You’re not alone. It happens to everyone who has ever been a business owner; and the manufacturing industry is a particularly tough gig.

You’re working day in, day out on your business, and then one day you feel like you have just hit a wall. You don’t even want to come into the office; when you do, it’s hard to keep your daily tasks in focus. Business burnout has set in.

Here’s 5 big reasons why burnout can happen and how you can help avoid falling into burnout yourself. 

1) Nothing new is happening

Most people feel like they have too much on their plate, but the opposite can also be a cause of burnout, that is – you barely feel like you need to come into the office anymore, because you have gotten your business running smoothly all on its own. It is time to challenge yourself again with a new growth phase. Tapping back into the stages of innovation and product development might be the next step for you right now. Before long, you’ll start to feel that familiar hunger to achieve something new again. You’ll blaze new trails, even in small ways. Optimize a process. Train an employee. Land a new client. Put something new into the world and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment. It is amazing where the energy comes from again. 

2) Your original goals don’t feel relevant anymore

Sometimes, you keep working on a goal for so long that it stops feeling meaningful. You forget that before your business existed, nobody was solving the problems you solve, in exactly the way you solve them. In other words, you have started to take your goals for granted. To get that energy back, you have got to find a way to connect emotionally with your goals; re-experience the original problem for yourself, or spend some time talking with people your business is helping.

3) You’re not sure how to reach your next solution

You know, in the back of your mind, what needs to be done; you just don’t know how to get there, exactly. You’re missing a step on the way to the goal. The way to address this problem is to break your journey down into sub-journeys and define a specific goal for each of them. Then tackle the hardest things first, day after day, until you start to see the change you’re aiming for. Or work with an experienced coach for your industry. Even professional sport people have coaches for this exact reason – to help them see what they cannot. The age old saying is ‘you don’t know what you don’t know.’

4) You have got a “what” but not a “why”

Back when you first started your business, you probably filled out a worksheet that asked you not only what you wanted to accomplish, but also why you wanted to accomplish it. That “why” might still be meaningful today, or it might not; one way or the other, you have stopped feeling the love. You need to define a new “why,” a reason to come into work to solve a problem that matters to you. 

5) And of course the main issue – you’re working too hard

You are used to working long hours but lately you have been coming in at the crack of dawn, working without a break, and only going home to rest when you’re on the verge of collapsing. There’s nothing wrong with hard work, but this is getting out of hand lately. Running a business isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. You have got to pace yourself. In fact, if you don’t stop and rest for a few days, you may run yourself straight into a breakdown. It might be time to assess the organizational structure of your company and do some shuffling of key people, or hiring of new management to help ease the pressure and share the load. I would be more than happy to discuss some of the proven systems the business owners we work with are using today. Contact me today.