Finding the right work-life balance as a business owner

Owning and running your own business can lead to a hectic, time-consuming and stressful life.

With so many important responsibilities and decisions on your shoulders, it can be difficult to separate your working life and your home life. In fact, research carried out by Xero has revealed that 17% of business owners surveyed had experienced periods of feeling highly stressed in the past six months.

Finding that perfect work-life balance as a business owner can present a significant challenge. Working excessively long hours can have a detrimental impact on both your well-being and the future success of your business. For this reason, it is vital that business owners dedicate themselves to ensuring they achieve an appropriate balance between their professional and personal life.

So, how can you achieve this? Below, we will take a look at some of our top tips for finding the perfect balance to suit you.

Perfect your working hours

Every successful business requires a significant investment of time, but too much can prove to be counterproductive in the long run. Try designating set working hours each day (leaving your weekends free); this will not only help you to ‘switch off’ at the end of each working day, but can also lead to increased productivity. Of course, there may be times when you do need to work those few extra hours, but ensure you gain these hours back by taking extended weekends or days off to recharge.

Build the ideal team

One of the main goals for many business owners is to implement a structure that will allow the business to run without you. The perfect team will allow you to delegate key tasks, handle workloads and keep your business running efficiently with minimal input from you. This will greatly reduce the amount of pressure and stress you feel, allowing you to take those all-important and well-deserved breaks and holidays.

Learn to prioritise

There are many different methods for prioritising your work. From creating lists ordered by importance, to dedicating set hours in the day to focus on certain tasks, prioritising your workload will help you to stick to your working hours and present natural opportunities to take a break. Emails can be a huge distraction when trying to complete your work; we recommend that you set aside time, two or three times a day, when you can log into your emails, read and reply.

Design the ideal office environment

The environment in which you work will have a huge impact on reducing your stress and improving productivity levels. It’s all about creating an office that both you and your employees thrive in.

And if a permanent office space isn’t for you, why not try coworking? Offering structure, a social connection and a professional image, coworking is a great option for business owners looking to break out and get their heads down.

Check out Moneypenny’s Workhub – a modern, centrally located and fully equipped working space – and find out more about how coworking could benefit you. Don’t forget, coworking is completely FREE for all Moneypenny clients.

Outsource key tasks

For the majority of business owners, it is simply impossible to juggle your core business responsibilities alongside each and every task that goes hand in hand with running a business (e.g. accounting, payroll, marketing, etc.). Whilst some choose to delegate these tasks to team members, other businesses may not have the resources and turn to outsourcing.

Outsourcing can be an extremely effective tool for any business owner to utilise. Accessing the expertise of a third party, whilst reducing workload, is often the perfect solution. As the UK’s leading Telephone Answering and Live Chat provider, here at Moneypenny we see first-hand the benefits that our outsourced services have on business owners. These benefits include, significantly more time to run and grow the business, reduced stress and improved efficiencies.

Struggling with your work-life balance can have a negative impact on how effectively you run your business and can have far-reaching effects on your mental health. Get this balance right, and you could significantly improve your business’ success and enjoy the lifestyle that being a business owner can afford.