Hey, it’s Bob Negen. And in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore why the quest for work life balance sometimes leads to poor thinking and bad decisions.

Closing your store one or two days a week or maybe closing early to get your life back isn’t a solution.

It’s a confession.

I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.

A retailer tells me in a personal conversation, a thread gets started on our Whizbang Retail Facebook group that there’s a need to close for a day or two.

There’s a need to get work life balance that the stress of running a retail store is getting to them. They need to get out of it. They need to be away from it. They need to get that balance back.

And I get it. Running a store is hard.

But what I hear underneath that statement is I don’t have the chops yet. I don’t have the leadership skills to leave my business without it falling apart.

And that’s not a judgment on my part. It’s a diagnosis.

You see, it’s really important to understand that work life balance is not either or work life balance in running a business. I’m sorry, is not either or work life balance. Running a successful business is and you can run a business with customer friendly hours and still have time for people you love.

You can walk out the door, go on a three week vacation and clearly set expectations that people don’t text you at all.

You can build a business that you run instead of having a business that runs you.

All of this is possible. And the path to this is not closing more. It’s building better.

Another thing that I regularly hear is people saying to me, yeah, but Bob, I can’t find good people and I understand that. But let’s make a reframe here. The reframe is that recruiting, hiring, building a culture through great training. Those are all skills.

And if you don’t have those skills yet, it’s not a judgment on you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good business person. It doesn’t mean that you’re not smart. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have the chops.

It just means all of those things yet.

You don’t have the skills yet. You don’t have the chops yet. So it’s not a character flaw. It’s your next opportunity.

You see, every problem in your business points to the need to develop a new skill. That’s the whole game. The whole game of your growth is from every time something bothers you, every time there’s a problem, every time there’s a stressor, rather than being frustrated, annoyed and anxious, ask yourself what skill do I need to develop to make this go away? You see, when you develop the skill, you now have the skills to deal with it when it comes the next time, when that problem inevitably raises its head again.

Here’s the deal. You earn the right to leave.

So go out and learn the skills.

Hire the right people.

Train them skillfully. Build a culture that isn’t dependent on you.

Then walk out the door and know that everything is going to be just all right without you.

What I’m talking about here is not a fantasy.

It’s the work.