You, like everyone else, are doing more with less, working harder than ever.  However, too much work makes for a stagnant, burnt out business owner. To remain fresh, energetic, and enthusiastic — all necessary attributes for those serious about competing in this tough market–you must create time for yourself and take the focus off of business.

I asked the members of our Remodelers Advantage LinkedIn Group to share their strategies for sloughing off stress and maintaining their equilibrium.  Here they are:

• Neil Meiskey, CAPS • I enjoy skiing and motorcycling, but my setting side time for
  exercise is probably the best stress reliever I know. Weights 3 days a week and some type of aerobics 3-4 days per week.
• Greg Antonioli (Regular blogger for Remodeling magazine)• Any exercise. For me it’s bicycling. A few hours alone on the bike letting my thoughts wander….even about business….is a great stress reliever.
• Debra Lellbach • About a year ago, I started doing Bikram (Hot) Yoga. I have found this exercise & moving meditation to be my life saver- clears the mind, great for toning & it sweats all the day’s stress away!
• Mark Nowotarski • Cycling, cycling, cycling!!!
• Lori Coultrup • Cycling helps alot! Also running. The more stressed you get, the less you want to exercise. But, the more you need to exercise. It makes the stress go away!
• Victoria Downing • I take ice skating lessons, I have to concentrate so much on not killing myself that I feel like I’ve been on vacation afterward! Feels wonderful.
• Radu Rusu • I agree — any exercise; it is all different for everyone but mine is ping-pong. I get to concentrate on the game and brake away from thinking about business.
• Dan Rosenberg • Going to the gym, long walks with my dog, and reading fiction. No news!!
• Neil Meiskey, CAPS • Almost forgot a great one, started taking voice lessons…love to sing. Very relaxing due to the concentration required.
• Debra Lellbach • Now that the summer grilling season is over, Doug & I are back to cooking a couple nights a week together. It helps us focus on something else besides our business!
• Tom Reavey • Making a gratitude list is a great tool for me. It’s all positive, it is all real and it is all in the present. I’m sure we can all make a decent length list of things we are grateful for, small or big things, that would make us wonder what the heck we are worrying about. We’ve got it pretty darn good. Some people I know do this daily before retiring at night; I think they get a better nights sleep that way. No exercise necessary, though exercise is highly recommended and beneficial. My wife and I love to go sea kayaking together, I traded in my surf board as a result, it still gives me that same oneness with nature I so enjoyed when surfing but with added bonus of sharing it with someone you love.
• Betsy Collins • My husband and I also have a gratitude time, usually on the way to work since we work together. It all started one morning when my husband was particularly grumpy. I started giving him a list of what we had to be grateful for. The next time, we called it “gratitude time” and alternated with his mental list and mine, which had the secondary effect of clueing us in on what each thinks about or values. For us, it’s a quick way to get perspective and our feet back on the ground. You also get to relive a moment of joy when it’s something difficult one of the children accomplished, or thanks for the recovery of a friend.
• Tom Bannister • I do martial arts, and I also do a little cycling. Both activities are great exercise and stress relievers.
• Doug Dwyer • As mentioned about Gratitude. We have a Code of Values at our company (DreamMaker Kitchens and Baths) that states “We believe in counting our blessing everyday in everyway”. During the depths of the Recession we took our entire team through the exercise of each making a list of all our blessing. The lists were very uplifting and meaningful to each person. Having a larger perspective does make a difference.
• Michael McCutcheon • My wife and I have been practicing Transcendental Meditation for many years and it has been a life saver. Lots of scientific research backs up the effectiveness in reducing stress and improving mental and physical health. Anyone who does TM regularly will tell you it works! It’s like taking a 20 minute vacation twice a day. Awesome!
• Joe Ratto • I’m a classical musician. Been playing since I was 12. Playing and learning new pieces takes you a million miles away, to other places and other times. A beautiful way to spend a few moments out of the present. For me, it’s easy to relax to this type of music.
• Jeff Abrams • Fly fishing is the greatest getaway for me. Imagine the focus necessary to gear up, scramble down the embankment without killing yourself or soaking up the river, then searching the waters flow for just the right spot for just the right float over just the right holding water. Then there’s the concentration required to tie on that “little sucker” with your special flipdown magnifier glasses hopefully secured. Now your ready to pursue your prey. Watch that little bugger float over that perfect lie, maybe for hours and hours. And suddenly your heart’s in your mouth as that 8 incher steals your fly and you better reel him in. Now I forget why I’m even writing this . . . . . . .

Thanks so much, folks, for sharing your tips and techniques for staying upbeat and positive.  Dedicating this time to yourself makes you  a much happier, confident person to be around, for your employees, your clients AND your family! If you have other creative ideas, please share!

Remodelers Advantage believes strongly that your business is a tool to help you build a financially secure future and a balanced, happy life.  Join our community of smart, motivated business owners and learn how to create this reality today. Give us a call at 301-490-5620.

A wise man once said,”It is easier to copy genius than to invent mediocrity.”

This is the philosophy that we practice. After all, in the over the 30 years we’ve been in business, we’ve worked with thousands of remodelers and we’ve seen this genius at work – and, copying the best of what we’ve seen, we’ve developed a practical, workable philosophy of how to be successful in business. We call it The Success Cycle. There are five elements in the Cycle.

The first element of the Success Cycle is to Create Leadership at All Levels.

We agree with international business expert, Peter Drucker who said that leaders of the most successful companies share three abilities:
* To define and establish a sense of mission. Good leaders set goals, priorities, and standards making sure that these are not only communicated but maintained.
* To accept leadership as a responsibility rather than a rank. Good leaders aren’t afraid to surround themselves with talented, capable people. The do not blame others when things go wrong.
* To earn and keep the trust of others. Good leaders have a personal integrity and inspire trust among their followers. Their actions are consistent with what they say.

It’s not always easy being the leader but as business owners, this is one of our greatest responsibilities.

The Second element of the Success Cycleis to Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals,

Running a business without goals is like shooting a rifle in the fog. You know there’s a target out there somewhere –but you certainly don’t know where – nor do you know if you hit it!

Successful business people don’t operate like that. Instead they set goals for what they want to see happen. And the best use S.M.A.R.T. goals. These are goals that are:

* Specific–what exactly do you want to have happen.
* Measurable–what will success look like? How will you measure it?
* Attainable–you don’t want to develop a goal that are so far out there it can never be reached. When you don’t reach it after lots of hard work, it can be demoralizing to both you and your staff. Or, if they realize at the very beginning that they’ll never succeed in reaching it, they might decide not to try at all.
* Realistic–again, set goals that are realistic and not pie in the sky.
* Timely–set deadlines. Goals should never be open ended.

The third element is to Execute Effectively through People and Systems.

This is probably the most difficult part of the entire cycle. If you’re like me, you probably have dozens of great ideas that you think would work but you’re just having trouble putting them to work. Let’s just review a few things that make this execution work.

First is to have top performing employees. It’s not easy to find and hire great employees – nor to keep them once you found them. But this is exactly what successful business owners do. They invest time and money to recruit, hire and train employees and they don’t flinch at getting rid of those that don’t work. We call this “Freeing Up Their Future” or “Gifting Them Back to the Community.”

To help your employees do their jobs well, you need to have well thought-out job descriptions so that each person understands what you expect of them and agrees with these expectations.

Lastly, using systems and procedures are a major tool for producing consistent results- and we’re talking results in the quality of the product, in customer satisfaction, in efficiency of the internal processes like the sales to production handoff.

The fourth element of the Success Cycle is Measuring and Assessing Constantly.

It doesn’t matter if you set all the goals in the world if you are not regularly reviewing the results and making the comparison of where you are now to where you want to be. The beauty in this regular review process is that you find out if you need to take different actions – WHILE YOU STILL HAVE TIME TO AFFECT THE OUTCOME!

You may find that you’re right on track and just have to keep doing what you’re doing. But you might find that, if you just keep going, you’ll miss an important goal.

You’re assessing and measuring so that you know:

* where you are compared to the goal,
* where you are falling down in performance,
* what you can do immediately to improve, and then,
* how can you improve performance overall in the future.

Now, I hope you can see that how the Success Cycle works . . . but we haven’t yet talked about the last element – the final element on which the whole process rests.

This foundation is Accurate and Timely Information.

All of these steps we’ve discussed predicated on the fact that the information flowing through your business and helping you make decisions is correct. If it’s not – if your reports are not formatted right, if costs are not sorted accurately, or if you don’t know how to decipher the information that is delivered through these reports, none of the other elements will work.

If you are really dedicated to running a successful, profitable business, you’ll spend time learning about each of the elements we talked about above. And when you do, it’ll be a whole new world.