10 Top Business Owners’ Fears

Owning and running your own business is fun, exciting and rewarding but it is also scary as fuck ! Often a rollercoaster of emotions that can twist and turn and change without a moment’s notice. Business Owners fears are real…. and scary!

A contact of mine, Geoff Shepherd, recently encapsulated it with a post on LinkedIn, titled ‘Top Business Owners Fears’. His list is below, along with his comments plus my thoughts too. I’m sure you’ll be nodding along reading this….

• Failure
• Uncertainty
• Imposter Syndrome
• Not actually being good enough
• Criticism
• Fear of success
• Letting go
• Burnout
• Responsibility
• Competition

1. Failure – when the business goes – pretty much everything else goes with it. That’s how it is for many SMEs.

When you run your own business, particularly when you start a new business, you are ‘placing all your money on red’, or so it feels. As the business grows it can be worrying to see your stack of chips getting bigger, and therefore the fall is even harder. Mitigating failure (and that’s a completely different blog topic) reduces the fear as well as the risk.

2. Uncertainty – It’s not a fear of adapting, it’s a fear of not knowing the severity of what the AF is lurking around the corner.

Sometimes you simply cannot control the macro-environment that you work in. yes you can ensure you are aware of what is going on but you can’t ever control it, and that’s scary. As told in my My Business Journey webinar, at one point we suffered a loss of 80% of our business overnight. On a number of occasions, Google moved the SERPS goalposts, kyboshing our business. Yes, uncertainty is scary, as the last two years are proof of!

3. Imposter Syndrome – what if everyone finds out that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing? This is very real for many people I know.

I pretty much spent all of my 18 years running my business suffering from Imposter Syndrome. I constantly felt that I was making it up as I was going along, and that sooner or later we’d be found out. Yes it’s very real, but at the same time it can be overcome. Take a look at the interview I did with the UK’s Imposter Syndrome expert, Claire Josa.

4. Not actually being good enough – It’s akin to failing but it’s all your own fault – because you just couldn’t cut it. Not the economy. You. Terrifying.

This point is sort of linked to the one above. As your business grows then so should you as a leader as well as a business owner. I always felt that it was important to keep ‘sharpening the saw’, as Stephen Covey describes it, and upskilling myself, by reading books, attending training courses and listening to podcasts etc. ‘Not being good enough’ is probably the simplest fear on this list to overcome, just by your own actions.

5. Criticism – You’ve got to have a thick skin. Complete strangers will publicly savage your business for the smallest of things (shitty restaurant customers for example). We once had someone completely fuming about the font we used on our event badges!

You put your head above the parapet and people will shoot at you. Yes you have to have a thick skin and take this sort of thing on the chin, but it can also be a great way to improve and develop your product or service.

6. Fear of success – It’s a real thing. Success brings change, a spotlight, raised expectations and even a backlash sometimes.

Probably not one of my biggest fears, but a real one to keep an eye out for nonetheless. Everyone seemingly loves to knock people off what they see as their pedestal. Over the years we won many awards, but people scoffed at them, denied their validity and rubbished it. We knew better.

7. Letting go – Surrendering control is bloody hard. It’s like letting someone else drive your life.

Letting go, or ‘delegation’ is one of the BIG issues many, many Business Owners struggle with. It is something that I didn’t find too difficult, but it’s a topic that needs time and effort putting into it. When I recruited my Second in Command, he asked me was I willing to let go; I was. But many Business Owners simply do not believe that they should let go, and that no-one else could possibly do their tasks as well as them. Not true! I have a very simple 5 step delegation process that helps Business Owners let go.

8. Burnout – Scaling a business is hard work. Constantly. Better boundary management really helps. Just say no.

As a Business Owner you are constantly thinking about your business; weekends, evenings, holidays…. all the time. And that’s not good for you, or the business. Burnout is a real problem and a real fear for many. A lot of it comes down to self-control and setting boundaries, but it does take time and a lot of effort. As mentioned above, saying ‘no’ is one of the keys to this, and it was a ‘skill’ that I only learnt in my later years as a business owner…. but it is more magical than could ever know. It’s actually point no3 on my recent Time Management article.

9. Responsibility – Halfway decent people do actually give a flying fig about their staff. It doesn’t mean that mistakes aren’t made or that we wouldn’t go back and change things, if we could. But, these people have lives, goals, worries, commitments, and families… and they’re your responsibility. Employing people is a privilege but brings about a heavyweight duty.

I have often talked about what was, at the time, the scariest thing I’d done as a Business Owner, and that was taking on our first two employees. So much responsibility ! Listen here at 10.30 into the interview. But as an employer you do indeed have huge responsibility, and with responsibility comes fear. But if you always aim to do the right thing, then errors despite your best endeavours do get some leeway.

10. Competition – We all worry that someone is going to take our clients, our staff, our livelihood. Best not to dwell on it too much and concentrate on doing the best you can for as long as you can. Keep building. Keep pushing service levels. 9 out of 10 times, it’s complacency not competition that gets you.

Geoff is so right with this final point. You can kill yourself worrying about what the guy down the street is doing, but actually if you focus that emotion on striving to be the best at what your company does, then you won’t, hopefully go too far wrong.

If I had to pick my own personal top three fears from that list during my time as a Business Owner it would probably be 3, 4 and 8.

Which would your top three Business Owners’ fears be?

You can read Geoff’s full post, and contribute to it, here.

Please let me know what you think about these Top 10 Business Owners’ fears. Anything you’d add? And any feedback/comments etc about the above would be more than welcome.

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