Kicking off a new business means that the entrepreneur or business owner begins operations leveraging his/her knowledge of the products or services it performs and how those product/services will be delivered to the marketplace. When the start-up begins with the entrepreneur him/herself – a non to infrequent occurrence, the entrepreneur begins operations doing absolutely everything – sales/marketing, finance and operations – dividing up his/her time based on what has to be done based on a priority known usually only by that individual.

There’s a breakneck pace that many new solo business owners assume. With an infinite number of things to do, and about a dozen hats to wear, it gets overwhelming, fast.

And, that’s nothing compared to what happens once the business actually has some momentum under it. That’s why one of my clients with a brand-new business was asking me: “Craig, how do you get it all done? Your business has about 100 times more going on in it than mine does, and I’m overwhelmed just with what I’m trying to get done.”

There is no entrepreneur or senior level executive I know of that hasn’t experienced serious stress during the course of their business career. Certainly there are times when the pressure builds and builds and builds – forcing executives and line personnel alike to struggle just to keep up!

Stress causes all kinds of problems – more often than not compromising the individual’s ability to concentrate and get work done. Certainly the costs of neglecting stress in your business can be very high. And, strangely, stress is sometimes overlooked as a health and safety issue by small businesses. Yet the unexpected absence of just one member of staff can affect productivity, and efforts to secure cover can be costly and time-consuming.

One of the first things that sales and company executives ask us when we meet them is; “We need to grow our sales, what can you do for us?” To that we always respond, “If you’d share with us some of the processes that you have in place now for the sales team to follow – we can then take a look at them and see if there might be a way that we can help.”

What we’ve found is that most of the time the issue is always the same: There simply isn’t a process in place for us to look at – period. The salespeople almost always seem to be autonomous from the rest of the company. There are well thought out processes in place for finance, personnel and administration – but not for sales. When we ask the question of why the building of a business development process for the salespeople seemed to be pushed to the wayside, we almost always got the same response:

“It’s a huge undertaking and I know I should (Don’t you just love that word should?) be doing something – but where would I start?”

Once upon a time a small boy and girl were building a sand castle on the beach. They spent hours building towers, walls, and a moat. As they were building the castle, the tide slowly kept creeping in closer and closer. Finally after working on this castle for most of the morning a big wave came in and wiped it all away. An adult who was watching all of this was at first feeling sorry for the children because of all the work they had put into building the castle. The adult then saw the children hold hands and run together laughing down the beach. It was then that the adult realized that although it is fun building empires, the lasting fun is having friends with whom you can continue to laugh and be with after all that you have spent your life building has washed away.