Are You in a Business Funk?

Are you in a business funk? A minor illness is often accompanied by numerous physical and emotional symptoms: fatigue, restlessness, aches, depression, a sense of defeat. When you’re in business, certain symptoms also appear to make you stop and take notice: getting overwhelmed easily, depression, restlessness, a sense of defeat, boredom.

It’s not easy to just push your way through some of these symptoms. But, one of the problems we have as solo entrepreneurs is that we depend on ourselves too much. Cut yourself some slack. You’re trying to do something monumental, start and run a business. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it successfully.

Collaborate Now

One of the best ways to get yourself out of a funk is to enlist the help of other solo workers. One of my early posts was about simple social ways to keep from getting lonely.

You should consider a few other possibilities. One is simply collaborating with other entrepreneurs on mutually-beneficial projects. The idea of bringing a team of people together to work on a short-term project is not new. However, the typical approach to this has been very top-down and hierarchical. The leader of the project is often the major stakeholder, in other words, the person who got the gig and is trying to control the flow of information, contact, and money.

Consider a different, more egalitarian approach. Find a project and work as a team with other solos, to figure out how to get it done. Nobody is boss, except of themselves and their own deliverables. The bigger the piece of the deliverable, the bigger the reward. This allows every person on the team to contribute as much or as little as they want.

Of course, this approach requires that you plan all of your deliverables and milestones in advance, and maintain a certain amount of flexibility about bringing on others, if needed. A key to success is to chunk your project into small enough, self-contained pieces to cut down on major dependencies between stakeholders.

Try Coworking Arrangements

Some people are simply getting out of the house and renting shared workspaces. Check out these two workspace experiments in San Francisco:

The Coworking Community Blog

The Altrupreneur Center

Some coworking approaches simply share space for a set monthly fee, but you’ll probably find yourself working in a team project sooner or later if you take up a coworking arrangement. That’s actually one of the benefits of the approach. Not to mention shared overhead.

No matter what you try, you need to get some outside infusion of energy into your business. It’s not enough to deal with your clients. After all, clients are on the receiving end of your energy and time. It’s critical to make sure you get some positive attention as well. At the very least, try getting together with like-minded solo entrepreneurs every week or two for brainstorming sessions.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been meeting with a friend who has had a successful solo career for over a decade. We have lunch, brainstorm new business ideas, talk about movies and books, and generally have a great time together. It energizes both of us and eliminates that feeling of carrying the whole world on your shoulders!