Episode 4: From Overwhelm to Ease

Episode Transcript

As health, wellness, and beauty experts, you know all about keeping a calm, peaceful space. But what about your business? Is that pretty calm? I'm Erika Dowell, business operations expert and your host of the Business Flow Formula podcast. Each episode, you'll get real-world advice and strategies from people who have been there and done that and lived to tell the tale - so you can clarify, streamline and elevate your practice from the inside out.

I know you know how to do it all, but does anyone else? Your processes probably feel overwhelming because you're not communicating them with your team. Overwhelm is often a symptom of not having the right structures, symptoms, or processes in place. 

Hey, I'm Erika Dowell, and this is the Business Flow Formula Podcast, the show that helps you build a business that flows with ease.

We're going to be talking about the very human side of being a business owner today. High stress, high feelings, and overwhelm. Optimizing for ease of the business isn't just about teaching someone else what you do - it's about getting it out of your head and into a document. It's about finding the right flow so you can breathe easy, rest without stress and spend more time being present in your life. So what does it mean to optimize for ease?

Just so we're clear, ease isn't that you're being lazy. In fact, ease means finding and creating systems that feel aligned, supportive, and energy efficient. Energy efficient, of course, isn't literally about the power bill, although saving some money is important. It's about saving your energy so that you can focus on other things you love to do. Ease is about being intentional about where we put our efforts, both in business and personal time. And finally, ease removes the friction and reduces decision fatigue. 

Do you ever feel like you've just finished playing an intense game of chess? That's not flow, that's a backlog. If you're feeling like you're constantly reacting to fires or forgotten steps or drop the ball or you have dread around certain tasks, like just that analysis paralysis almost. Maybe you have an over-reliance on your memory, or you get a lot of I'm just checking in emails from colleagues, but also from your teammates. And finally, you can't really delegate because it's all in your head. For example, you want to ask someone for help, but also you know that you're gonna have to teach them how to do it, and maybe it's just easier if you do it yourself. Those are all signs of overwhelm and a lack of ease in your business. 

I know as a wellness or beauty practitioner, you help so many people feel great about themselves, so your energy needs to be on the same level. Tension is so easy to notice, and we don't want the tension in your business to be able to cut it with a knife, for example. So, implementing flow and ease in your business will be a game-changer. 

Also, if it's always hard, you'll start dreading work, which isn't why you started your business. You started your business so that you can have a little bit more control over your life. When I started my business, I chose the name intentionally. Signal is all about listening to the signals your business is sending you. And those signals come from everywhere, and they include how you're feeling.

So it's not just the signals in your finances. It's not just the signals from your team. It's also the signals from your body and your brain, and just how you're feeling about work. And I just want to be super clear. Overwhelm is a signal, but it's not a failure. You don't need to judge it. You need to listen to it. Establish what you're feeling and what you're going through. Identify the common causes of your overwhelm. It's likely that your systems don't talk to each other, and you're left piecing together the tools that don't integrate. Now, I don't know about you, I do love puzzles, but I don't love puzzles at work.

Outgrown processes also contribute to that overwhelm and lack of ease and flow in your business. What worked when you were a solopreneur - no longer would work with a team, and they're going to feel left out in the dark. Been there, done that. Many of my clients have done the same. Having no processes at all and things living in your head or happen when you remember, we're not built to remember every single thing that we're supposed to be doing as business owners. Make sure you have a process for it so you can pull it up and go and do it. Simple things like paying sales tax, you probably pay those quarterly or annually. Write the process down and then bring it up when you need to pay for it.

When it's starting to just feel a little bit too much, let's zoom out. Where's that pressure really coming from? Is it self-imposed, is it coming from your team, maybe it's coming from accountants or bookkeepers, or maybe it's just societal pressure. Let's zoom out and choose one area - maybe it's client onboarding, hiring for help, maybe it's your payroll, marketing - it could be a litany of things, but let's just pick one and ask ourselves what would this look like if it were easy and it had flow. Then, let's bring in your team- they'll know where those clunky parts are. You'll be able to identify and start simplifying. Even asking your team, hey, what are your thoughts on what this looks like if we were to simplify it? And that's exactly it. You can simplify it. Not everything has to scale right now. You don't need all the latest tools and processes and all the things. You can simplify it and make it easy and have one thing talking to one other thing - you don't need to do it all at once. Pick the one thing - maybe it's client onboarding, maybe it's hiring and fix that first.

Some examples of this would be using templates/reusable assets, and this is when you have an onboarding checklist for your clients or patients that come in - having them fill that out rather than having to memorize what you need to ask them every single time they come into the office. You might even have canned email replies. That would be if you get a lot of emails, phone calls, DMs asking what your hours are. We could probably make that a little bit easier and have a canned email reply for that. Maybe you'll even put a team member on replying to those kinds of emails. 

The next one is having trigger points with your clients. And this isn't, of course, triggering your client. We don't want that, but it's when a client books with you, what happens?

They obviously need to get that onboarding checklist. They need to sign that waiver. They need to do something like that. Build that system in, and that's one less thing that you now need to remember to do when your client comes in. Make sure that we build in human touchpoints in all of these new small shifts that we've done. Where humans start stepping out of our processes, our clients will start to feel like they're a little left out. For example, having a check-in with your client when they come in and noting, hey, I noticed that you put this on your intake form, can we talk about that? That's an example of a human touch point right there. 

Another one is if you've built in a process around hiring or marketing, setting up a check-in with whoever is doing that work (because you should not be) will start to create ease and flow and making sure things are getting out of your head. And finally, it keeps things from slipping through the cracks.

If we now look at marketing as an example, marketing is almost an essential part of business these days. So, whether or not you're writing blog posts or creating video content for Instagram or TikTok, or YouTube, what have you - you should consider batching your content. And you can also use AI to help you a little bit. Batching your content means setting aside a couple of hours each week or each month, depending on how much you want to create. Setting up your phone to record videos of you. Maybe it's you working. Maybe if you're a lash artist, that's putting lashes onto your client. If you're a hairstylist, maybe that's filming yourself cutting hair or styling hair. Then you can start to use scheduling tools - now you don't need to pay for another tool, you can just use what is built in the systems already. That starts to keep things going with an ease and with a flow. I know when my clients started batching their content, they started finding a lot more time in their day and a lot less stress around oh my god I still have to film that reel, oh I forgot and they kept doing it over and over and then they would just feel bad about themselves and sit there and ask why they couldn't do it. It's okay to just set aside one to two hours a week or month and get your marketing done. 

So your homework this week is pretty easy. Pick one process that feels really heavy to you. If it's marketing, if it's client onboarding and ask yourself, what would ease and flow look like here? What does that look like for you? It's going to be different for everybody, of course. And then I want you to take one step - whether that's creating a checklist, delegating a piece of that work or scheduling a weekly time block in order to get that done.

If this resonated with you, or maybe want to share it with a friend, feel free to do that. But if you're ready to build a business flow that feels human, sustainable, and scalable, check out Signalember.com and book a consult with us in order to start the Business Flow Formula. Keep it simple, keep it human, and let it flow.

Are you ready to turn your chaos into calm? Subscribe and follow the Business Flow Formula. Let's create more profit, efficiency, and flow together.