You May Need to Stay Put in Your Business

We coach and consult with many service-based organizations and we are finding some patterns after the pandemic. Many entrepreneurs are struggling with what it is like to now lead a company considering the remembrance of where they were before the pandemic, what the pandemic has done to their companies, and how they have been affected personally as leaders. 

We’ve all been struggling personally after the impact of the pandemic on our lives and those around us. And now an unstable economy is bringing a lot of discouragement to service entrepreneurs. You are not alone if you feel this too. Many entrepreneurs are considering selling or shutting down their business, or getting a job elsewhere, but we caution against that. 

It’s never wise to make changes to get away from something; instead you want to make appropriate changes to move towards something of greater value. 

Let your movement towards new things drive your decisions. If you don’t see a clear path to move towards something of value, then it is often best to wait and stay in a holding pattern. Running from something can leave you disillusioned as you find out the grass is never greener in some other lawn – and can often be worse than where you are now. You may need to stay put in your business until there is a clear direction to move towards the next valuable thing. 

Yet staying put feels like agreeing to stay in the hurtful and disillusioned places. Though that does not seem wise, it may be what you need right now for a few reasons:

1. Staying put can give you time to assess your business options and move more slowly. Change management can be complicated work so you need a slower pace of change to be more strategic. 
2. Staying put can allow you to avoid unnecessary risk-taking. Any change in businesses, whether selling, shutting it down, ramping up something new, etc. always takes a level of risk-taking. You have to make bets, whether big or small, to implement changes. But if you do it to run away from pain, instead of moving towards new value, then you can miss things and get it wrong.
3. Staying put allows you to figure out what is really driving this disillusionment with your current situation. It is human work, and it’s often hard to even know yourself well. Sometimes you need to take time to journal, get a coach or counselor, or just to stay the course to learn why you may be struggling. Look at your problems, don’t look away from them. 

As coaches and business counselors, we work with entrepreneurs to really vet out what is going on inside their minds, their emotions, and their businesses. We couple our knowledge of how businesses work and scale, with the mental and emotional science of how humans work and react to their entrepreneurial situations. We can help. Sign up for our Newsletter and subscribe to our YouTube channel to learn more about how we support entrepreneurs in our work.