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Bakery Day 161 - A year in review: Did someone say stress

I have to laugh.. I swear I thought that owning my business would give me all the control, direction, and results that I wanted. I guess it is true, it does. But I never thought that I would be more stressed out than when I was working for the man (that is an American expression which I can explain if necessary).

Stress comes from any of the following (but not limited to) areas:
- bills
- meeting customer needs
- proper rest & finding time to enjoy life
- doing taxes, including the aggregation of every receipt
- worrying if I will have enough money for rent in a month from now
- making mistakes with what is baked and feeling terrible about the results
- arguing with my partner when really it is just two people who work very hard and are tired
- not understanding why people do not come back
- the language barrier - uff.. i can talk about this one for weeks
- pricing products so they will sell and yet, not undercut myself
- taking orders and they are not picked up by customers - the roscon last week, some customers did not pick up their orders. My out of pocket expense for each one was between 5-6 euros. And, the ones we did not sell are no longer good enough to sell. We barely broke even.
- landlord not caring about the damage from the basement or fixing the doors that were broken as a result of us being robbed three times. Do not worry, I have an entire post coming just on the topic of him.
- ensuring no moths or other bugs get in to the flower. or they ruin expensive purchases that must be thrown out.  I had one bag of white spelt flour. It cost me 65 euros, and bugs destroyed it (moths to be specific).. adios money
- why people do not sit at the tables on the plaza
- why the man with the thursday market stand continues to not care about making sure no one can see my business as he blocks the view and my complaints to the city go unanswered.

as you can see, I can build a list of stressful things to be a mile long... some of these things I can take in stride and some eat away at my fabric. I try to do my best as each day is a list of new problems, but I also know that new successes come as well.

How do you deal with stress? What is your experience (if you are a business owner) with managing the countless obstacles that come up daily?

I own a business.. that comes with stress... but I still would not want to change it for going to work for the man...

Thank you for tuning in as always.. it really means the world to me !!

#doeverythingwithlove

Comments

  1. Awesome blog! Do you have any tips and hints for aspiring writers?
    I'm planning to start my own site soon but I'm a little lost
    on everything. Would you suggest starting with a free platform like Wordpress or go for a paid option? There are
    so many choices out there that I'm totally
    overwhelmed .. Any ideas? Appreciate it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, first, thank you so much for taking the time to write me.

    Ideas.. well, I have many, but when someone feels overwhelmed because it seems to be too much, I always go for the KISS (keep it simple silly) approach, which is what I did for my blog. If you have a website, ask your provider to install Wordpress, it is perfect, and has many free formats you can download and apply to your website. From there, all you need to do is start writing your blog entries.

    Any more questions, feel free to let me know :)

    ReplyDelete

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