It’s not easy to admit you are not coping when you are building a business. With a responsibility to maintain a strong front for staff, customers and investors it can often feel like there is nowhere to turn when inevitable setbacks, challenges and issues are encountered.
3am Founders is a new movement that aims to shed light on the challenges that keep entrepreneurs awake in the middle of the night and the Gold Coast Innovation Hub team joined forces with iYouth and Bond University to deliver the first session last week.
Business owners were invited to anonymously share the issues that they are currently experiencing so that we could facilitate discussion around these topics and create an environment where participants could share similar experiences and provide create constructive dialog around each issue.
So what are the main challenges that plague our entrepreneurial leaders?
Business and Industry concerns:
- Ambiguity of strategy – the need to document, implement and drive processes on scale when you move from a lean startup that needs flexibility to a scale up that needs to standardise policies for staff, customer and partner on boarding.
- Staffing – How do you spend enough time supervising and supporting new staff when you are constantly being pulled in different directions?
- How can you be as good as a leader as you scale as you were in start up stages? Learning art of direction and overcome crisis of control.
- How do you spend time most effectively.
- How do you juggle hats as your company grows: Having to lead the ship: CEO, CIO, CMO, CFO.
Family Concerns:
- How do you meet the social and emotional expectations of your friends, family and significant other?
- Balancing personal life: relationship with business, having great communication with your partner.
Personal Concerns:
- Imposter Syndrome – feeling phony, not walking your talk enough.
- Comparison with your peers and judgement from others.
- Fear of unknown.
- Finding time to give back to those less fortunate – being a good person when time is constrained.
- Deep rooted conditioning around being accepted and the Aussie ‘All Good’ attitude leaves you feeling isolated and like a burden to others because you are the only person having difficulties.
The topics made way for some fantastic conversations around managing expectations, managing time, planning and prioritisation as well as risk taking, sharing experiences, meditation and broadening our stress gap (we’ll delve more into stress gaps in another post).
Have you encountered any of these challenges? What have you done to overcome them?
Please share your experience!