Finding your Feel Good Factor
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Understanding your Feel Good Factor scores
Thank you for completing the Feel Good Factor survey, we hope you found it useful and your personalised results have given you something to think about.
It’s likely that it’s left you with even more questions. The resources below, will allow you to continue reflecting on each section of the survey, and help you decide what to do next.
How you’re feeling about yourself at the moment
Sometimes it can feel like your business is running you, rather than the other way round. It can start to feel like a ‘job’ and chances are that’s not why you set it up in the first place. This can become an isolating and lonely place, where it can feel the only person you have to talk to is yourself.
It maybe that the enjoyment factor is not quite there at the moment. Or you’ve got to a point where the responsibility is starting to weigh down on you. At times we start to allow the self-limiting beliefs to creep in and question if we are best placed to move the business forwards and unlock future opportunities.
Maybe you are satisfied that the business is working well for you on a personal level and you are pretty optimistic about the future. That’s great. The key is to reflect on what needs to happen going forwards to sustain this position for you.
Things to think about
- Networks are more important than ever. Whether that’s personal, professional, family, or something else. Social contact is hugely important for wellbeing.
- Small businesses and the self-employed are all in the same boat here. Trying to keep your business running and navigating through lots of uncertainty can be very isolating. So, it’s important to keep talking to people. The key benefit here is that others might have creative ideas that you haven’t thought of. We’ve all heard about pubs and restaurants suddenly offering takeaway options. Perhaps there are equivalent ways of pivoting in businesses like yours. Exchanging ideas can make all the difference.
- Why you are doing it? Why did you set the business up in the first place? Put the business to one side for a moment and reset your personal aspirations. Be selfish and identify what your needs and wants are over the next few years. It may be that recent experiences have shifted these, or things have become reprioritised. Then you can start to revisit what it is the business needs to do to deliver that for you.
- This can be a good time to step back from the day to day, hit the reset button a bit and reframe what the business needs to do for you to be happy, motivated and fulfilled. But also take a fresh look at the market opportunities around you and how you can best position to take advantage of those things.
How your team are coping
As a leader, there’s no bigger or more important responsibility than taking care of your team. This is especially true in these difficult and unprecedented times. After all, your teammates need your support to help them not only remain productive, but to also cope with the additional anxiety and stress that Covid-19 has induced. Many of you will want to get going again. In many cases it is an existential need. But you have to weigh this up with responsibilities you have to your employees and customers.
Anxious employees could result in lowered productivity. That creates a catch-22 scenario for your business: People produce less, resulting in bigger backlogs.
Also, trust in the workplace can be harder to build and maintain during remote working. Positive leadership is more important than ever to ensure leaders remain credible and reliable when dealing with a remote workforce.
Does everyone around you share this optimism and enthusiasm? How engaged are your people with the future opportunities for the business and their role in making it happen? Or is there a high dependency on you to continue to lead the business and convert the opportunity?
Avoid falling into the ‘owners trap’ and becoming a ‘bottleneck’ in the business. This can constrain the ability for the business to sustain growth or maintain a strong position.
Things to think about
- Staying connected isn’t just about your own mental health, it’s about your team’s mental health too. If you manage others, remember that contact with you and with each other might be an important part of how they are dealing with the pressures of being isolated with family, or without anyone.
- When it comes to assessing how employees are coping, try to keep an eye out for changes in demeanour. Body language (if you’re still seeing staff in person) can be a fairly reliable indicator of mood, as can the underlying tone of emails and phone calls and the speed at which employees respond.
- According to Harvard Business Review “Work groups in which employees report that their supervisor (or someone else at work) cares about them as a person, talks to them about their career progress, have lower turnover, higher sales growth, better productivity, and better customer loyalty.”
- Forbes report that “Learning leads to happiness, improves adaptability, boosts resilience, and keeps your mind engaged and body active.” It’s also a simple way to counter the boredom some people are experiencing with their unprecedented downtime. And a great way to help your employees learn new skills.
- Reconnect with your core purpose – it is easy for communication and decision-making to become very short term and tactical. However this is an opportunity to also define and demonstrate a common sense of purpose with your team. Remind each other of what brought us together as a team in the first place, what we stand for and when we are at our best. Reconnecting to purpose can be a critical factor in coping with crises and trauma. Use this period to start new conversations across the company, engage people in the challenges, but also a positive outlook about the future.
How your business has been affected and what the future may hold
Has Covid helped your business to boom – and you’re in a position where you are looking to sustain and accelerate growth? Or has cash flow taken a big hit and it’s a struggle just to keep going?
Efficiency is crucial to being successful & emerging stronger. Many businesses have realised they have been running with excesses, and this is the perfect opportunity to start running more efficiently.
Have your suppliers been working effectively since the pandemic or have they been affected? How able are they to resume normal operations? It might have raised concerns about the resilience of your current suppliers, or brought into focus the dependency you have on one particular supplier.
Things to think about
- What is the end goal for you? Sometimes we can become so engaged in the day to day delivery, we forget to step back and remind ourselves of what we want out of life further down the line. Often there are things we can start to work on now, which builds greater ‘value’ in the business and can give us further freedom in the future
- Sometimes we can become a bit inward looking so it can be useful to take some time to look outwards, assess what is happening in the world around us and what that might mean for the business.
- Look at where your business is currently spending money, and consider which expenses are avoidable (some are likely even entirely avoidable after a crisis). Think about excess marketing, rent, the size of your company ,and other expenses that may be reduced without affecting the quality of your business. Use the opportunity to reduce and dilute those dependencies to build greater, future resilience into the business.
- Try to take the time to look at how you focus our time and activity. Are you harnessing the potential of the business and focusing on the right opportunities that create most value? Take some time to do some futureproofing.
- Businesses have been ‘stress tested’ – has this exposed critical dependencies in the business – perhaps where we have become over dependent on a key member of staff, or over dependent on one customer for too much of our income, or one supplier for the majority of our goods. Start to think and plan for how you can dilute these dependencies to build a more resilient business.
How the market in which your business operates has been affected
Often over time we lose sight of what it is that makes us different, or makes us better. And how we should position ourselves to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
You may have some concerns about how your business is currently positioned in your marketplace. Perhaps you are concerned about the pace of change, or the ability of the business to stay on top of market changes. It may be that you are seeing increased competition around you. Or, you are being challenged to deliver products and services in new ways, as a result of wider changes in the market.
The danger at times like this, is that we can become too insular and inward focussed and can miss some of the opportunities that exist. We naturally start to think that we need to find more business, but can overlook the potential that already exists.
Are there more opportunities than before in your market? One of the challenges as a leader is to channel the resources in the business to focus on the right things and avoid distraction. When we see continued opportunity in our current market, the biggest risk can be complacency. When we are operating in an environment where we see lots of opportunity, the risk can be distraction. By trying to go after too many things, we lose our focus, and not convert any of them well.
Things to think about
- A good starting point is to take a step back and relook at our business. Start by looking at your Top 10 customers. What are they buying from you? What is the trend in their spend? How well do you know them?
- Start to undertake an ‘audit’ of your products and services, your customers, who you work with, and your suppliers. By taking a fresh look at things, we can often identify unrealised potential’ and some quick wins to restore our confidence.
- Review your products and services, review what your customers are doing and what is happening in the world around you. Identify what you can influence and is within your control to change.
- Now can be a good time to really understand where the greatest value sits in the business, take time to appraise where the market is going and what we need to do as a business to remain at the forefront of the opportunities.
- It may be that to maintain or strengthen your position in the market you need to invest in new skills, bring new capabilities into the business, or stop doing some things to refocus your resources and time on things that can create more value.
- Customers are becoming ever more demanding, barriers for competitors to enter the market are often becoming lower, and geographic boundaries are being broken down. Are you clear on what you do best? is that what your customers value most?
What next?
That’s a lot of information to take in isn’t it? We hope you find it useful. Are you wondering what to do next?
We have some options for you!
Articles and insights
We have lots of useful articles and insights in our Content Hub. You can find relevant information for each category below.
Local Business Doctor
Or, if you would like to speak to someone, your local Business Doctor would love to hear from you for an informal chat. Just complete the form at the top of the page, and we’ll be in touch.
Business Regeneration Tool
You may want to delve a little deeper into your business by yourself, and that’s great. We have an online strategy tool to help you navigate the new normal, by guiding you through a 6R process The Business regeneration workbook is just £45, and you can find out more and purchase here
BD Business Support Group
We know that running your own business can be lonely. And after completing the survey, you may feel that you’d benefit from sharing the load with fellow business owners who know exactly how you feel. If you would like to join one of our BD business support groups, please register your interest here and we will be in touch with details of how to get involved