When Things Don’t Always Go To Plan

Despite your best efforts no business can ever run completely smoothly all of the time. There will be hitches and snags along the way, occasions when things don’t go how you’d wish them to. Many of the undesirable eventualities that may befall your business can be predicted to a certain degree. By recognising these now and taking steps to ensure you don’t unwittingly invite disaster into your life, you can take positive action to avoid them, thus saving your energies for those few circumstances that are completely out of your control. This chapter identifies some of these problems and highlights likely solutions, making your operation more disaster proof.

Gardening- A Dangerous Business

Every year gardeners both amateur and professional will climb unsafe ladders in the belief that an accident won’t happen to them. Others will continue to use tools and equipment that are positively unsafe and dangerous. Avoiding seasonal blues doesn’t just mean staying safe, it means staying alive. Gardening is a dangerous business. Nothing should be left to chance. Get it right and you’ll enjoy running one of the most rewarding businesses in the world, but ignore your safety or that of others and you could end up paying for it with your life.

As well as physical dangers, there are psychological challenges. Research carried out into stressful occupations has discovered that the proprietors of small businesses, and self-employed people working from home, are likely to suffer more in the way of stress than if they were employees.

You may think that swapping a hectic working life dogged with commuting problems for your own gardening business would be a stress-buster, but possibly this will not be the case. Running your own business brings with it a whole new set of problems and challenges - the experience can either be enjoyable and fulfilling or highly stressful, perhaps even more so than the environment you left behind.

I started my business because I wanted more in the way of independence, fun and income.

• Independence- the freedom to be my own boss and break free from the limiting working environment I’d become accustomed to.
• Fun- I don’t see why going to work has to be a struggle or something that cannot be enjoyed. When I started my business, I wanted to work at something that I knew I would enjoy.
• Profit - without it, I can’t live the life I want to live. If you wish to remain in business for any length of time, your venture must be profitable. Having a profitable business means that you can enjoy the experience even more.

So What Makes Self-Employment So Stressful?

Imagine that you are leaving your present job with its stresses, strains and long hours to start your own home-based gardening business. You’ve fully researched your business idea and are confident that you can make it work. Your family is enthusiastically behind your plans and agree that it is time for you to go it alone. Financially you’re relatively sound and have at least three months of survival income sitting in a high interest rate account, which hopefully won’t be touched unless you really need it. Business planning is something that you have enjoyed doing and you worked out a clear launching strategy from which to work from to catapult your business into the market.

But this is only half of the picture. You’re giving up much more than a job. What you’re leaving is a way of life:

• The support and friendship of your colleagues.
• Either a wage or salary paid to you weekly or monthly.
• Paid leave.
• Depending on your employer you may have been paid while you were off sick.
• Bank holiday pay.
• Job security.
• When you leave work at the end of the day, you are physically removed from it, even if you take work home you have left your working environment, which in itself is refreshing.
• If things don’t go well there are often other people or circumstances that can be blamed.

 

Being self-employed means that:

• Most of the time you will be working on your own.
• You will not have the ‘family environment’ of many work places to fall back on.
• You will have to accept responsibility for your business in terms of both its success and failures.
• Work isn’t over when you’ve completed your last job of the day. When you get home there will be telephone calls to return, bookwork, quotations and preparing for the next day.
• Taking a day off either through illness or holiday means loss of earnings.
• Factors outside of your business can have a negative impact on your earnings, bad weather being the most common offender.
• Your working environment is where you live. Separating home and working life can often be difficult.

 

All of these things can make life more stressful and less enjoyable. Therefore it’s essential that prior to starting your business you really do believe that this is for you. It would be far better for you now to realise that this really isn’t for you as opposed to adopting the attitude that you’ll give it a try and see how it goes. I can tell you now that unless you’re prepared to give yourself 100% to your business, then things won’t go very well.