In September, I ran the Spring Reset, a free five-day challenge for business owners. Everyone who registered answered one simple question:
What is the biggest challenge you’re facing at the moment?
Just over 60 people answered. Some gave me one word. Some gave me a paragraph. One said “Everything, lol,” which was honestly the most relatable answer on the list.
I’ve spent the last six weeks writing about what came back. This is the whole series in one place.
What people told me
Roughly a third said some version of the same thing: too much on, too many priorities, nothing getting finished.
The rest fell into a handful of themes. Systems and admin that live in your head and nowhere else. Sales and cash flow, with a slow economy making everyone nervous. Running two businesses, or wearing every hat in one. Distraction from the inbox, interruptions and the “quick question” that eats an hour. Staff who are away, not on board or impossible to find. Low energy after a long winter. And a quieter group who named procrastination, second-guessing and imposter syndrome.
If you recognise yourself in more than one of those, you’re in very good company.
Time is a symptom
Most people described a time problem.
I think time is a symptom. It’s decision-making that’s sitting underneath.
When you run a small business, you’re the only one deciding what matters this week, what can wait and what finally gets done. And you’re making those calls in the gaps. Between clients. At 10 pm. Halfway through an email about something else.
That’s what I call being stuck in Worker Mode. You’re so busy doing the work that there’s no room left to run the business. Boss Mode, the planning, deciding and prioritising part, gets squeezed into the leftovers.
More hours won’t fix that. Protected time to decide will.
Every section below is a different version of that same problem.
When everything’s a priority, nothing is
Most small business owners I talk to aren’t short of things to do. They’re short of a way to decide which thing comes first. So the default kicks in, and whatever’s loudest wins. The client who’s emailed twice. The overdue invoice. The staff member hovering by your desk.
What never makes the cut is the processes you keep meaning to write down, the plan for next year, and your monthly financial review and cash flow forecasting. Those things are important, but they’re not urgent. Nothing is shouting at you to do them, so they quietly slide to next week. Then the week after.
Important tasks are very polite. They’ll wait forever.
The fix is to separate deciding from doing. Your brain doesn’t do both well at the same time, and if you try to decide what matters while you’re in the middle of doing, urgency wins every time.
Try this: before you open your inbox on Monday, give yourself 20 minutes of Boss Mode. Get everything onto one list, circle the one important thing that keeps sliding, pick the two or three urgent things that genuinely need you, and book a time for the circled one. Then open your inbox.
You’re the business and the only employee
This was the trap I saw most often. You need the client work to pay the bills, but the client work takes all the time you’d need to build something more sustainable. So you keep doing the client work, and the business stays exactly where it is.
If you run a small business, you’re probably the CEO, the operations manager, the accounts team, the marketing department and the person who notices the printer’s out of paper, all on top of the work you’re actually paid to do. Something has to give, and it’s almost never the client work. What gives is the owner’s job.
I spent more than 20 years in senior operations roles before I started coaching. In that world, nobody would expect the person running the production line to also set the strategy, do the budgets and plan next year in whatever time was left after their shift. Yet that’s exactly what we ask of ourselves as small business owners.
In most small businesses, the owner’s job isn’t being done badly. It isn’t being done at all, because nobody has ever decided it’s a job.
Try this: imagine you were hiring someone to run your business, not to do the work but to run it. Spend five minutes writing their job description. Then be honest about how much of it you’re doing, pick the one thing that would make the biggest difference over the next three months, and give it an hour a week.
Default or deliberate
A handful of people told me they’re running two businesses. Others described one business that behaves like two. Almost all of them said the same thing. One gets the attention. The other gets whatever’s left.
When two things are competing for you, one usually wins by default. Not because it matters more, but because it’s louder. In my operations days, we called deciding where resources go “capacity planning”. In most small businesses, it’s called whoever’s yelling loudest.
Splitting your time evenly isn’t the answer either. Businesses rarely need the same thing from you at the same time, and treating them equally usually means doing both halfway. What helps is choosing, on purpose, which one leads this season, and deciding what the other needs to keep ticking over.
Same amount of time. Completely different headspace.
Try this: give yourself five minutes on paper. Which one gets your best hours right now, and did you choose that? Which one needs to lead for the next three months? What’s the bare minimum the other one needs to stay healthy?
“I’m not sure I know what I’m doing”
The quietest answers on the list are the ones I’ve thought about most.
Many of the people I work with didn’t set out to build a business. They got very good at something, people wanted more of it, and one day they looked up and realised they were running one. You trained for years to get good at your craft. Then you were handed a second job, running the business, with no training, no manager and no manual.
I call this the identity gap. It’s the space between who you are as a skilled practitioner and who you’re becoming as a business owner. On one side, you’re confident. On the other, the pricing, the sales, the numbers and the planning, you’re much less sure. That’s where imposter syndrome lives. Not in your work, but in the gap.
It sounds funny, but travelling is a great time to test this. What do you write in the Occupation box on the immigration form? I still remember the first time I wrote “Scientist” there. And the first time I wrote “Coach”.
The gap also explains a lot of procrastination. When business owners keep putting something off, it’s rarely laziness. The task usually sits on the business owner side of the gap, where they feel least sure of themselves. It’s a confidence problem dressed up as a time problem.
Try this: think of the business task you’ve been avoiding the longest, and ask honestly whether it’s really time, or whether you’re not sure how to do it yet. If it’s the second one, that’s good news. It’s a skill you haven’t learned yet, and skills can be learned.
Feeling unsure isn’t a sign you’re not cut out for this. It’s a sign you’re in a role you haven’t had a chance to grow into yet.
Before the summer rush hits
November gets busy. December gets busier. Then there’s the close-down, followed by a January spent working out where you left everything. By February, the plan you meant to make still hasn’t been made.
In my operations days, the annual shutdown was planned months in advance: what needed finishing beforehand, what would happen during it, and exactly how we’d start back up. Most small businesses work flat out until the last minute, collapse into the break, and try to restart cold.
Try this: plan the season, not just the to-do list. What genuinely has to be done before you close? What needs to be in place so you can actually switch off? And what’s the first thing you’ll do when you’re back? Book that, plus an hour of Boss Mode in your first week back.
Where to start
That’s a lot of “try this”, so here’s the honest version. Don’t do all of them. Pick the section that made you wince a little, and do that one exercise this week.
To everyone who answered my question before the Spring Reset, thank you. Your honesty shaped this whole series. Most business owners are carrying far more than anyone sees from the outside, and almost all of us assume we’re the only ones who haven’t got it figured out.
You’re not.
If you want next year to feel different
If something here has landed, and you’d like next year to feel more deliberate than this one, that’s exactly what 1:1 coaching is for. Over three months, we set clear goals, build a plan to get there, and you get the accountability and support to follow through.
The first step is a Clarity Call, a free 30-minute, honest conversation about where you’re at and how I can help.
I’m taking my own advice this summer. I’m closed from Friday 18 December and back on Wednesday 13 January. If you’d like to talk before the break, book a call before then. Or book one for when I’m back, and start the year with a plan.
