Maria Braun

The everyday life of a business owner: either sales are too low or too high, or there are too few goods in stock or too many. You know the feeling? And it doesn't matter whether you sell goods, or a service, or knowledge. With your own business, you sell something and you have some customers.

And the worst is before the holidays - when people start thinking about grocery shopping and then don't have the headache of thinking about, for example, buying cranes or pallet trucks, or aren't even interested in printing advertising banners!

How do you deal with this feeling as a business owner? Do you also have such dilemmas?

I call such a state of mind “salesman's bipolar disorder”. It's never just right. It's always either too little or too much. Such a state gets you even despite the best small business development strategy.

Here are some examples from my experience:

You sell toys online. The peak season is in November and mid-December. This is normal. You've been preparing for the peak season since August, buying goods, hiring people, buying cardboard boxes and packing tape to stock up. You optimise what you can to pack as quickly as possible. You achieve super efficiency results. For example, you pack 800 parcels with four people in eight hours. You feel tired, but also proud! I did it! And actually, if the season lasted a whole year, you could do even more optimisation and pack even more! You make plans for a great sale, but around 18-20 December sales die down, only to fall all the way to zero on 23 and 24 December. And what happens then in your head? You go into a panic. What's it going to be! There are no orders, what am I going to do now? And what are my employees supposed to do? A while ago they were packing 800 parcels and now they only have to pack 100 at the same time?

The same thing happens to you before Easter. Although you are able to think logically and you know that Easter in Poland is largely about a richly decorated table, lots of eggs and yeast cake, you still worry about the lack of sales of gift products in the last days before Easter. And then people are no longer thinking about gift shopping, but about grocery shopping, possibly car washes and tyre-changing workshops.

How to deal with this? With panic and anxiety in the mind, which is actually justified by the seasonality and most simply the festive calendar?  Or do you need to give employees a few days of looser work because it is impossible to always work at 110% of the norm? Or send employees out for team training? Or maybe it is a time for the business owner to think about a few things and take stock? Or to think about development topics that there was no time for in the heat of work? Or to prepare a business plan for the micro-business for the coming year?

For me personally, just realising that I was falling into such a “bipolar disorder” was a value in itself.

Sometimes you also need to be able to slow down, even if it is forced by the holiday calendar :-)

If you need support or would like to talk about a business consultation, feel free to get in touch!

Adres

ul. Złota 11
00-123 Warszawa

Contact

kontakt@mariabraun.pl

+ 48 697 993 960

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