Helping shop owners do the balancing act of driving profits at work and taking dreams home is part of our mission. The challenge is there is no such thing as work-home balance. In real life, you are either heading for a crisis or coming out of one. Most of us keep pedaling the bike even when we know we are off-balance. When we lean too far to the left, by making too many withdrawals, we try to balance by making deposits. We fall off the bike when we lean too far to either the family or business side. And how would that look?
Many shop owners are recognition-dependent and want to run the best shop in their area. This is an admirable trait, but if recognition becomes more important than profits, it eventually will affect the employees, family and customers. The primary job of a CEO of any small business is to make it profitable. Not paying daily attention to your financial key performance areas will make the bike lean to one side, and then you have to focus all of your energy on setting it right.
You also could lean too far towards home by spending too much time away from the shop when it desperately needs your help. You must have a strong second-in-command if you want to enjoy any kind of free time on a regular basis. So how do you find the best balance?
Find Your Balance
First, list what you want to accomplish tomorrow at the end of your day. Create one list for your business and one for home. Home priorities may be spiritual or related to family and health. This will help you get started faster every day on what is most important for you to accomplish. Make sure you are focused by being 100 percent at work when you are at work, or 100 percent at home when you are at home. Many of us, even when we do take vacations, think more about work than the vacation itself.
I’m a workaholic. I love helping shop owners grow and spend most of my waking hours figuring out how to help more of you. I rarely took a vacation, until five years ago, when I decided to take a month off to be with family, to fish and to drive old muscle cars. Before I left, I had cameras installed at work to see what was going on while responding to e-mail. I became obsessed monitoring the cameras and barking orders through e-mail while the family enjoyed the beach.
Finally, one of the braver family members asked me why I had come to the beach if I was going to work the whole time. I said I was multitasking – and not just working – because I was with them. To this my family said, “It seems you are not with us at the moment, you are still at work.” They were right. From then on, I began weaning myself off my laptop a little each day until I was giving 100 percent to the family. I got into the listening mode rather than the telling mode. It turned out to be the best time I had ever spent with the family, and the business actually did better without me during the vacation.
Spend time with people who are faithful to you. Being faithful is being true to the people around you and to yourself.
Commit to Change
Nothing changes until you change, so make a list of things you are not going to do anymore. A “no” list! We perform 220 seminars for shop owners in North America every year, and I used to do most of them because someone told me I wouldn’t be able to duplicate myself. I loved speaking and helping shop owners, so it was difficult for me to even consider a replacement for myself. I never did consider it until my wife was diagnosed with cancer. She told me the average life span of people with her disease was seven years and asked me if I wanted to spend that time with her or the business. That did it for me.
I began to train instructors who ended up being every bit as good as I was. I then began to spend my business time working on my business and not on its day-to-day operations. My business began to grow steadily, helping more shop owners than I ever dreamed was possible. I would love to claim the change was my idea, but it wasn’t and I was committed to change. If you don’t grow and change, the people in your business and family life will start to wonder if they need to change whom they spend time with. Don’t say you’re committed, show it!
Ask For Help
Ask for help from someone you trust and create a written plan to balance your life. It is difficult to change without support from someone you trust. We have 18 coaches at ATI who work with shop owners and their families. They tell me they spend almost as much time helping you with your personal life as they do with your business. Let’s face it, if you are not happy at home, you are not going to be happy at work either, and vice versa. Start executing the plan in 24 hours and celebrate any victories along the way. Remember, it takes 21 days to make a habit, so promise only what you can deliver.
You owe it to yourself and the people around you to build a better you. Give the important people in your life all the credit for doing it. If this article motivates or inspires you to take action, great, but don’t tell your loved ones, who have been trying to change you for years, it was Chubby’s article. Give them the credit for trying to help you all those years.
Become Inspired Again
Why do you need inspiration? You need to be inspired to change or else nothing will move you. Nothing inspires us more than having short- and long-term goals. I will share a technique we use to inspire service managers and shop owners. We have them create a list of all they want to accomplish before they die and a list of everything they want to accomplish this year. They prepare the list and search for pictures in magazines that best describe their goals. They glue all of them on a huge poster board and hang it where they will see it every day.
The reticular activating system in our brain begins to remind us daily of our goal and helps us target our behavior. The biggest reason goal-setting doesn’t work is because we write them down and put the list out of sight and mind. We get calls every week from service managers crossing off accomplishments from their goal poster.
Take Action Today
There is always time to take more control over where you are headed in business. Ninety three percent of the time we can financially re-engineer a shop to double their investment with us in less than a year. Remember, if the people in your life feel you will never change, they may start to wonder if they need to change whom they spend time with. The clock is ticking!
If you would like to try to change, contact me at [email protected] and I will email you Chubby’s Balancing Your Shop and Home Life Kit. I would love to see your goals!
The kit includes blank forms for goal-setting, a list for good and bad habits, an improvement list, a no list and a written plan. It is a simple but effective way to create enthusiasm which creates energy and breeds happy people.
