Restaurant Owner: Your Quality of Life Must Be a Priority
While I’m the first to tell you that the restaurant business is one of the hardest businesses out there, that doesn’t mean you have to suffer for it. Your quality of life matters, and you deserve to experience all that life has to offer inside and outside of your restaurant. So how do you find the balance? A few weeks ago, on my weekly group coaching call with the members of my coaching group, I posed three questions I wanted them to answer about their quality of life. You see, quality of life is the number one benefit we work toward in my program. It fits perfectly with restaurant prosperity, which is freedom from your restaurant and the financial freedom you deserve.
In this episode of The Restaurant Prosperity Formula podcast, I share the three questions I asked my coaching group members to help them dial in their intentions to realize a higher quality of life, and then I give you their answers. If you think you are working too many hours in your restaurant and missing too much of your life, this episode will comfort and inspire you. You’ll be surprised by the varying degrees of what they consider a measurement of good quality of life, but you’ll easily see how yours fits in with them all.
The three questions were:
- Why is quality of life so important to you?
- What does quality of life look like to you now?
- What are you doing to get that quality of life or maintain the quality of life you have?
Quality of life is important and that is one of the main reasons these owners join my coaching program. They’re tired of missing important things such as a best friend’s wedding, a kid’s last volleyball game, or a mother’s 80th birthday party. And they don’t want to miss the little everyday things either, like family dinner, watching a kid’s T-ball game, taking vacations, having time for yourself, anything that is important in your life deserves your attention. With the right systems and the right support, every restaurant owner can establish a quality of life that doesn’t require consistent sacrifice.
Before I became a restaurant coach in 2003, I had experienced this for myself. As a kid I watched my mom work tirelessly for the restaurant and had a really poor quality of life. When I was starting out as a restaurant manager, I worked 80-hour weeks and had very little to show for it. And while I did it again when I started my coaching business, I knew at that time that it was because I was going to create a better quality of life than my mom had.
To be honest it really wasn’t until recently that I really fulfilled that, that I woke up to the importance of a balance between work and life. I think my restaurant coaching members have taught me a lot about it.
What about you? Are you falling into that same habit that you're the only one who can do anything? If you're not there, it doesn't happen? Are you the key to your business, which mean you work long hours and really hard and you give up a quality of life?
Are you still stuck doing the same things over and over again, but expecting a different result? What does that sound like? Oh, that's Albert Einstein's definition of insanity. Are you crazy or are you ready to make a change?
You opened your business to have freedom, but instead you’re more like a prisoner. Even when you do leave your restaurant, you’re so exhausted that all you want to do is nothing. How many times have you worked your ass off in the business, gone home, and instead of going out with friends and family, you pass on it and you sit there and watch Netflix and drink a beer.
Just because you work in the restaurant industry, it doesn't mean you don't deserve a rich and rewarding personal and family life. You opened your business as an enterprise to give you freedom in your life, to enjoy the spoils of owning your own business.
This episode of The Restaurant Prosperity Formula podcast is full of examples of members who are working toward or have found a higher quality of life. You will be inspired by their achievements and see yourself in their struggles.
Click the podcast player above to listen in, or you can watch the video on YouTube, click here to download the latest episode.
