A top-notch analysis of businesses present myriads of challenges and stress to their respective owners, to an extent of having sleepless nights occasionally. Most of the stress majorly stems from late payments, cash flow, lack of sales, too much debt, and issues arising from employees.
To a great extent, you’ll have thoughts that ultimately weaken the mind hence tiredness and anxiety. The pressure thus is likely to build up. Business owners have to realise that managing a business is stressful. Running away from the stress only makes things worse, instead, they should embrace them through various tips discussed below.
Problem 1: SME Owners and Cash Flow
Small and Medium-Sized Businesses’ owners’ biggest stress is cash flow. More than half of entrepreneurs that took part in the survey have admitted that they had trouble with cash flow. When the cash is not coming in timely, there are difficulties paying your bills, the salaries, or even buying stock to meet your sales. According to the same study, around 38% of SME owners were unable to pay their debts.
Solution 1: Adopt Credit Control Procedures
To solve the problems related to cash flow it is important to start with an audit of your invoices and data, related to your Accounts Receivables (AR). The sales might be going up, however, if your customers don’t pay for the invoices in a timely manner, that means you have unrealized cash on your balance sheet. Eventually, this means and your business is giving free credit to clients.
In order to identify the weak link, do the ratio analysis of your Balance Sheet, focusing on AR-related data. For example, find out your Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), or Account Receivables Turnover. What are the trends, is your DSO increased in comparison to the previous period? It is important to know these answers related to your cash flow.
Of course, staying on top of this important data might be time-consuming and would take a lot of your attention away from running your core business. The great news is that now the technology allows outsourcing these vital tasks. Kolleno offers a credit control extension compatible with major Accounting Softwares that will give you peace of mind. Kolleno cloud-based solution will monitor the late invoices and will help your collect your debt in a timely manner, removing the strain away from your cash flow.
Problem 2: Maintaining Relationship with Clients
You did a good job by reaching out to your customers and making a sale. But how do you maintain a good relationship and make your current clients loyal? This is something that the majority of business owners stress. After all, increasing your customer retention by only 5% will translate to a profit increase between 25% to 95% according to Bain & Co. Moreover, it is 5 to 25 times more expensive to get new customers than to retain existing ones. So, the big question is how to maintain the relationship with your customers friendly especially with the ones who miss on paying their invoices on time?
Solution 2: Sending Timely and Friendly Reminders
When clients miss the deadline on their invoices it doesn’t always mean that they have problems with cash flow. Sometimes there are so many invoices coming in every month, that they forget some deadlines sometimes. So, the key is to send a reminder, so the client can also plan ahead the cash going out every month. Also, simply not forget it is useful sometimes to get a reminder.
Your employees might not have time, energy or might feel awkward chasing customers. Kolleno AI-based software will send automatic reminders choosing the best timing and tone-of-voice depending on the customer.
General Stress-Relieving Techniques:
- Remind Yourself of the Positive Milestones
One of the vital aspects that will immensely save on stress a great deal is looking into both the positive and negative aspects of the business. Often business owners concentrate only on the negative aspects underpinning the venture that needs to be fixed. You can easily enhance your stress management in the venture by simply reminding yourself of the immense milestones that you’ve actually achieved and are improving the business.
Note down the accomplishments since they stand a chance to exceed your expectation or rather the way you view your venture’s progress. Take into account all milestones be it the smallest or of any capacity and pin them somewhere you can easily glance, for instance on your desk or the wall. Whenever you feel stressed about all the things that are going wrong, look at your list. Take a moment to remember all the things that have gone right and smile about your achievements
- Prioritize the Goals that You Look Forward to Achieving
Massive causes of stress in most ventures are a lot of work-in-progress that needs to be finalized to give room for additional projects but none of them likely to get done. Making an effort to tackle a portion of each task will ultimately render them incomplete. It is therefore advisable to focus on one or a small number of tasks at a time and not aiming to do everything at once. Prioritizing your goals means writing down everything that you need to complete. Then, ranking the corresponding tasks from greatest to least.
The things you need to do first should come at the top of your list and the rest follows in a well-structured order. Following your list of tasks will help essentially in creating an agenda for yourself appropriately. Try as much as possible not to get overwhelmed by the length of your list. Just focus on what you need to tackle next.
- Free Your Brain of Thoughts by Jotting Them Down
Thinking constantly over daily business issues in addition to the matters arising at home makes the brain work non-stop. This might hinder you from having a healthy sleep. In order to offload your brain, jot everything that the brain is trying to process down and their possible solutions. Mostly writing thoughts down can take a while, but it’s worth it. After jotting them down, you can easily relax and sleep since your brain won’t have anything to process. You’ll absolutely free yourself of any worries since everything is scheduled at a given time and there is no chance of forgetting any single item.
- Ensure You Take Breaks for Some Moment to Gain Momentum Again
The simplest piece of advice to business owners is to take a break to regain the oomph and momentum to tackle tasks with energy. Whenever you are stressing about a given issue that is either incomplete or detailed, step away from the stressor for at least ten minutes will highly freshen your mind and enable you to calm down accordingly. Breaks also aim to prevent burnouts.
When you take a break, do something that relaxes you. You can easily take a walk, get some coffee to drink, call a friend or even watch a funny movie or clip. Don’t do anything business-related. When you get back to your business, you will have a clearer mind. You will have fresh energy to tackle the task. And, stepping away might even open your eyes to a new and better way to complete the task. This will ultimately render your operations seamless and enjoyable.
- Take good care of yourself to maintain the good health needed for the venture
Having good health means a lot in the business ecosystem. This is because maintaining a venture takes a lot out of the business owner. Your venture comes with long nights, early mornings, no weekends, and no sick days. Your busy lifestyle strains you a lot and adding stress is actually not worth the investment. This, therefore, calls for a need to take good care of yourself by just doing the simple things. Drink water throughout the day. Regularly eat. Get some sleep. Get to a health food store and buy some natural supplements. Aim to reduce caffeine consumption since when you’re healthy, you’ll be able to handle stress most appropriately. Last but not least, exercise adds a greater portion to your daily success in every aspect of the venture.
Are you looking to centralize your payments, collections and reconciliation in one place? Book a demo to learn how Kolleno helps businesses to free up resources and focus on core priorities.
July 07, 2021 
