Rediscover your motivation for your business
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We know that a lot of building a successful business is ‘tenacity’. It’s accepting that you are going to have to work at this for a few years, but sometimes those few years of slow and steady can really grind you down.
Yes, you love your business, you love your mission, but you’re just so tired. You’ve expended all that early energy and enthusiasm that you had. When this happens we call it ‘Founder Fatigue’. For some, this can come really soon in your business journey – if you exploded onto the business scene and threw everything you had at getting your business running, it might even happen in the first year. But for many of us it happens without even realising.
Fatigue can happen in any business, but it’s especially prevalent in mission-driven businesses because you have such a high emotional investment in your cause – you are driven by your sense of responsibility to make a positive impact with your business. But left unchecked, losing your motivation will kill your business.
You will find yourself, subconsciously, sabotaging your own company. You will make decisions not based on what’s best for growing your business, but on whether or not you can be bothered doing it. You’ll stop showing up. You’ll stop going out and looking for opportunities because of all the extra hassle and work those opportunities might create when you are already burnt-out.
But don’t worry! We all face it and it’s fixable too.
Read out 5 top-tips to rediscover your motivation and reconnect with your business’s mission:
1. Rediscover your 'why'.
If you’ve ever listened to any motivational business speaker, you’ll have likely heard the phrase ‘find your why’. And it’s great advice: if you want to be motivated in your business then you’ve got to have a great reason for having that business in the first place. But when you’ve got a vegan business, your motivation (or your ‘why’) is already baked-in.
Your ‘why’ might be for the animals, it might be for the environment, or it might be to create a better, healthier, more compassionate society. Or it might be a mixture of all of the above. But as you build a business, your ‘why’ can also become like the wallpaper: you don’t completely forget your reason and motivation, but you don’t notice it on a daily basis anymore either.
So the first thing you need to do to combat founder fatigue is to reconnect with your ‘why’. One powerful way to do this is to get involved with the wider animal advocacy movement. If you view your business as your form of activism, then what better way to remind you of that than surrounding yourself with other activists in the movement? If you started your business with a vegan agenda, then go book your place at the animal rights and animal advocacy conferences. In the UK we’ve got the VARC Conference in Manchester. New AVA Summits are launching around the world, in North America, South America and Africa. There’s the CARE Conference in Poland and the International Animal Rights Conference in Luxembourg.
Just spending time at these events, listening to the speakers and making new connections, will show you that you have a place in a huge movement of people who are trying to end animal suffering and safeguard the environment like you are. It will massively boost your motivation levels to make a difference with your business.
Another way to reconnect with your ‘why’ as a vegan business is to take a step out of your comfort zone and engage in some real hands-on activism, not just business activism. For example, the animal charity VIVA! supports people with leaflets and guidance that you can use to do your own outreach events, and you can also sign-up to be a volunteer for events running in your area. Get involved with your local Animal Save movement and attend a vigil at your local slaughterhouse. It will really deepen your connection with why you are doing what you are doing.
2. Automate, delegate or get rid of the things that bring you down
Now that you’ve reconnected with your motivation, you have to free yourself from some of the things that are wearing you down in your business. You will likely already know what these things are. If you feel a sinking feeling whenever you think about having to do a social media post, or if you put off doing your accounts to the point where you need a full week set-aside to catch-up with them, then you are not the right person to be doing these things. You have to eliminate the things that don’t bring you joy in your business or that you are simply not suited to doing.
To do this, use the tool: ‘delegate, automate or get rid’:
Automate
If a task is bringing you down in your business, first ask if that task can be automated. There are online tools and apps for almost everything these days, like submitting receipts, chasing invoices, booking meetings and automatically following-up emails. We’re now starting to find real-world useful applications for AI beyond just writing social media posts. So if you’re still copying and pasting between systems or facing a pile of paperwork every evening, then there’s a good chance someone’s created a tool to automate it.
Reach out to other business owners you know and ask how they do the tasks that you hate. You might be surprised to find that you are the only one who’s still doing it in the old-fashioned manual way, and everyone else automated it years ago!
Delegate
If it can’t be automated, can you find someone else to do it? There are people who love doing social media posts, or filling out accounts and spreadsheets, or customer service and fulfilment. You don’t even need to even make your own product or deliver your service yourself in your business, there are other people who can do it just as good (if not better) than you, leaving you free to concentrate on the things you actually enjoy and are good at.
The person you hand-off to could be an existing employee or a virtual assistant or freelancer. It could be someone working part-time for you remotely or you might find a service provider who can take over your manufacturing or deliver your service for you. And don’t immediately think that you don’t have the budget for this, because if you’re spending all your time doing the things that take away your energy, then that’s going to cost you far more in terms of potential revenue as a business than bringing in an extra employee or hiring a VA to do it instead.
Get rid
And then finally, if you can’t automate it or delegate it, can you just get rid of it?
Some tasks find a permanent place on your to-do list because ‘that’s the way things have always been done around here’. So get someone to sit and go through your to-do list with you and challenge you on everything you are doing. Do you still need to be keeping that spreadsheet up to date that no-one looks at any more? Do you have to keep attending that event that you haven’t got anything out of for the last couple of years? Do you even need to keep servicing those clients that don’t make you money? Be ruthless, because it’s not just your time these tasks are taking up, it’s your energy and motivation too.
Find yourself an accountability buddy, someone else who is at a similar stage of their business journey, and have regular catch-up calls and check-ins with them.
3. Build your tribe around you
We’ve already spoken about getting more involved with the wider movement to reconnect you with your ‘why’, but you also need to build up your support network of people who are going through the same thing as you. If you are running a vegan business then you need to regularly talk to other vegan business owners, because they are the people who understand why you are doing what you are doing and face the same unique challenges that you are of running a business on vegan ethics.
So (and this isn’t just a shameless plug) come to our Vegan Business Tribe member meet-ups to find those other vegan business owners because these are the people who want your business to succeed (even if they haven’t met you before) because you are on the same mission that they are.
Find yourself an accountability buddy, someone else who is at a similar stage of their business journey, and have regular catch-up calls and check-ins with them. Share your to-do lists for the week with each other and hold each other accountable for getting them done. This is especially powerful if you usually work on your own and haven’t got your own team around you.
4. Set a clear goal and make a plan to achieve it
I am willing to bet that you had clear goals when you started your business, but do you still have them now? Nothing wears you out quicker than running on the spot, so if you haven’t sat down and worked out where you are going then how are you going to know if you are making progress?
For example, if you want to increase your turnover by 100% over the next twelve months, then you’ve got to know how you will achieve that and then take responsibility for making it happen – you need to have actionable tasks with deadlines for each in the diary.
One of the best tools to do this is the SMART goals system. So your goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable (in the timescales you have set yourself), Relevant and Time-bound. So that means you need to have a goal that you can clearly-define and measure so that you can track the progress you are making, and it needs to have a deadline of when you want to have achieved it by.
If you don’t have this in your business, then you’re going to be rudderless and drifting. You’re never going to be sure if you’re improving or heading in the right direction because you won’t know what the right direction is. But if you’ve got a clear picture of what you are trying to do with your business then you can take responsibility for making it happen – and that is brilliant for reigniting your passion and motivation.
I’ve seen people run businesses for 20 years, and then someone comes in and sets a SMART goal and, all of a sudden, it’s like a start-up all over again. So recapture the clear plan and direction for your business you had in the early days so that you are not just running on the spot anymore, instead you’re running towards something that will really make a difference to you, your business or the world.
4. Practice self-care
I am not going to say that you need to be that kind of entrepreneur that does yoga at 5.00am with a bowl of granola in one hand. Or say that you need to meditate for 45 minutes every morning or just work four hours a day. But you do have to protect your mental and physical health as a business founder.
If you get up at 5.00am then you need to be asleep by 10.00pm. You can’t stay up until one in the morning watching Netflix or gaming – justifying doing so with the excuse of having to ‘decompress’ or have ‘me time’ to recharge at the end of the day.
If you feel you need to recharge then nothing does that better than sleep. Getting a full seven or eight hour sleep every night does wonders to your mood and energy levels. And if you want to have ‘me time’ then make it ‘quality me time’. Don’t spend 60 minutes at the end of every day mindlessly scrolling through your phone letting your brain rot, book a weekend off with your partner and go stay in a posh hotel (or pitch a tent in the middle of a field!).
Practicing self-care doesn’t have to be separate to your business. For example if you need to travel for work then take the opportunity to extend the trip by a day or two to visit somewhere new while you’re there. If you run your own business then reap the benefits of running your own business. Want to go to the gym at 10.00am in the morning when it’s empty instead of 6.00pm when it’s packed out and you can’t get on a treadmill? Then arrange your work day around that schedule.
Self-care is also acknowledging the progress you’re making and celebrating the small wins. Collect customer testimonials to show you the difference you are making in the world. Take a moment to celebrate progress or milestones in your business. Because when you can see you’re making a difference, then you’re not working all those extra hours because you have to, you’re working them because you know that you’re achieving good in the world by doing so.
A bullet point recap of what we’ve covered in this article:
- Rediscover your ‘why’. Reconnect with the reason you started your vegan business in the first place.
- Automate, delegate of get rid of the things that that wear you down. That might be using apps, that might be delegating to others, or just stopping doing the things you’ve always done.
- Build your tribe around you. Connect with people who understand the unique challenges you face as a vegan business owner.
- Set a clear goal and make a plan to achieve it. Nothing wears you out like running on the spot so set your SMART goals and recapture that early passion and motivation.
- Practice self-care. That doesn’t have to mean going and sitting on top of a mountain, but work self-care into your routine.
