How New Entrepreneurs Can Avoid Business Bondage

Is pursuing success as an entrepreneur really worth risking so many relationships and losing your personal life?

Business bondage can be described as the state of feeling inexorably intertwined or even imprisoned by your business.
Business bondage is frequently experienced by new entrepreneurs and small-business owners.
Every day as an entrepreneur seems like a marathon. You are exhausted after putting in long hours of work, but you wake up the next day and do it all over again without finding time for you personal life.

Many factors can contribute to this feeling: 

• lack of experience
• financial stress (insufficient capital, late- or non-paying customers, high-interest credit, etc.)
• macroeconomic events (national economic issues, financial market fluctuations, etc.)
• inability to lead or delegate tasks
• inefficient or inadequate business systems
• lack of experienced help/staff
• increase in the competitive environment

According to the Small Business Administration, business startups fail at a rate of roughly 50% within the first five years. In order to make a business succeed it requires enormous financial, emotional and physical commitment by the owner(s).
The flip side of that commitment is the necessity to find life balance or else risk succeeding at work but paying too high a personal cost.

For small-business owners, however, work-life balance isn’t so straightforward. Especially as their business is growing, many owners find themselves immersed in the day-to-day needs of their company—from finding and hiring talent to marketing the opportunities. It’s hard to break away even for an hour, much less take a vacation.
But it's not an entirely impossible task—

How To Achieve Personal Life And Business Balance:

The keys to maintaining balance are flexibility, delegating work and prioritizing time for fun.

Use of Technology: use various scheduling tools to fit everything into place. Technology is a great help—you can use phone calendars, email reminders and mobile reminders to maneuver your way to each meeting, event and party. Also apps like unit converters and Visual Assistant make work a whole lot easier.

Hiring the right people. This will help you to delegate tasks. It will help take your mind of the business for some period of time because you entrusted your business into capable hand(s).

Ensure that you prioritize your personal life.

Be Disciplined: The hardest part about executing on the plan is being disciplined enough to actually meet your goals. In all likelihood, something at the office will challenge your weekly plans and priorities. Appointment requests will come, challenges will arise, meetings will go long, deadlines will loom, and there will always be excuses to make an exception.

Those times will test your priorities. However, you can handle most of the items without making exceptions or excuses if you just stick to your plan.