Stressed Every Day? 6 Stress Management Tips for Business Owners

Stress is part of our everyday lives. There’s good stress that can help prevent you from doing something you should. Then, there’s the bad stress that can cause harm to both your physical and mental health.

Uncontrolled stress can lead to mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. On the physical side, too much stress can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, and eating disorders. Too much stress can cause many health issues that make your everyday life difficult to go through, especially if you’re a business owner.

Keep your stress under control so you can work to the best of your abilities. Reviews for Corporate Business Solutions has six stress management tips for business owners.

Learn Your Symptoms of Being Overly Stressed

Everyone has their own symptoms that tell you when there’s too much stress in your life. However, there are several common symptoms of stress that it’s important you’re aware of.

Stress manifests itself in various ways, including headaches, acne, frequent sickness, chronic fatigue, digestive issues, and decrease sex drive. Pay attention to these types of symptoms if they’re frequently happening. It could be your body telling you to slow down and relax.

Take Breaks Throughout the Day

Breaks are essential but often overlooked. Many long and stressful days could be eased up a bit by knowing when it’s time to take a break. That is also why it’s important to know the symptoms of stress to take those breaks when symptoms appear.

Taking a break can look different per person. Some may prefer to go for a walk around the block and breath in some fresh air, while others might need to exit their email and get lost in a quick game. Whatever your break looks like, just make sure to take them when you start feeling stressed.

Stay Active

Physical activity is an effective aid against stress and even prevents it from flaring up. Staying active has a positive effect on the brain. It reduces the stress hormones while stimulating endorphins (those “feel good” hormones). When you feel good and strong, you’re more likely to have a better handle on stress when it does appear.

Learn to Delegate

Is your stress coming from being overwhelmed with work? If that’s the case, it’s time to learn how to delegate or start hiring a trusted team. If you’re constantly drowning in tasks and never feel like you can get caught up, it’ll be challenging to get your stress under control.

Take a Vacation

Many entrepreneurs are stressed because they have too much work. So, taking a vacation may seem counterintuitive. However, sometimes when you take a step away from the job and focus on relaxing, it can help clear your head so you can come back and tackle your day with a more positive perspective.

Get a Good Night’s Rest

Sleep is essential for everyone. Although it may seem tempting to stay up late to catch up on work for the next day, running off too little sleep can actually do the opposite. Not having enough sleep will lead to chronic exhaustion, which can cause mind fogginess and slow you down. So, get a good night’s rest as much as you can.

Stress management seems simple. However, it does take some practice to develop the habits that will help keep your stress under control.

Growing a Business and a Family? 4 Tips for Balancing Your Work and Life

A common question entrepreneurs face is balancing their work life and home life in a day. When do you know it’s time to put the computer down and spend time with your loved ones? What do you do to even get to the point that you can have a balance between the two?

Learning to balance your business and a family isn’t always easy. Depending on how the day goes, one will often be a higher priority than the other. Which one goes first in your day often comes down to what’s most important in your life.

For entrepreneurs who want to manage a healthy balance between growing their business and growing their family, we have four tips from CBS-CBS.com that can help.

Use Your Family As Daily Motivation

Finding the motivation to get work done throughout the day can be challenging. We often get used to the idea that we need to wait for motivation and inspiration to strike before getting the ball rolling. However, motivation often comes from within and outside influences.

If you struggle with taking work home, late nights, and not being fully present with your family, use them as your fuel throughout your day. Remind yourself that you need to get your work done to be fully present at the supper table and into the evenings with your family. It can help you stay focused and determined to complete your to-do list for the day.

Prioritize Your Day

Speaking of to-do lists, if you don’t use them already, you’ll want to start. A daily to-do list is an excellent way to organize what you need to accomplish right now and what can’t wait until later in the week.

A good tip is to start each morning making a list of what you need to achieve in your working hours. Start with the essential tasks that absolutely need to get done. That way, if something takes you longer and you have a few more tasks left, they’re likely not as high of a priority and could even wait until the next working day.

Don’t Shut Your Family Out

There’s a difference between separating your work and family life versus balancing the two together. Unless you and your partner both agree it’s best to keep any work talk at the office and not at the house, keep your family involved in your day-to-day activities with the business.

For starters, your partner can be your biggest supporter and cheerleader for your business (and the motivation we mentioned in our first point). Communicating with your partner about the company can also help solve problems that are frustrating you that could help make your next workday a little less stressful.

Learn to Delegate

When you’re first starting a business, you may not have the luxury to delegate tasks as you’ll likely be the only person involved in the business. As you grow, though, and work becomes more demanding, you’ll need to start delegating tasks to employees and managers. Learn the signs of when it’s time to hire support, especially if it’s cutting into your precious family time.

The above four tips can help you find some balance between growing your family and growing your business. Many of the ideas come from simple changes like how you start your day in the morning. It’ll be trial and error to find what works best for you.

Conquer Your Mind: 3 Tips to Manage Self-Doubt as an Entrepreneur

We all experience self-doubt at some point in our lives. For entrepreneurs, it can become even more prominent as you move forward with your business. Self-doubt can hinder your daily decision-making to even take your business down a path that would lead to success.

Along with self-doubt often comes impostor syndrome. If you’ve ever felt like you’re not fit for what you do, other people in your field are more competent than you are, or that you’re faking what people see, you likely are going through imposter syndrome. It’s an internal experience that ultimately makes you feel like a phony, even if you deserve to be where you are.

Trying to overcome something like impostor syndrome and self-doubt takes time. It’s about building your confidence and letting yourself accept that you deserve to be the entrepreneur you are today. To help, Corporate Business Solutions has three tips to try.

Find the Root Cause

There are likely certain areas when your self-doubt is at an all-time high. If you can pinpoint when you feel this doubt the most, you can start to unravel the cause to find the solution. For example, if you’re presenting information on a particular topic but feel you’re not fit to do the job, ask yourself why? Is it because you don’t know the information, or is it because you’re nervous about speaking in front of people?

When you find the root cause of the self-doubt, you can then form your solution to overcome it. In our example above, it may be that you need to spend a bit more time reviewing the information or finding resources to help with public speaking. You may have all the skills you need; you just need a bit of confidence in yourself.

Build Your Confidence Up

Having confidence is vital when running a business. If you doubt yourself and every decision you make constantly, it starts to seep into the rest of your business. How do you expect to move your company forward if you are unsure about where you’re at right now?

Spend some time building up your confidence. Find a mentor to guide you in the business world, focus on your previous success and failures as a way to grow, and always have a plan. When you have a plan, you’re more organized and more likely to feel confident in what you’re doing.

Watch What You Say and to Who

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you told someone about upcoming plans, only for them to have a weird reaction? When that happens, you may feel that your plans aren’t a good idea and start to doubt your choices. No matter what the intentions were of the person you spoke to, if they have a poor reaction to what you say, it can affect what you do next and how you feel.

Instead of letting self-doubt take over from something like this, prevent this type of situation from happening in the first place. When it comes to your business, be picky about what you say and who you say it to. Of course, having a few people to bounce ideas off is good to have, but that doesn’t mean you tell everyone what your plans are.

Managing self-doubt as an entrepreneur is an ongoing process. No matter how many years you’ve been in the business, you’ll have moments where self-doubt takes over. It takes time and practice, but you can overcome it.

4 Business Strategies for Female Entrepreneurs

There have been many strides forward in the business world for female entrepreneurs. In fact, four out of every ten businesses in the United States are owned by women. That number continues to grow as more and more opportunities present themselves for female entrepreneurs.

With that said, many female-led businesses still face unique challenges. Many challenges come down to having confidence in what they’re doing and being taken seriously in their field. In today’s world, though, there are various tips and suggestions available to help female entrepreneurs succeed in the business world.

Are you a female entrepreneur? Your Corporate Business Solutions consultants have four business strategies to help with your success.

Advocate for Yourself

Advocating for yourself can be one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur, especially for female business owners. As entrepreneurs soon find out, the business world is highly competitive and can be pretty intimidating.

Remember that you’re here for a reason, and you have the skills and knowledge to be successful in the business world. If you find yourself being overshadowed when you know you have the skills, speak up.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

With that said, it’s essential to know when it’s time to get help. Entrepreneurs just starting often have to wear all the hats in the business. However, you can only do that for so long until you have to build a team. The tricky part is knowing when’s the right time to start building that team.

Asking for help also comes in other forms too, like your home. When you’re trying to grow your business, it requires much of your time. Women are often still the primary caregiver at home while working, whether employed or the employer. If you find yourself becoming overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to ask for help from your partner at home.

Always Be Learning

There’s never a downfall to continuing with your education and developing your skills. When you know more and have the education to back up what you do and say, you can open up new possibilities for you as an entrepreneur.

Always learning can also come from when mistakes. Every entrepreneur is going to make a mistake at some point. The difference, however, is what you do afterwards. Spend some time reflecting on what happened, what went wrong and how you can overcome the setback. It can help prevent the same mistake in the future, though make sure to not dwell for too long on the past.

Work Hard at Every Opportunity

Sometimes, when an opportunity presents itself, it may not be exactly what you hoped for. You could have planned for option A, only for option B to be what is the most feasible at this moment. No matter what route you take your business, work hard at it and work to the best of your ability. Even better opportunities can present themselves in ways you least expect it.

Female entrepreneurs continue to make strides in the business world. It’s not always easy, but being a business owner can be an enriching experience.

Website Makeover: 5 Tips to Revamp Your Website

From time to time, you may want to give your website a facelift. Why? Because a poorly designed and unattractive website can actually hurt your business.

Potential customers are more inclined to leave your website and go somewhere else if your website is slow to load, poorly designed, and has no contact information. Every website needs many crucial elements, and a well-planned layout that is aesthetically pleasing is one of them.

Take a look at your current website and see how it makes you feel. If you’re not proud of it or happy with how it looks, we have five tips from CBS-CBS.com on how to revamp your website.

Set a Goal

Why do you want to redesign your website? If you’re unsure of that answer, you should determine that before you begin.

There are various reasons why a company revamps its website. It could be to speed up the loading time, a change in branding, or it’s been a decade, and it looks outdated. Having a reason or a goal for your redesign will help keep you on track, and it will also tell you what to spend the most time on to engage your customers (i.e. Reducing photo sizes to improve load times).

Document Your Current Website

First, you want to ensure you have your current website documented if you need to go back to the original site. Having a website record allows you to reference back to check important information (like pricing and product descriptions). Also, it’s not a bad idea to keep track of your website’s progression over the years. It’s a great way to compare and see how far you’ve come in website development.

Be Consistent With Your Brand

Every company has a brand. Within that brand are specific colors that represent the logo and the company. It’s essential that you use the same branding across every page on your website.

Consistency comes in many aspects of your redesign, including font used, what’s bolded or italicized, and the photos. Keep things similar across all pages.

Follow the Less is More Rule

Have you ever loaded a website that bombards you with popups, paragraphs of information, and pictures everywhere? It’s distracting, annoying, and not very pleasing to the eye. Most users would likely leave.

With a website, you need to go straight to the point. Cut out any fluff (you’re not writing a novel). Our attention span to websites continues to shorten, which means you only have a handful of seconds to hook the reader into staying on your website.

Have a Call to Action

Make your website as easy as possible for the user to maneuver through. Don’t send them on a wild journey just to find the vital information they need. Instead, tell them where you want them to go next in the form of a call to action.

A call to action can be a statement to “click here,” “signup now,” or “join our email list today.” The purpose is to tell the user what you want them to do next. Using a call to action is a simple tactic to help guide the user to your end goal (increased exposure, more signups, higher sales).

Enjoy redesigning your website. When you have fun with the process, it’ll show through with the overall results. Remember, a website is crucial to your business’s success. Ensure it gets the time it deserves.

The World of Clickbait: What It Is and Why You Should Use Caution

You’ve likely come across them before – you see a headline that sounds epic, only to quickly realize the article has nothing to do with the title. You just went to a clickbait article.

Clickbait articles aren’t anything new, and there are many mixed feelings about them, yet you still can find virtually everything. In videos, paid advertisements, and blog posts, you likely can’t browse the internet without coming across something that is clickbait.

If you’re curious about what clickbait is and even thinking about using it yourself, hold that thought. First, let’s understand what we’re talking about. Then, your Corporate Business Solutions consultants have a few caution points to consider.

What is Clickbait?

Clickbait is something with a sensationalized headline (whether it be a Facebook ad, YouTube video, or a blog post). The purpose is to have a title that draws on your emotions, which, ultimately, connects to your curiosity and makes you want to know more.

The sensationalized headline usually uses words like “you won’t believe this,” “OMG, she did what,” or “this one simple trick will change your life.” It’s easy to see why people would want to click on articles with titles like that – they promise something dramatic and amazing.

However, the problem lies when you actually click the title and go to the media. Once there, you quickly realize that the video or article doesn’t live up to the exaggerated headline. Not only that, but the quality and accuracy of the content are usually questionable.

Why Use Caution With Clickbait

Now, there’s a difference between a more dramatic title that catches the reader’s attention and blatantly using a sensationalized headline that provides no relevance to the content. The goal of posting content is to get users to click on the headline and spend time absorbing what you provide.

There are a few problems with only using clickbait. The first is building trust with your viewers. If every time they click on your content, and it doesn’t live up to what you advertised, you’ll have issues creating that trust with your viewers. Ultimately, they’ll stop going to your content, which will hurt your business.

Another issue is with SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines consider the quality of your content with where you show up in search results. Clickbait content that is low quality will get punished by the search engine, which will put you lower in the search results.

Continuing with search engines, if they notice viewers spend only moments on your content before leaving for something else, they also mark that as less valuable in the search results. Basically, the more clickbait you use that doesn’t provide much value, the more you’re hurting your overall website (and business).

Now, that isn’t to say you should never use clickbait. When used correctly and sparingly, it can actually benefit your website by generating organic traffic.

When using clickbait, though, err on the side of caution. If you’re using sensationalized words to draw the reader in, ensure that the content and quality lives up to the expectation. A well-planned and phrased headline can use “clickbait” words that draw the viewer in. It’s up to you, though, to ensure you’re providing something that makes them want to stay.

Mental Health and Entrepreneurship: 5 Tips Business Owners Need to Know as a Business Owner

Mental health has been a growing topic in the last year, mainly due to shutdowns and isolation from Covid-19. With many businesses forced to close their doors and families isolated at home for weeks on end, mental health becomes very prominent.

As an entrepreneur, your mental health is a crucial aspect of your overall success and wellbeing. Without taking care of your mental wellbeing, stress can overtake your life and ultimately make you quite unhappy.

Luckily, you can do many simple things in your day that will help boost your mental health. Corporate Business Solutions has five tips for entrepreneurs to help with their mental health.

Get Enough Sleep

For business owners, their company is their entire life. Although you need to put in the work to get the results you want, it shouldn’t come at the cost of other vital aspects in your life – sleep.

Sleep is essential for everyone. Not getting enough can negatively impact all life elements, including how you focus, increase your risk for health issues, and even put you at risk for mental health illnesses. So, make sure you get enough sleep each night so you can tackle the next day with a clear and focused mind.

Write Things Down

Have you had those days when your to-do list is never-ending, but you’re frantically trying to remember what you all need to do? How do you feel in those moments? Likely, stressed, anxious, and frustrated.

Prevent your stress levels from rising too high by staying organized. One way to do so is by writing things down. Whether it’s a notepad with your daily tasks or journaling the night before to clear your mind, getting your thoughts on paper will help you remember them and keep your life more organized.

Ask for Help

Never be afraid to ask for help, even as a business owner. You may wear multiple hats, but if you’re drowning trying to get everything done, your quality of work will likely suffer. Higher employees to take over specific tasks to focus on the essential parts of running a business.

Asking for help isn’t just about hiring employees. It also comes in the form of mental support. Psychologists are trained to help provide the proper tools for an individual to manage their stress and anxiety. If you find you’re always overwhelmed, it may be time to ask for professional help.

Give Yourself Downtime Hours

Working every hour of the day may seem like a good idea, but you must give yourself time to unwind and relax. It could be at the end of the day or taking a lunch break. Whatever the case may be, those downtime hours are meant to disconnect you from work so you can focus on yourself.

Add Meditation to Your Routine

You’ve likely heard of meditation before, but do you include it in your daily routine? If not, you should.

Meditation for entrepreneurs is an excellent way to take a time out, reduce stress and anxiety, help with your sleep and even improve your creativity. Give it a shot one day and see how you feel after taking a moment to center yourself and clear your mind.

Make your mental health a priority this year by adding elements to your routine meant to slow you down and take a moment to think. You may be surprised by how much more productive and happier you are when prioritizing your brain’s health.

Happy Workers, Successful Business: 4 Tips to Motivate Your Employees

What makes a business successful? There isn’t just a straightforward answer. It requires dedication, leadership, cooperation, creativity, determination, and so much more.

For a company to grow successfully, though, you can narrow down the traits to something more specific – your team.

You can only do so much as the owner until you reach the moment when employees are necessary to keep moving forward. Without them, you’re left drowning in tasks with no time to grow your business.

It’s more than just having employees, however. They also need to be happy and enjoy coming to work for them to stay and be productive. To help ensure they stay, reviews for Corporate Business Solutions have four tips to motivate your employees.

Be Nice, Honest and Respectful to Employees

First, one of the best ways to keep the peace in the office is how you interact with your employees. Bad management is one of the top reasons why employees quit their jobs.

Put yourself in the shoes as an employee (or, you’ve likely already experienced it). If you have a boss that undermines your work, is rude, closed off, and difficult to communicate with, how would that make you feel? Likely, frustrated and wanting to leave fairly quickly.

As the boss, be a positive influence in the office to help keep employees happy and ready to work.

Provide Room for Growth

If you want employees to stick with you long term and motivate them to achieve greatness, you need to provide them opportunities to grow. Change their mindset that they’re merely working at a job to the possibility of it being a long-term career.

Part of growth opportunities comes with creating positions within the company, so employees have somewhere to strive for. Next, you also need to provide training opportunities. Even if employees don’t want to move into a different position, offering chances to further their skills shows them that you care about their development and want them to stick around.

Give Them Encouragement and Feedback

Work satisfaction comes in various forms, including feedback you provide as the boss. When you’re told you’re doing an excellent job at something, you likely feel pretty good about yourself and want to continue performing well. Positive feedback and encouragement is contagious and can do wonders for motivation and happiness.

Feedback shouldn’t just be all positive, though. There is such a thing as constructive criticism too. Again, it’s about showing that you care about their performance on many levels and want them to achieve in their position.

Listen to Your Employees

One of the best ways to improve office happiness and motivation is to seek out what your employees want and need from you. You can do this in many ways, but a good idea is to have an open door that employees feel comfortable walking through. If you show them that you value their opinion, they’ll be more likely to express what they need from you to help them be their best at work.

Keep your employees motivated and happy with simple things. Although offering rewards and pay raises are excellent, it doesn’t always have to be monetary. Being available to talk, offering support, and encouraging your employees to succeed can go a long way.

How to Start A Business From Home

With all the changes we went through in 2020, you may be wondering how you can make a business work that can withstand a global shutdown. Many home-based businesses were still able to operate in some capacity (with some not affected at all).

Home-based businesses are an excellent way to make an additional income or use it as your career option altogether. You may be interested in working from home for many reasons, so why not get one started?

Reviews for Corporate Business Solutions has five tips to help get your home-based business started and on the path to success.

Make a Note of Your Talents

Before beginning, it’s a good idea to jot down you’re talents. What are you good at?

When going into business, working on a path that uses your talents can help in many ways. For one, you’re more likely to enjoy the job if it’s something you’re good at, and it will show you if you’re suited for running a business.

Brainstorm Business Ideas

Next, spend some time brainstorming ideas that you could turn into a business. Start with ideas that use your talents already listed. Next, move onto any hobbies you have that you could sell as a product or service. Many home-based businesses begin from someone’s hobby.

Create a Business Plan Draft

Once you have an idea, you’ll need to ensure you can turn it into a business. Do that by starting your first draft of your business plan. Your business plan is something you’ll refer back to as your business grows and use it for any financing you may need.

When writing your business plan, start with a summary of what your company would look like. How would you operate and make a profit? What would your target audience look like and the competition in your field? As the business grows, you can start to include growth goals to move forward.

Do a Test Run

So, you have a plan in place and ready to open the doors. However, it’s a good idea to do a test run of your business with friends and family. Ask for their honest opinion about your plan, if they think the public would like it and if it’s something you can make a living from.

If you get positive feedback from that test run, you can then take your business idea into the public world as a beta. Beta is when you’re testing what your business sells to the public to get honest feedback. You can do this by creating a social media account and asking for a select amount of people to do a test run on what you’re offering. Provide them with a discount to entice customers.

Legalize Your Business

After you’ve gone through everything above and feel confident that you have a solid business idea, it’s time to legalize your business. That means applying for a business name, creating tax accounts, and getting any required licenses.

Upon legalizing your business, you can then create your website and social media accounts to promote your new home business.

Starting a home business has its challenges but can very rewarding when it takes off. Stay dedicated, work hard, and enjoy the journey of starting a home-based business.

How to Manage Your Time Like the Boss You Are

Time management is a crucial skill that every business owner should know. Good time management can be the difference between checking off every task on your list and falling behind in growing your company.

Why should you work on your time management skills? For starters, it’s an excellent way to help relieve some stress in your day (by completing everything you wanted that day), give you more time for a better work-life balance, and even open more opportunities for your company.

With time management having such a positive impact on your life, here are six tips from your Corporate Business Solutions consultants that will help you master this necessary skill.

Plan Your Week and Day

One step for time management is to plan your upcoming day and week. Having a plan for what you need to achieve that day will help you stay on task, rather than feeling overwhelmed, trying to determine where to start.

Prioritize Your Tasks

Prioritization is another element of time management. If you spend most of your time in a day working on tasks due at the end of the week, rather than focusing on something due tomorrow, you’ll feel less rushed and stressed about everything. Plus, prioritizing allows you to see what items you can delegate to your team so you can focus on what’s the most important to the business.

Start Your Day With the Most Important Task

Are you someone who dreads working on certain things? Rather than dwelling on them throughout the day and procrastinating, schedule them for the morning so you can get them out of the way. You’re likely to have the most amount of energy at the start of the day, and completing those problematic or annoying tasks right at the beginning is an excellent motivator.

Remove Distractions

Did you know that a distraction can cost you roughly 25 more minutes than what you expected? A study into workplace disruptions found that it takes the average person almost 25 minutes to recover from a distraction and refocus on their task. If you kept track of how many times you got distracted in one day and added 25 minutes to each distraction, how much time was wasted?

Eliminating distractions is a crucial element of time management and keeping yourself organized, focused, and motivated. Close down additional tabs on your web browser or close your office door so you have more privacy. Whatever your main distractions are, think of how you can remove them or minimize how often they steal your attention from your work.

Focus on One Task at a Time

Think of this tip alongside removing distractions. Do you find yourself trying to work on multiple things at once? Maybe you’re in a phone meeting and shooting off emails to a client. Trying to accomplish multiple tasks at once doesn’t have the effect you’d hope. Instead, pick one item on your list and focus on just that task until it’s finished, then move on to the next one.

Set a Time Limit to a Task

A good trick to try is to set a time limit for each task you do. Whether it be doing the dishes, writing a report for work, or even cleaning your office, setting a time limit can help keep you focused and motivated to finish the job.

Don’t stress trying to master time management, as it’s a skill you’ll always be learning. However, making it a priority in your life will help ease stress and stay organized.