It’s spooky season, and to celebrate we’re going to talk about some of the most terrifying aspects of business ownership! Owning a business can be a high-pressure experience. This pressure can create fear and anxiety around almost anything. While military personnel are often cited for bravery, and generally have more risk tolerance than the average civilian, it doesn’t mean these fears don’t impact us at all.

Deep down, we all know you can’t manage your company and make big choices from a place of fear. So, to help us all overcome a little bit of our fear as entrepreneurs, we’re going to explore what keeps entrepreneurs up at night, and what you can do about it if it’s getting to be too much for you to handle.

Prepare yourself for an onslaught of some of the most bone-chilling, spine-tingling horrors of business ownership!

The Howling Client

This horrific creature has driven many a business owner to madness with their incessant howls, drowning out all thought and reason. They howl at you under the full moon, long after you’ve plugged your phone into the charger and gotten into bed. In digital spaces, they can run in packs, magnifying the cacophony until you break.

We’ve all dealt with high-maintenance clients who never seem happy unless they’ve made you work twice as hard or for half the price. If you’re a new business, you’re likely to have some clients abusing your time to the point where there’s no profit in dealing with them.

There are some lessons to learn from the howling client, especially early on. They can even be critical revenue streams early in your business, when you’re desperate for clients. However, the best way to deal with them once you’re on your feet is to fire them. Not every customer is profitable for your business model.

Being Entombed in Paperwork

It starts simply enough—you’re on a sales call or pitch meeting and you come back to see a form in your inbox that needs to get filled out. You don’t have time to fill that out, and you’d rather try and land another deal, so you walk away. You come back a few days later and now there’s an invoice to send, too. Then you turn around and three months have passed and the paperwork is backed up and compounding.

Then it’s tax season and the piles of papers aren’t just in your inbox, they’re stacking up on your desk and you have to push them aside like you’re clearing brush in a jungle just to read an email. And which stack had your tax forms and receipts? Suddenly you can’t breathe, you can’t think. You’re entombed in paperwork, cursed from doing any revenue-generating activity until you’ve dug yourself free.

There is a lot of paperwork that comes with owning a business. Invoices, reports, tax forms, license forms, compliance forms, reports, NDAs, agreements, proposals, insurance, it is truly endless.

There are only two ways to deal with the loads of paperwork. First, you can be hyper-organized and stay on top of it with one of the many software solutions out there. Unfortunately, this still requires a level of discipline most of us can’t find without being screamed at by someone with a lot of chevrons on their arm.

The second way is to get it off your desk and hire an employee or service to manage as much of it as possible. As the entrepreneur, the bulk of your time should focus on customer experience and product, and revenue-generating activity. Filling out paperwork is not the best use of your time. The moment you can afford someone to take it off your hands, even with part time help or through a service, reclaim your time.

The Shrieking Bills

Every week, some new bill explodes from your inbox, shrieking about the money owed to keep your business’s open sign lit up. Payroll, inventory, your lease, utilities, insurance, software licenses, it’s an unending choir of bills demanding to be heard and paid.

You can hear them shrieking when you’re about to pitch a client, when you’re sitting down to dinner, or even when you’re lying in bed. The shrieking doesn’t end, and it feels like you can’t think, can’t focus, can’t be present until they’re stopped. But there is no stopping, even if you somehow pay them all, the next month, the next week, the next day, another arrives and begins it’s wailing.

The monthly bills for new businesses can be intimidating, and if revenue isn’t quite covering the bills, it’s easy to feel overextended and overwhelmed. There’s not much to do except ensure you’re being tactical about only adding expenses when you know you can afford them long term, grow within your means, and make sure you have a safety net and aren’t personally exposed to risk by the business.

It’s also important to organize and systemize your accounting. Unprofessional accounting practices, especially external-facing transactions with your customer base, can damage the trust customers place in your business. Educate yourself on business accounting practices if you haven’t already.

The Eternal Torment

You lie down to sleep, an exhausting day of working on your business behind you. You feel your consciousness drift. Sleep is imminent, only to be interrupted from your phone chiming. It’s an email from a client having second thoughts about the deal you made. Before you can decide if it’s something that you need to address or that can wait until tomorrow, the phone chimes again.

An employee isn’t feeling well and probably can’t work tomorrow. You’ll have to cover, but you already scheduled a lunch pitch meeting. The crushing relentlessness of business ownership has invaded every moment and place in your life. There is no escape. You lock the door to the bathroom and brush your teeth. You hear your phone chime through the door. It could be an emergency, so you check it. It’s the week’s inventory order, the shipper lost something.

You finally fall asleep, twisting and turning through chaotic stress dreams. You wake up to 32 unread emails, 17 text messages, 4 missed calls and 2 voicemails. It’s Saturday.

It’s difficult to enforce a sustainable work-life balance as a business owner, and often impossible when the business is new. It’s difficult to set boundaries for your personal life and remain agile enough to take advantage of opportunities. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set any boundaries at all. Finding a pace you can sustain year-round ensures you’re thinking clearly and critically, and making good choices for your business.

The Abyss of the Unknown

You are wrapped up in the day-to-day operations of business. It’s difficult to think too far ahead when there’s an emergency a few times a week. But when you do think of the future, it comes with invasive questions—did we drive enough revenue this month? Will I cover my next inventory shipment? If I don’t will I lose the business? What would I do if a hurricane hit nearby and I was out of business for a month or two? How long can I stay in business without revenue? Will I lose the house? Is it time to pivot to the market, or was that just a fad that’s already over?

What you don’t know about the future of your business is so vast, most entrepreneurs break it down into the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” just to acknowledge that it’s impossible to achieve complete knowledge of what you don’t know. Living with the fear of the unknown and the risk that comes with your own business can be terrifying if you go too far down the rabbit hole.

Overcoming Fear

There are two key steps to overcoming fear. The first is to acknowledge it out loud. Pretending you aren’t afraid almost ensures that you’ll give into your fears and react instead of respond when faced with them. Acknowledging your fear means talking about it with someone, be it a friend, a professional, or even just the face staring back at you in the mirror. But saying it out loud, and exploring why it creates so much fear and anxiety, even just naming the fear reduces its power.

The second step is to prepare yourself and face the fear head on. Preparation might come in many forms, from taking a few deep breaths, to educating yourself and drawing up a game plan, or anything in between. When you feel ready, you face that fear, and then repeat the process until you’ve mastered the fear and can respond thoughtfully instead of reacting fearfully.

Special Recognition For Two of our Bravest Entrepreneurs

Special thanks to IVMF program alumni Vernetta K. Mosley, CEO of Cultivate the Writer and Chrysalis Consulting LLC, and Dana Yumul, CEO of the Dental Hygiene Group for acknowledging and sharing some of their fears with us to help make this list!

Ready to Overcome Your Business Fears?

Find a community of fellow veteran and military spouse entrepreneurs who can help you overcome your business fears and chase your American Dream of business ownership at IVMF. We meet entrepreneurs where they’re at in their journey, from those with little more than an idea to serial entrepreneurs planning their latest exit strategy.

Ready to start your entrepreneurial journey with IVMF? Explore our portfolio of entrepreneurship programming, much of it available virtually or at locations across the country. Find the program best suited to help your business take the next step today!