In this episode, we tackle one of the biggest myths in franchise ownership: that success requires working around the clock. Spoiler alert—it doesn’t! In fact, running yourself into the ground can actually hurt your business. We break down why work-life balance isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity for long-term success. From the sneaky ways burnout creeps up on franchisees to how it impacts leadership, employee morale, and customer service, we explore the real cost of nonstop hustle. But don’t worry—we don’t just highlight the problem; we bring the solutions. You’ll walk away with practical, battle-tested strategies to finally reclaim your time: ✅ Delegate and automate—trust your team and use technology to lighten the load. ✅ Set boundaries—because answering emails at midnight isn’t a flex. ✅ Tap into your franchise’s support system—mentorship and corporate resources exist for a reason! At the end of the day, franchise success isn’t about working harder—it’s about working smarter. A balanced franchisee is a stronger leader, and when you take care of yourself, your business thrives too.
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So I have a question. How are small business owners like us who are spending sixty plus hours a week working in our businesses and are still struggling to make ends meet? We have no time to spend with family, friends, or the things we value most in life. We feel trapped inside of our businesses, and it is consuming our lives. How do we get the freedom to be able to work on our businesses and not in them?
That is the question this podcast will give you the answer. My name is John Nichols, and this is expansion code radio. What's up, everyone? Welcome to today's podcast. My name is John Nichols, and this is expansion code radio.
Today's topic is work life balance, and I really love this topic. This is one of my most favorite topics to talk about because without a work life balance, you're gonna get really burnout. So, you know, only a franchise can feel like juggling flamethrowers while riding a unicycle. Exciting? Yes.
Sustainable? Not so much. But what if I told you that you could take your foot off the gas every now and then and actually make your business run smoother? Well, that's what this podcast is gonna talk about today. I remember back years ago, I've been in this business, in the UPS store business now for twenty plus years.
This spring, it will actually be twenty two years in March. And the big thing that I really understand about this business, about being a franchise owner or even a small business owner, is that burnout is real. I remember my first year for the first six months of my wife owning a business. I worked six days a week, and then I would go home in the evenings and work on my books. I was roughly putting in sixty hours a week.
And by the time I hit my third or fourth year, burnout had set in hard. It's just one of those things that happens to us. And when I look back on this, I really could have had some advice to keep burnout from happening to me. It was one of those big crazy things because you need some work life balance. You don't need to be working all the time.
It's like walking a tight rope. And if you're not in your business enough, well, your business is gonna start to fail. If you're in your business too much and you don't have any personal life, well, what happens? Your personal life goes to hell in a handbasket, and then you get burnout. And I don't know if anybody there has had burnout before, but it is rough.
I mean, it is hard. And I remember when burnout hit me. I didn't wanna get up in the mornings. I didn't wanna go into into my business at all. I own UPS stores, guys.
And at one point, I hated my customers. There wasn't anything they were doing wrong. It was just I had been there dealing with it day in and day out, six days a week. I did this for years. And I'm gonna tell you right now, you really, really, really need to take some time off.
You really need to take some weekends off. You need to get up from behind the counter of your franchise or your small business. And so that there's kind of the big thing that there's kind of intro to this podcast is that there is life outside of that. And I'll get into a story about that later on. The next thing I wanna talk about is twenty four seven.
Hustle or is it just a myth? And I'm gonna tell you right now, it's just a myth. Some people think owning a franchise means kissing your weekends goodbye, sleeping with your phone under your pillow. But here's the truth. It's not all about working more.
It's about working smarter. And that's the reason why you gotta have people. You gotta have team. You gotta have somebody there so you don't have to be there twenty four seven. Now you're gonna take care of the big problems.
You're gonna take care of your people. You're gonna take care of your customer. But this crazy hustle of twenty four seven is just a myth. You don't have to do it. And the thing is is I figured out one thing, is that I can either trade my time or money, or I can trade my money and get my time back.
Let me say that one more time. I want you to really listen to me. Okay? I can either pay somebody and get my time back, or I can keep my money and I don't have any time. It's a really big thing.
And once I figured out what this concept was, it really changed my life. I mean, crazily changed my life. And so I had to start trusting people. I had to hire people and give some blind trust out there. Now are people gonna screw you over?
Is there gonna be bumps in the road? Are you gonna be disappointed in people? Are you gonna hire the wrong people? Yes. 100%.
Yes. Yes. Yes. But it's okay. It's not devastating to your business.
You can bounce back. It just means that you may have to work a little bit to get your business back to where it was, but then you can step away and start trusting people. If you train them like they own the place, you give them a owner mentality, especially a manager, then they're gonna run that place just like you would. And you need to start turning over your customers that are your customers. You know who I'm talking about, folks.
It's those people that come in, they only wanna talk to, in my case, John. John's the only one that can help me. That's not true. I give them my personal touch, but not everyone has to have me. As long as we are focusing on an extraordinary customer experience and trying to provide that every time, that's our goal, there can be plenty of John's out there.
We don't have to have a hundred Johns. We just need to have people in our organization that believe in our concepts, that believe in what we do. And I have a rule or it's actually not a rule. I ask my employees what their job is, and my employees have two jobs. The first one is provide an extraordinary customer experience, and the second one is educate our customers about our products and services.
That's it. Everything else they do inside my UPS store is just a task. It's something that takes up part of the day. So when we're talking about they are processing a shipping transaction, task. If they're taking an order for a print job, it's a task.
Cleaning a bathroom, a task. Sweeping the floor, a task. Everything that we do, packing packages, a task. But the thing is is that but their main job that they have to do is that we have to create this ambiance inside our locations to where people wanna come back. They feel at home.
They feel wanted. They feel welcome. They feel like they are part of our crew. And that there is that extraordinary customer experience that we gotta create with folks. And then we just have to educate people about our products and services.
And most owners don't understand or even managers don't understand that our products and services sell themselves as long as the customer is educated about our products and serve. Give you a prime example of this. Years ago, we started killing I'm sorry. We started carrying the little tongue tied there. These little things called flip notes, and they were these.
They were roughly, I don't know, three by five little metal cases inside them. They had a little notepad. And when you close the case, the pen would keep the clay the case closed because it was on it was on a spring. It was a spring hinge. So when you pull the pin out, the case opens up, and then you can write a note.
And the thing is is that we had them upfront as a nipples item. And all thing you had to do was just introduce the customer to that product. What we would do is that we just create a top track around that and say, hey. Have you seen have you seen our flip notes? That simple.
Answer is gonna be yes or no. Oh, well, great. Well, we have some new colors in, or if you have a flip note, would you like a insert or another pen to go with it? There's all kinds of things that you can upsell and cross sell within your business, but I don't tell my employees that we're upselling or cross selling. I tell my employees we're educating the customer.
Not everybody likes to sell. You know? But in doing this, it's all about training. And that is the one thing that people don't understand. And I went into this whole story and kind of down this little rabbit hole to let everyone know that it's a myth that the owner that you as the owner have to be there twenty four seven.
It's all about training your employees to do their job when you are not there, and that takes time. And once you train your employees well, then you have to hold them accountable. And so the thing is I think the key takeaway to this is is that you don't have to live in your business, and you can make it thrive without you there all the time. Next thing is is what does it cost you when you get burnout? This was a big one for me.
It was crazy. My customer service went down. I didn't like being around my employees when I got burned out. I didn't like being around my customers. In fact, I hated my business.
In fact, when I got really burned out in 02/2006, I think, I put my business up for sale, and God was looking out for me. He didn't let he didn't let me sell that business. He had plans for me. It turns out that my business is actually my miss my mission field for God. It was pretty cool.
But the thing is is that once you get exhausted inside your business, it cost you tremendously. It started costing my marriage major problems inside my marriage. I come home, I would be irritable, upset about things. Caused major problems inside my marriage. It caused problems with my kids.
It means that I was easier to anger. It means that I snapped at my kids more. I was just a terrible person to be around. And it is a ripple effect that goes across everything. When you are unhappy in your business, you're unhappy in your personal life.
And that's the reason why you gotta have this work life balance piece. And so it's crazy. And you really have to talk to someone and listen to what they're saying to you about what's happening with you. It's highly important that you have somebody to give you some accountability. You have to have somebody to listen to you, but also tell you, hey, you're screwing up right now.
This is not cool. These are not the things that we want you to do. You're just screwing up in your business, and it's just really not cool. The next thing I wanna talk about is strategies. And I've lost I've gone over this a little bit, but the thing is is that you have to have strategies in order to get some work life balance.
You have to have strategies in order to get away from the business. Like I said earlier, training your employees is huge. Make sure that your employees are able to do the same kind of customer experience you're able to give people so that this way the business will run seamlessly. Also too, you have to have people that are willing then their customer oriented. That's what all these I mean, being in a being a franchise retail franchise owner, that's what all this is about.
It's all about the customer. And when you are focused on the customer, you're really able to grow your business. So the big thing is is that I always like to delegate stuff. And there's a real quick easy way to give people part ownership of their business to where they feel like they own a piece of the business. So my example of that is I would dedicate someone to putting up the mail.
So we have private mailboxes that we rent out. And I would take a full time employee, and I'd be like, okay. This is your job is to take care care of our mailbox customers, to take care of the mail, to make sure that all the boxes are checked in for each customer here, and make sure that they understand when they have to pay, when they're behind, what's coming up. Your job is to educate the customer the mailbox customers about the things going on with the mail in their box, and also to to educate the customer about any specials or anything that we're highlighting this month or over the next two months. And once you give someone ownership of a piece of the business, it changes them completely.
And so that there's the one thing about delegating or automating certain things. Like, if I wanna free up some time, I you I'd switched from doing a manual schedule to doing a an app where people where I would upload the schedule, and then people can see that schedule. And then I also switched it from me doing it. I also delegated it out to my managers. And once my manager started doing this, they started having more ownership of the business.
They had control of who they wanted to work with and when. They also have control over all kinds of other things too, but you just gotta let go and trust people and train them and make sure that they're competent in what they're doing. And also to look at different tools, different tech tools that can actually make your life easier, like I said about the scheduling software. The next thing is set some boundaries for yourself. Right?
After the store closes, you really shouldn't be answering your cell phone unless it's right after the store closed. My rule of thumb for that was is that after a center closed, I would answer the phone from an hour after the center closed, and then I wouldn't answer my cell phone till the next morning. Now if it was an employee calling or if it was the store calling, I would always answer that stuff. But most everybody was out of there after thirty minutes after the store closed so that there was a boundary. I also set boundaries of it's dinnertime with my with my family, with my kids, with my wife.
During dinnertime, I normally wouldn't answer my phone. I definitely wouldn't check emails or be on my phone during that time frame. And when I set these boundaries and I start putting things or people first over the business, it really makes a big difference. Just like now, my twins are 16. And after 08:00 at night, my kids know, don't come down.
This is mommy and daddy time. You have until 08:00 to come hang out with us, do whatever you need to do. But after 08:00, from eight to nine to from either eight to nine or eight to ten, sometimes sometimes we go to bed a little earlier, but normally ten o'clock's our cutoff time that we go that we try to go to sleep tonight. That's when yeah. It is mine and my wife's time.
That's where we decompress. We talk about our day. We focus on each other during that time frame. And so from eight to ten, that there is mommy daddy time, and my kids understand that. And so it's the it's the one of the biggest things to do when you're trying to really set boundaries within your family life or family time or even with friends and your work time.
You have to separate these things out somewhat, and they will bleed over. I mean, you can't ever completely separate them out, but you can definitely set boundaries on this is what I'm doing when I'm doing it, and these are the exceptions to the rules. And once you lay that out and everybody knows what that is, it makes life 10 times easier. Everybody knows what the expectations are. Your employees know what the expectations are.
Your family knows what the expectations are. Your friends know what the expectations are. And with saying all that, it really keeps you accountable to separating these things out. Also, with inside of a franchise system, there's gonna be all kinds of franchise support systems that you can tap into. You can co you can connect with other franchisee.
The networking piece inside the franchise is probably one of the biggest keys I've found. Because people that's been in the in the business longer than you have will have ways and it will have tips and tricks that they can tell you in order to get some work life balance. And they're gonna tell you to get up from behind the counter. You shouldn't always be working behind the counter. The next thing is is that you should be working on your business instead of in your business, which means you should be going probably to networking events or chamber of commerce events, Things that are getting people driving people into your location versus you standing behind the counter.
Community connection is, like I said, one of those great big things that really helps. And our last thing is is that, why is work life balance so important? And the thing is is that when you have a balanced life like this, you make better decisions for your business, you make better decisions for your family, you make better decisions for your friends. It leads to clarity. It creates a positive work environment, and that there is huge.
It's pretty interesting. Employees tend to mirror the leader or the owner of the business. If I'm stressed, my employees tend to be stressed. If I'm doing great or having a great day or thriving, my employees tend to have a great day or thrive. Now this is not always the case.
You lead from the top down. People see you as the influencer. When you're able to influence your employees because you're the owner of the business, you have really great influence over other people inside of your organization, and you have to be wise. You have to be a good steward of this power that you have. So the thing is you really need to have some self awareness about how you're acting and what you're doing.
Because if you're rude to a customer, your employees are gonna mimic that too. You need to be showing the best version of yourself to your customers and mimicking you need to be displaying an extraordinary customer experience all the time because your employees will mimic that and do what you do. It's all this perspective shift that will really help you out. So if you're having a hard time with work life balance, just imagine where you could be in the next five years and what you would like that to be like. Then map it out and make it happen.
I wanna thank you for being on the podcast today. Thank you for listening. And, folks, have a great day, and I will see you on the next one. Thanks a bunch for hanging out with me today. This episode was jam packed with golden nuggets to fuel your business journey.
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