The Hard Shoulder: Why Your Business Needs a Pit Stop Before You Crash

We often talk about burnout as a ‘high growth’ problem and the result of scaling a company too quickly, or the stress of managing a massive team. But after 12 years as a business owner, I’ve seen that it’s just as prevalent for micro-business owners and freelancers as it is in the corporate world.

When you start out as a new business owner, you’re fuelled by adrenaline because you’re excited to make your dream a reality and escape that nine to five grind. But before you know it, you find yourself working 80+ hours a week because you’re told that to achieve success, you need to push harder, work more, and sacrifice sleep for your dream.

None of us start a business thinking I’m quitting my 40 hour a week job to work 80 hours a week. But it slowly creeps up as you follow those ‘success formulas’, get sucked into the online noise and are told to push and push and push until you break.

The ‘should’ is getting in the way of your why

I think the problem is that we’ve stopped looking at our WHY for our business.

What if, every time you were told you ‘should’ do something a certain way, i.e. launch a podcast, join a new platform, or change your pricing; you went back to your original business why and ask yourself “does this actually align with my business and way of doing things?”

We need to start asking the hard questions before we commit to doing things.

• Will this new task take me away from the very reason I started this business?
• What am I going to have to sacrifice (time with kids, sleep, mental peace) in order to do this?
• Is this a “must-have” for my vision, or am I just following someone else’s roadmap?

And I know what you’re saying. “There are so many successful business owners out there that have worked the 80-hour weeks in the beginning, I just need to fight my way through things for a while until that happens for me”. Let’s unpack that.

The Business Blueprint Fallacy

I see so many founders who have spent thousands of pounds on ‘proven formulas’ and ‘blueprints’ that promised to take them to six figure sums in four weeks or similar. Then feel like they have ‘failed the system’ somehow when it doesn’t work for them. I actually have a blog about the ‘Six figure business trap’ which goes into this further.

But here’s the truth. Those formulas worked for the people who developed them because they were built on their values and their why. If your goal is a slow, intentional business that allows you to be present for your family, a ‘high-velocity, high-stress’ scaling formula will never work for you. It’s like trying to run a petrol car on diesel, you’ll just end up burnt up and broken down on the hard shoulder.

The Missing Education for Micro-Business Owners

I strongly believe there is a massive gap in how we teach entrepreneurship. We focus on the foundations, legal requirements, insurance, and tech, but we skip the most important part: the individual behind the business.

We aren’t taught how to figure out what we actually want personally from our businesses. We aren’t taught how to define our own values or discover who we really are as leaders.

When you lead a business based on your own values, you start making better decisions. You stop looking at what everyone else is doing in the lane next to you. You become successful on your own terms, and suddenly, the risk of burnout drops significantly. Why? Because you aren’t fighting against your own nature anymore.

Burnout happens when we try to live someone else’s life. It happens when we try to build an empire we never actually wanted because a guru told us it was the only way to be “successful.”

It’s time to turn down the volume of the online world and turn up the volume of your own intuition. If you stay in your own lane and do things your way, you won’t just build a profitable business, you’ll build a life you actually enjoy living.