There are all types of stress your business (which ultimately means you) can experience and most of them seem to be available in excess these days.
But some types of stress are good for your business, occasionally even great for your business.
Consider the following:
The stress of client abundance. Now here’s a good problem to have. When your clients are multiplying faster than bunnies, you have one of the best possible problems. And when the weight and the work load feel like too much to handle, remind yourself how much better it feels to have too many clients than to few.
A non-stop stream of paying clients, eager for your services, means you can scale back your business marketing efforts for a while. You can cut your advertising and business marketing budget, and focus the bulk of your time and energy on taking very good care of all your clients. Just remember to ramp your marketing efforts up again before your plethora of clients begins to decline. Otherwise you could find that when your feast ends the famine sets in all too quickly.
The stress of too much work. Too much work (one that is obviously more than you or you and your current staff can handle) sends a nice clear signal that you need to bring on additional full or part time workers.
Many times in business the signals aren’t so clear. You think you need help, but are anxious about whether you can really afford it. Having a work overload is not only great because it signals that you are on a path to prosperity; it is great because it removes the uncertainty of whether or not this is the right time to hire help.
Knowing that a job will not get done unless you bring on extra troops is a large, screaming billboard, that tells you “go ahead, NOW!”
And lastly, there’s marketplace stress. Marketplace stress isn’t your own, internalized stress. It is the stress that creates need and therefore opportunity in your market. In your particular market, what causes customers and clients to complain? Where are the holes that you and your competitors are currently failing to fill? Some of the greatest opportunities you will ever experience in business arise where there is a gaping hole to be filled and you are the Obvious Expert who steps in to fill it.
Finally here’s one last thought about stress in business, which applies equally to stress in all areas of your life. You have three choices for dealing with stress. You can let it break you. You can find ways to cope with it. Or you can keep making changes until you find the solution that eliminates the source of the stress entirely.
“Failures do what is tension relieving, while winners do what is goal achieving.”
