Balancing work and family is one of the greatest challenges for an entrepreneur. Left unchecked, your business can consume every waking hour. There are always sudden firedrills, new customer pitches or urgent personnel matters. How do you balance everything?
I will be introducing a future feature called "Behind the Firewall". It will be a series of guest blogs from leading entrepreneurs and this will be the first topic.
While their perspective will be the more relevant, I have three comments on this topic:
1) Sanctuary: your family and friends are your greatest resource. They are your sanctuary from the often random corporate world. Keep your spouse in the loop and take care of the relationship. Also, it is key to make time for your kids. I wrote about how important this is in my post "Resilience in the Storm". This is the only thing you can count on when things gets rocky on the business front.
2) Team: build out a team that you can delegate to and trust. If you find yourself jumping deep into functional areas, you either a) need to learn to delegate better or b) have the wrong lieutinents. This is not to say there won’t be times when you need to get more involved, but too often we see entrepreneurs try to do too much of it themselves. This is the leading area that indicates whether an entrepreneur can scale with his/her business.
3) Funding: determine if you want your business to be a lifestyle business or a swing for the fence before you take capital. Also, assess which your business is best suited for. Fund it accordingly. Venture capital demands rapid growth. Once you have taken VC money, expectations rise and so will the demands on your time.
More to come on this topic from those in the trenches…