Overworked or Over-Lifed?

When Clay Nelson was growing up, his father owned a construction and remodeling company. “My dad's idea of vacation,” Nelson says, “was going to someone's house and remodeling it. All we knew was work, work, work. We loved him, but we didn't know who he was.” As an adult, Nelson ran his own remodeling company. It took 14 years before he realized that he was following his father's path. Nelson took a hard look at himself and dissolved his company. Eventually he began teaching others how “not to be used by the business.”

Overworking in the remodeling industry is a familiar story. Although there are no statistics on remodeler burnout and family trouble specifically, Nelson, who has been a business and life coach in the remodeling industry for the past 25 years, says that compared with other industries, remodelers seem to “consume themselves the quickest.”

Getting out from under — maintaining a good “work-life balance” in current parlance — is a matter not only of making some tough decisions but of turning those choices into habits.

Anyone starting a business knows that it's going to take an incredible amount of time and energy, and they're willing to suffer because the task is something that they love to do. “I had no husband, no kids. Eighty hours a week was a short week when I started,” says Janet Lasley, co-owner of Lasley Brahaney Architecture and Construction, Rocky Hill, N.J., who began her career, like so many other remodelers, as a solo carpenter.

“There's a blind side to work-life balance,” says Lonnie Pacelli, president of Leading on the Edge International, a leadership consulting and seminar firm. “You figure it's going to be 90 hours a week, and that's how it will be. That blind spot is acceptable for a short period of time.”

But it takes its toll, says Sharon O'Malley, publisher of the human resource newsletter Work/Life Today. “There are health risks and burnout, and at what point is it not going to be your passion? If you've been [in business] for 10 years, should you still be working around the clock?”

After two years of long work hours, Lasley cracked her spine. She was forced to hire helpers, and in many ways, she says, that was really the beginning of her business.

Yet work-life balance is not the same for everyone. “People talk about working hard as if it's a bad thing,” O'Malley says. “Anybody who has passion to start their own business is doing it because it's work they love to do. There's such a thing as a ‘happy workaholic.'” It's only when people lose their passion or they don't want to work that much anymore that it becomes an issue.

In fact, according to a recent Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index, small-business owners work an average of 52 hours per week, with 57% working at least six days a week, and more than 20% working all seven. Yet 65% of those surveyed said that they made time outside of work for things important to them, and 49% said that their personal life is rarely affected by stress from work. In other words, they work hard but they're happy with the way their lives are going.

Work-life balance issues are easier when there is just one person; add a spouse and/or children into your life and your loyalties are divided. “It wasn't uncommon for Peggy to come by a jobsite at 10 o'clock at night,” says Bill Medina who was doing trim carpentry when he started Medina Construction, Salina, Kan., just out of high school in 1976. He married Peggy two years later, and in 1981 they had their first child. The scope of work had expanded to siding, additions, and basements, and Bill was working more and more. Peggy would bring their son to a job-site and stay with Bill in the evenings. He didn't hire employees until 1984.

By 1991 their marriage was shaky, in part because Peggy had gone to work for Bill in a job she was good at but didn't like and didn't get paid for. The business was consuming them.

The Medinas joined Business Networks, a peer review group, and say that helped them through initially. “We saw some tragedies in that peer group,” Bill says. “Several divorces, a lot of stress, one suicide. We learned from that and didn't want to be a casualty.”

Recognition is the first step toward making changes. “Your wife, your doctor, your kids tell you something, or your batteries are discharged: You cannot look at another concrete truck, cannot track another change order. You're at a point where you say, ‘This has to change,'” Nelson says. “That's when you ask, ‘Who am I, and what do I want?'”

Making the necessary changes is difficult. It's not enough to admit that you need help at work. “You've got to know where you want to go and recognize the fact that you cannot get there by yourself. You have to be able to delegate,” Nelson says.

If you want to have an hour and a half every day to go to the gym during lunch, you have to ask yourself what you need to get there. “You're used to having circumstances dictate to you,” Nelson says. “You have to give up feeling guilty.” He suggests writing down the goal and saying, “‘I'm going to build my business around that.' Put it on your dashboard, on your computer.” Then delegate responsibilities and hold people accountable.

But often, when people recognize that something's not right, Pacelli says, “Rather than throttling back on the work side, they will throttle up on the life side of work-life balance. They become overworked and over-lifed.”

Pacelli was working at Microsoft when he had a mild nervous breakdown from trying to meet — and exceed — work goals and spend time with his wife and children. “I had to have a serious conversation with myself,” he says. That conversation led him to develop what he calls “five practical tips for work-life balance.” They are:

“It's easy to look at these points and say, ‘I'll start tomorrow,'” Pacelli says. “It doesn't matter how quickly you put them in place. What matters is that they become habits with you.”

Paul and Julie Weissend, owners of Dovetail Construction, Richmond, Va., have been in business together for 18 years. As a couple with two children that also works together from home, it is especially important for the Weissends to make distinctions between work and home life. Some of their strategies: always meet clients during normal business hours; have family dinner every night; confine work talk to pre-dinner preparation and do not talk about work on weekends; define each person's role in and out of the business and maintain mutual respect for what each person does best; hire responsible employees who do their jobs without too much oversight; try to pick the right clients; and have a financial buffer.

“Giving good people responsibility to do their jobs and getting out of their way has been really freeing,” says Paul, who acknowledges that early on he micromanaged employees.

Of course, things don't always go smoothly, and then Julie, self-proclaimed “CEO of the domestic subsidiary” who does Dovetail's financials and tax work, issues what she calls her “pathology report.” “I have a threshold that Paul can't go past. If a client is interfering with our family balance, I let him know it's unacceptable, unhealthy. And Paul has really embraced that.”

The Weissends make family dinner an appointment as important as any business meeting, schedule dates as a couple, and take vacations. “[Our] relationship is important enough that we're not going to leave time for it. We're going to make time for it. People get so busy that they end up taking what comes instead of crafting it,” Julie says.

Paul acknowledges that he has a harder time letting go of the business. He says that to ease that stress, he writes things down so that he's not mulling them over in his head.

The Medinas, too, have developed similar strategies. Bill imposed a curfew on himself, promising to be home every night at 6. “That was 10 years ago, and I've been pretty religious about that,” he says. He now takes every Thursday off and has breakfast out with Peggy. There are no evening or weekend calls. “You've got be respectful of your time together,” he says. “[Peggy and I] go for walks every night. I get from our house to the corner to talk about work. Then, Peggy says, ‘Well, we've turned the corner,' and I'm conscious about not venting [about the office].” For that Bill puts in a call to his Remodelers Advantage mentor group. “I've learned to let go of a lot of stuff,” he says.

In simple terms, publisher O'Malley sums it up: “Focus on work at work and home at home; be present for each of those things. You'll have two parts of a happy life instead of always feeling guilty about one or the other.”

Being aware of the importance of balancing work and life will also trickle down to the way you manage your employees. Because of the nature of his business, Bob Sorensen, a partner in United Cleaning and Restoration, Middlefield, Conn., says that he could work 24 hours a day forever. But he and his partners in the damage restoration and disaster recovery services company make personal and family life the priority for everyone in the company. “We have a rotating staff of 15 people, field people as well as managers that are on call,” he says. Sorensen works five days a week and no weekends except a half-day on Saturday once every two months. During the week, he works two nights later than the rest, and the other days he's home for dinner by 6 p.m. He and his partners have even set what he calls an odd business goal this year: “Spend more quality time with our wives.”

“We're flexible in our approach,” Sorensen says, “especially with salaried employees. As long as they get their part of the job done, they won't have to miss time with their kids.” And managers must use their time off or lose it. “We want them to use it. It's healthy for them to be away from the business.”

At Lasley Brahaney, architect/saleswoman Anne Sax says that employees find it helpful that Lasley and co-owner and husband Marc Brahaney, an architect, have a family of their own and are conscious of life outside the business. “There is flexibility,” she says of the office culture. “There's freedom to address medical or child care issues, and there's trust and understanding that you're going to do the work you need to do.”

While it may be easy to offer flexibility and other perks for employees when your business is small — and often treated like a family — it's important to standardize these policies and document procedures as you grow. That kind of big-picture thinking is key: With a shortage of skilled workers predicted, having a work-life balance program will help you attract and retain good people. And there are larger themes at work. As Stewart Friedman, professor in the management department of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told the Chicago Tribune recently, “Work/life is not only a social movement to benefit the next generation of children in our society, it's a field with powerful ideas for cultural transformation that compels businesses to make more intelligent and humane use of people and technology.”