There’s a predictable amount of stress when it comes to managing a startup, especially in the early stages. And, occasionally, unforeseen events creep up that cause stress to spike.Fuse
If Brandon Waselnuk ever came close to a meltdown, it was when he found out the lead investor pulled out in the middle of a fundraising round. The entire deal collapsed.
So did Mr. Waselnuk, co-founder of Ottawa-based startup Tattoo Hero. Once he broke the news to the other investors, he crumbled to the floor. Instinctively, he launched into a series of push-ups.
Once he pulled himself back up, he called a few mentors to get reassurance that everything would turn out fine, even if he had to start all over again.
"With a limited amount of money in the bank it was a very stressful time," he recalls of the setback.
There's a predictable amount of stress when it comes to managing a startup, especially in the early stages. And, occasionally, unforeseen events creep up that cause stress to spike like it did for Mr. Waselnuk.
He recovered relatively quickly and eventually so did Tattoo Hero, a platform for artists to connect with clients and manage their shop. That wasn't quite the case for Ian Bell when his dating app, Tingle, went south. He spent eight months trying to keep it afloat – even selling the company's laptops to scrape together cash – before shutting it down for good.
"When you're sitting at home all day long trying to salvage your dying business, you don't have much schedule. You don't have meetings. No one really wants to talk to you. You're off in the wilderness," said Mr. Bell.
He claims Tingle had been a year ahead of the now ubiquitous Tinder, which, retrospectively, rubbed more salt in the wound. Lucky for him his current startup, Rosterbot, was waiting in the wings.
"I pushed my stress envelope as far as it could possibly go," Mr. Bell said. "I was faced with losing everything."
Mr. Bell dismisses the situation now – "I've built up a lot of calluses over the years," he said, but stress specialist Dr. David Posen says events like these deserve to be acknowledged. "Those aren't stressful situations. Those are catastrophic situations."
Some may consider it a rite of passage for businesses to fail or for financing to fall through, but compared to other stress triggers that aren't so dramatic, they're still rare over the course of a founder's career.
Sam Jenkins says his definition of stress has changed since he started Wellnext. For him, it's constant. "How am I going to have enough cash to make sure that I'm not going to shut down or put people on the street who are now depending on me for a paycheck every two weeks?" he said.
"Being an effective leader is making sure [I'm] not deflecting some of our stress onto the team."
The premise of Mr. Jenkins' business is to promote a healthy workplace, so it's especially important that his own office be held as an example. Even so, he's the first to admit he needs to shut the laptop more: he works every day, up to 70 hours a week.
Dr. Posen, who's counselled many entrepreneurs at his practice, says long, erratic hours, uncertainty and the secret to the enigmatic work-life balance are ones that arise the most.
When patients tell him they're reluctant to give up their headlong morning-to-night schedule, Dr. Posen shows them productivity charts to prove a point. "You're putting in these long hours but how efficient are you, I ask people?"
He'll also frequently reference studies that show the ideal workweek capped at 40 hours and the instruction to devote no more than 90 continuous minutes to any particular task.
"When people are building a business and they're meeting clients at all times of the day, answering e-mails at 11:30 at night and so on, what they're doing is training people that [they're] going to be available all the time," said Dr. Posen.
The majority of Mr. Waselnuk's day revolves around work, so he might be at odds with Dr. Posen. But he takes breaks intermittently throughout the day. He'll hit the gym first thing in the morning; working out brings something back under his control, he says, helping to offset the occasional unwelcome surprise.
He's also a proponent of power naps and walking meetings to break up the day. "When you're building a company it's a very intricate part of your life. I work from 5 a.m. to 5 a.m. Whatever happens between that is up to me."
Similarly, Mr. Bell plays hockey up to five times a week. If he didn't, he'd keep working from home, a habit that carried over from the early days of Rosterbot when he was consulting full time to pay the bills.
Exercise is the closest thing to a magic bullet, says Dr. Posen, but Waterloo-based stress management coach Amanda Weber says meditation has been effective with her clients, too.
Ms. Weber knows first hand what startup life is like, having worked alongside early-stage tech companies for 17 years. In a typical group session, she'll get clients to focus on deep breathing. When time becomes an excuse for not using the techniques, her advice is to integrate them with other daily rituals.
"They take one little step, they have a little ah, ha moment, they go 'this is good, I can do something else.' Next thing you know, I have people after a year that say their lives are completely different," Ms. Weber said.
Yet, there's no consensus when it comes to work-life balance, or if it's even desirable.
"There's still a stigma attached: no pain, no gain," Ms. Weber said. "When I worked in the startup environment, it's almost like there was never enough hours in the day and that was the mindset that was precipitated."
Both Ms. Weber and Dr. Posen encourage small business owners to find a balance, which doesn't necessarily translate into an equal ratio of work-to-leisure hours.
To stay on track, Dr. Posen has patients record time diaries. "If you can't find at least an hour a day for yourself, then you need to go back to the drawing board."
Follow Report on Small Business on Pinterest and Instagram
Join our Small Business LinkedIn group
Add us to your circles
Sign up for our weekly newsletter