Turning down business and beating overwhelm

Yesterday, I published one of my own articles about the reasons for turning down new business: Turn Them Down, Don’t Let Them Down. I encourage you to avoid one of the biggest mistakes any organization can make, but one that is most common to solo entrepreneurs. Don’t take on work that you can’t reasonably handle.

Sure, there are a lot of jobs that will strain you or even force you into hiring temporary help to manage. Everyone gets that occasionally. But some work just isn’t worth it. Some work isn’t humanly possible to complete in the contracted time line. Some isn’t possible to do to the exact specifications of the contract. Some is from folks who are impossible to please. You must be able to differentiate the jobs you can do from the jobs that are just too much. If you don’t, you’ll let your client or customer down, you might not get paid, you’ll develop a bad reputation and you’ll ultimately lose business — not only from the disappointed client/customer, but from others. Read the article.

As a related follow-up, I also published a guest article today, How to Get Rid of the Entrepreneurial Overwhelm…for GOOD!, which has a few suggestions for avoiding the ways entrepreneurs find to feel overwhelmed by the distractions of possible work opportunities and marketing ploys. With all the advice on line about how to market, especially the rage for “social marketing,” it’s easy to lose the focus you need to make your product or service better and keep up with the business you already have. And then there is all the advice on how to turn your one current product into a line of fifty products, with little or no effort and create a fortune in multiple streams of income. Not. Don’t get distracted.