Don’t Close Down Your Business Yet

If you’ve ever thought about shutting your business, closing it down, and just walking away, this video is for you.

I’ve seen more and more people online commenting lately, feeling that pressure, and at least letting those ideas bounce around in their head, and I wanted to break it down to kind of give some insight and some frameworks for thinking about what that might look like for people.

First of all, entrepreneurship is not for everyone. I totally understand that.

The purpose of this isn’t to talk you in or out of having your own business but to give you an outside perspective if you’re really questioning on making that jump of closing your business or not.

What Is Making You Feel Like Closing Down Your Business?

Number one is recognizing what’s happening when you’re feeling those feelings.

Nine times out of ten, what I’m seeing is that’s the result of feeling burnout.

Whenever you start a business, you have a ticking time bomb that you’ve set, and you have a fuse. When that fuse gets to the bomb, you’ve hit burnout.

The whole game is to try to get everything in the business running smoothly enough where it’s making enough money, takes as little energy as possible before that timer gets down to the end.

Because when you get to burnout mode, now you’re too tired to make changes, to adapt, to push through to that next level.

As long as you have energy and enthusiasm, whatever problem is there, you can adapt and find those solutions.

But once you’re burnt out, it gets much, much harder.

If you’re considering closing your business, you’ve probably let that fuse burn down really close to that burnout stage, if not all the way there.

In order to climb back out of that hole, you have to start to say “What are some ways I can become more efficient, that I can improve things and possibly get a foothold to get back to where I’d like to be?”

Continuing to try to coast or to ride through that wave, you’re probably just going to get deeper into that burnout stage and get past a point of no return eventually.

So there’s a good chance, if you’re feeling this, that you might be in an early enough stage where you can course correct if you’d like to.

As long as you can avoid burnout, you can keep finding ways to improve things, if that’s what you’d like to do.

Evaluate The Alternatives If You Were To Close Down Your Business

Number two is to actually look at the real alternatives.

If you DO close your business, that’s totally fine.

What are your next steps?

1.) Getting A Job Somewhere

You could probably get a job somewhere else.

But in my experience, most entrepreneurs go from being maybe one of the best employees possible – where they worked and they treated a business like it was their own, to becoming completely unhirable after running their own business.

They’ve run their own business now, they like to do things their own way, and going into a job where someone else tells you how to do something in a way that you feel is stupid or not the best is pretty untenable after you’ve done that yourself.

And your tolerance for mistakes of management gets to be much, much lower.

Working for someone else can be a much harder-to-stomach challenge than you might think.

2.) Start A Different Business

Number two is you could start a whole different business.

This is when most entrepreneurs think, “Oh, I just started a hard business and there’s another easy business out there I could start instead.”

Well, it just really seems easier than your current business because you don’t know enough about the challenges of it yet. I promise, there are no easy businesses. They all have their own very unique challenges.

• On some, maybe it’s staffing.
• On some, maybe it’s sales.
• On some, maybe it’s profit margin.
• On some, maybe it’s standing out in the marketplace.
• On some, it’s funding and capital.

They all have their specific challenges.

There are no easy businesses.

There’s no leaving what you have and getting to an easier spot.

Closing Down A Business Takes Effort

And the third really important consideration here on these alternatives is that your business is not like a tree fort in the woods where you can build on it for a while and then decide I’m done with that and then just leave it behind and go off and do something else.

Closing your business down takes a number of steps. If you have outstanding debt, that probably carries forward to you. You have customers you need to let know that you’re no longer in business.

You need to close down websites. You close down bank accounts. Close down agreements.

Unwinding all that takes a lot of energy. And sometimes the energy to do all of that and launch a new venture would be more than the energy just to change the trajectory and improve the business that you’re already with.

To The Victor Goes The Spoils – Survivor’s Benefits

That takes us to an important consideration, which is the survivor’s benefit.

If you decide to stay with your current business and make it work, I think it’s important to recognize that those feelings of hardness that you’re experiencing, the difficulty that you’re experiencing are most likely not unique just to you.

What I typically find is that an entrepreneur feels that they’re the only ones struggling and all of the competitors in their field are doing great, but they’re just the uniquely flawed people who can’t figure it out. And that’s almost never the case.

It’s helpful to remember if you’re feeling that pain and that stress in your industry, it’s most likely many others are as well.

This is actually a unique benefit because what happens is as things get tougher, more and more people might leave that industry.

When business is easy, it’s not so hard to open a business in that particular industry.

But when things get tougher, those people who enjoyed it when it was easy, don’t have the stomach for the difficulty maybe. As they get out of that industry, that leaves fewer and fewer players inside of it. So even if the business level has dropped down a bit, as people leave, you still get a good chunk of that pie.

Now the real advantage is as the business picks back up again, as the industry may grow again, there are fewer competitors left. YOU get a bigger piece of that remaining pie if you’re one that sticks it out.

There’s a really big benefit just to surviving and sticking it out, even though it might be difficult because those who didn’t have the stomach for it have left.

So just a bit of encouragement. If you’re going through a tough time, and you can keep going, on the other side, there’s kind of a big reward. And this is where markets can really shift.

You can go from being a mid to low-level player and just by surviving, end up in a much higher percentage of the market on the other side.

Change Is Required

This is NOT just hitting your head against the wall over and over again trying to survive, this is making changes and adjustments on that way through. An important part here tying into that is if “you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.”

However, you’re doing business now is making you want to stop doing business.

That’s probably an indication that your business either

• Isn’t serving you (the way you’ve set it up, it feels like a prison. You hate the way your business is, so you have set it up in a way that you’re going to be unhappy).
• Or you haven’t developed the skills, tools, or systems to make it run smoother. And so you’ll have to make changes to improve that.
• You could be in an actual ongoing crisis. (If you’re in a crisis, I have a video on that, the five-step proven process to work your way out of that specific spot. If you’re trying to backtrack into what are the skills and tools, I have some videos to break some of that down.)

You might need to reach out and read some additional books, listen to some podcasts, and find some additional people.

But you’ll probably want to make some changes because what you’re doing right now is not working for you. Without changes, it’ll likely keep not working for you.

As we talked about earlier, the cost of changing tends to be less than the cost of trying to walk all the way away.

If you can get a small foothold of change improvement, now you can use that little bit of breathing room and build more and more on top of it and eventually really recover some of that fuse moving you away from burnout to having a much happier business.

You Can Always Close Down Your Business Later

The last really important step here is you always can walk away from your business later.

If you decide to stick it out, make some changes, and see how it goes, this is a decision that you can put off. You can walk away from it later. But this is really important.

If you’re doing that, stop subsidizing your business as soon as possible.

What do I mean by that? If you have a business that is not doing well, and let’s say you will get a full-time job to support this side hustle, and you’re pouring extra money into that business over and over again, that’s not a business that’s at break-even or just barely above but not enough. That’s a business that’s losing money.

In that situation, you have to get to break even ASAP.

I’m talking that needs to be in weeks or months, not years time frame. You don’t want to kind of keep a business going on for a few years where you’ve sunk another $50,000, $60,000 into it or racked up debt that you’re going to carry forward.

If that’s the case, closing your business becomes more of a financial reality than an emotional reality.

Conclusion

I hope these have been some helpful things to really consider to lay out the framework before you close your business.

• One is describing the burnout phenomenon.
• Two is what the alternatives might look like so you actually can think your way through those next steps to see, is it really something I want to do or is it just kind of an emotional response to the discomfort I’m feeling?
• Three was the benefit if you were to stick it out and survive on the other side of some intense difficulties in business. The benefit here is that the victors get the spoils.
• Number four is that it’ll take change. “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” So you’ll have to identify what changes you need to make.
• Five, you can always walk away later if you decide to.

I hope this has given you something to think about.

I think entrepreneurship is an amazing, amazing thing.

I think every entrepreneur, whether they admit it or not, has these doubts in their head at times, “Is this all worth it? Wouldn’t it be nice just to go to a corporate job, clock in, work, clock out, leave my work there?”

That would be nice in many ways, but the freedom that we get to express ourselves, to create something, to help people is really an enormous, enormous gift that should definitely be treasured.

I hope that you stick it out if it’s worth it and you get out if it’s not being nice to you.

Have a great rest of your day.