Small Business Owners: Build the Net Before You Fly

This article was written by Sue Miley and published by Crossroads Professional Coach.

The balance between routine and purpose is delicate, hard to measure, and different for everyone. I imagine everyone has a tension in this dichotomy.

I like change in many facets of life. Every hour, I work with a different client and switch from one business issue to another. Hiring, leadership, marketing, cash flow, team drama, growth decisions. And I thrive on learning new things. AI has been a refreshing educational challenge while also providing a powerful tool to get stuff done.

And I love starting a new canvas or writing a blog or story.

But if I am traveling and out of my routine…

If I miss a couple of workouts…

When I stay up too late or get off my sleep schedule…

Or drop full day trainings or planning meetings into my week…

I feel off-kilter and almost unhealthy.

I am envious of the people who seem to go, go, go and live adventurous lives.

Until they make their way into a coaching conversation and describe the exhaustion, overwhelm, and feeling that their lives, their teams, or their businesses are out of control.

Those same owners, when they finally get back into some kind of routine, will sometimes describe being in a rut and stuck and wondering how this became the ho hum life they built.

It feels like an uncomfortable ride where the ground is never level and the landing never sticks.

Why is that?

Jumping Off the Seesaw

I don’t have a perfect formula for balance, but I have started thinking about it differently.

If we treat routine and adventure as two separate states of being, it is like two children on a seesaw. When one goes up, the other comes down. It is constant tension.

We need to jump off the seesaw.

Instead of standing on opposite ends of the board, what if we changed the whole apparatus?

Think about a trapeze artist. Before they ever leave the platform, the net is already in place. The net isn’t built on the way down. They don’t decide midair whether they’ve secured it. The net exists first, and because it does, they can let go of the bar completely. They can fly.

That’s the routine. Not the cage. The net.

I have come to realize that a resilient business owner needs a two-layered net: a personal net to keep your mind and body grounded, and an operational net to keep your business safe.

The Law of the Net

This isn’t just true for our physical health or our personal lives. The same principle holds in business, maybe even more so.

I had a client in the industrial services space who landed a meeting with one of the biggest petrochemical plants in the region. He had been chasing that kind of work for years. And then it happened. They offered him a contract that would have changed the trajectory of his entire company.

He called me the same day. I could hear it in his voice, equal parts exhilaration and dread.

We walked through it together. The scope, the timeline, the crew requirements. He didn’t have the people. Not the right people, not enough of them, not trained to the standard this plant would expect. He could have said yes and figured it out on the way down.

But he didn’t. He passed on the job.

That is one of the hardest phone calls a business owner ever makes, turning down the contract you have been dreaming about because you know, honestly know, you can’t deliver it yet. But that’s exactly what he did. He protected the relationship instead of gambling with it.

We spent the next year building his team. Hiring right, training hard, building the internal capacity to handle that size and complexity. And when the next opportunity came from that same plant, he was ready. He said yes. He executed. And now jobs like that one are regular. It is just what he does.

He built the net before he flew.

Creating the Foundation

We need to think of growth more like the trapeze. The net is the routine. We build it first.

What are the foundations required for you to stay healthy physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally while you lead? That is your personal net.

And what are the building blocks for a strong business? Enough capital, enough capacity, clear processes, trained people, and a few backup plans that do not depend on you being the answer to every question. That is your operational net.

The point is not to avoid risk. The point is to stop confusing risk with recklessness.

We bring the routine with us wherever we go. It travels with us. It holds.

If I work out at home, I work out when I travel. If I have quiet time and journal to ground myself in the morning, I get up earlier when the schedule demands it. And when I launch a new campaign, add a service, hire a key person, or step into a new venture, I want the working capital committed, the line of credit in place, the team clear on the plan, and the process strong enough to hold the weight before I leap.

I think we feel the extremes of stuck or overwhelmed, bored or frantic, trapped or anxious because we keep swinging from routine to tightrope walking. The tension will not go away until we stack them.

In order.

Create the foundation.

My client in the industrial space didn’t get to fly because he was reckless or bold. He got to fly because he had done the unglamorous work of building what was underneath him first. He had the people. He had the training. He had the capacity. And when the moment came, there was nothing to fear on the way down.

That’s available to you too.

Build the net. Then fly.