Introduction:

Hey restaurant owners, do you ever feel like you wake up in the morning ready to take on the world and then boom! Something happens the second you walk into your restaurant and your whole day is crushed? Today I want to talk to you about how to balance those highs and lows.

I’ve been in situations like this: you wake up in the morning and you’re thinking today’s going to be a great day! But then something bad happens that throws you into this downward spiral. 

One of the challenges of being an entrepreneur is that all of the burdens fall on your shoulders. Anytime something happens we have a much stronger reaction to it. If you’re just an employee in someone else’s restaurant and it’s a slow day, your reaction will be “Eh whatever, not that big a deal.” But if you’re the owner that has bills coming in and it’s a slow day, you just go into this dark depression. But when you have this great day, you feel amazing, which is totally understandable.

Find your balance:

So how do you find that balance? When the highs are high, don’t get as excited about them. It’s not that I don’t want you to get excited, but I don’t want you to feel so amazing or too euphoric about a good day that if you crash on the next day, you won’t feel so low. With that said, when the lows get down there, try not to get as low. What I want you to really work on is keeping more of an even balance.

I’m an entrepreneur and own my own business now. While it’s not a restaurant business, I work with restaurant owners – I’ve been in your shoes. I also go through highs and lows like when I sign a client things are great, lose a client things are bad, sell a few programs things are great, then suddenly have a few days of slow sales and not so great. You think, “Oh my gosh why am I doing this? I should just get a job!” But when I worked with my first business coach, she taught me a powerful lesson about balance. She taught me that as long as your consistent in your inputs, and as long as you’re consistent in your day, and as long as you know that you’re waking up every morning and doing the right thing for the right amount of time every day – the outputs will balance themselves out. 

You can only control what you can control. You can’t control what other people do, who walks through the door, or who calls in sick today. What you can control is creating a culture that people want to work in and an environment where people want to come in and eat your food. You can control your marketing, partnerships, the quality of your food, the ambiance in the dining room, the culture of your staff, your accounting, finances and checklists. You can control so much in your restaurant. But when we start to feel these highs and lows, it’s because those are the things that we can’t control we allow our emotions to take over. 

What I want you to focus on is balancing you. Balancing your inputs, the work that you do. As long as you’re consistently doing your marketing, training your staff, working on better processes, procedures, and systems the outputs are gonna balance themselves out. You’re gonna get the results, but results that are slightly not quite equal to what you want because of how our modern expectation economy works. Unfortunately, we have to put a little more input into getting the output that we want. 

The point is to work on your inputs, work on what you’re doing toward your business, what you’re doing in your business, and let the other stuff happen. If you do the right thing at the beginning, you’re gonna get the right results at the end. So just try to keep a little more balance in your life and in your business, and really focus on the inputs rather than the output.