Do you have business PTSD? Or, have you created a stress free business?
Choosing to become an entrepreneur signs you up for all kinds of new things: a 24/7 sales career, and sometimes anxiety.
Many people become entrepreneurs because they love a particular product, or feel passionate about a service, and then find themselves doing so much more. They’re CEO, COO, IT tech support, customer service, human resources, and the list goes on!
In fact, sometimes, entrepreneurs find themselves doing the other roles that sometimes, they can lose their original passion!
The uncertainty of business taking on all those extra roles can bring about entrepreneurial PTSD and a LOT of stress.
Perhaps it was a failed launch; or a business that isn’t performing according to plan or projections. Maybe an investor is withdrawing support. It could even be that you’re not taking care of yourself, and your body is just giving up.
Whatever it is, there are things that every entrepreneur can do to help themselves.
For me and my team, organization and communication is key. Now that I have been creating this podcast for nearly two years, I have five team members. Every single one of them (and our Pitch Queen interns!) knows exactly how to find what they need.
Our organization keeps things simple, like finding the files we need in GDrive to Dropbox, from becoming targets of stress.
Christa Orecchio, a guest on the Success Unfiltered Podcast, knows how business PTSD and failures can impact entrepreneurs and activate stress triggers. However, when you control what you can, and find healthy ways to deal with the triggers that you can’t control, you’ll find that others take your business even more seriously, and you’re able to spend your time working on your business instead of dealing with stress and the PTSD that it can cause.
Good Launch Gone Bad
Christa was excited for her first launch. She guessed that maybe a few hundred people would sign up for her gut-healing program. She’d worked one on one with many clients, and was so excited to be able to help more people with an online course.
She’d worked hard to prepare a video course, complete with custom meal plans and supplements. Her vendors were all lined up, and the sales page was ready.
When the site went live (right before the holidays), she was excited to see hundreds of people sign up.
That quickly became thousands of clients.
People were just randomly finding her, and signing up for her course: the growth was explosive.
Then, there was a problem, and Christa needed help: fast.
With that many people signing up, the site kept crashing, but Christa had another issue. She needed customer service help.
She outsourced the work to an outside customer service team, and all was well. The waiting list for the next launch grew, and Christa trusted that the customer service team was taking the calls, and dealing with her customers, just like their reports told her.
Angry emails and requests for refunds quickly tipped her off that her customer service team was not doing their job correctly.
In fact, they weren’t even doing their job.
Investigation showed her that she had to step in fast to prevent a disaster.
To mitigate the disaster, she had to act quickly, and be transparent with her clientele. Because of the mass amounts of people who needed resolution for their problems, Christa was able to help create some extra webinars for her people.
But this taught her a lesson for the next launch…
Tale of a Rogue Affiliate
When it was time to launch again, Christa was ready.
She’d hired a customer service team. She’d worked with multiple companies to prepare supplement kits – there were a million dollars worth of the supplement kits ready!
Her email list of more than three thousand readers were primed and ready to buy.
One of her affiliates approached her and said, “Hey, if we lowered the price, we’d sell more.”
However, math said that she couldn’t lower the price: she had so much capital tied into the inventory already, and she knew that she would be able to sell enough to cover the capital. In order to provide excellent customer service that she had prepared for, she couldn’t lower the pricing.
“I would love to give you what you want,” she said. But she was so heavily invested already and she couldn’t revamp the program.
She opted not to raise the price.
In response, the affiliate sent an email to his list: “I am no longer supporting Whole Journey, and here is why you shouldn’t either.”
With that one email, he vaporized her list, completely destroying that launch.
Christa’s team scrambled to recover. They found some new affiliates, and they launched with small success, but it was nowhere near their projected numbers. In fact, the team ended up breaking apart the supplement kits and selling the components separately to recoup their investment.
Undaunted, Christa pushed forward.
Creating a Stress Free Business
Business PTSD happens often, especially for entrepreneurs facing high amounts of stress and anxiety.
Christa, in particular, had to find a way to overcome that. After all, it was one of the foundational messages of her courses: training the body not to survive on stress hormones, but to reprogram how your body finds energy.
There are many stress triggers that Christa couldn’t control: when her affiliates emailed their supporters, or when customers were upset.
But what she could control were her processes.
There are specific things that Christa has implemented in her business, using tools like Google Drive, Google Suite, and Dropbox. Workflows and automatic responses in her email help her even now, to be effective and efficient in her business.
Choosing to control what she could, and finding healthy ways to deal with what she couldn’t helped Christa face the challenges of business.
It’s the same with our businesses. We can control what we can control, and have to learn how to cope with the rest.
In Conclusion
Christa experienced two devastating NO’s back to back, despite her best preparation. Even when she prepared herself and her business for the launch the second time, she still experienced frustration and stress.
What are some things that you do in your business to help eliminate stress? Do you have any secrets about how you handle stress in your business? Share them with us in the comments!
