how I can support you:

• Business Planning—For solo business owners with a lot to do, and never enough time. We’ll refine, prioritize, and organize your goals, and I’ll create a road map for you to get them done. My most popular service—now booking into February 2025.

• Operations Analysis—Is your business built on a strong, long-lasting foundation? An operational deep dive will reveal any cracks or weaknesses, and tell you exactly how to fix them. Booking into January-February 2025.

• General Consulting—Get expert support with business challenges like workload sustainability, financial fundamentals, pricing, client communication, and more. Booking into January 2025.

When you’re ready, schedule a free 30 minute intro call with me.

Thanks for reading—see you in 2025. If you have a business owner friend who would find this newsletter useful, please share it with them!