AF277 - What To Do When You Feel Like Quitting?

amazon fba business growth dream big step small wholesale bundles workshop2023 Dec 19, 2022

Let’s be honest. Most of us feel like quitting sometimes. When things get hard we look for ways to ease the pain and sometimes quitting seems like the best option. I want to walk with you on this journey because the struggle is real but so are the solutions!

Have you ever felt like quitting? When you felt like giving up. When things get hard, we look for ways to ease the pain, and sometimes quitting seems like the absolute best option. I consider myself a serious player in the game. Although, I am not very good and still at the very intermediate level, I am very invested in the game. I am very invested in my growth in the game. I love it. I enjoy it. It is something I do in my spare time.

A lot of you think that it is not complicated, but you try it and you try it against all of these players and you realize that it is a lot more complicated to be consistent than you think. Going and spending time, money, and energy, practicing and working up to events, and focusing and realizing that you did not have expectations of winning every single thing, but you did have expectations to play really well. And it turns out that there are lots of different reasons and different factors that we could go over for a long period of time, but what you are really boiling to is quitting.

Have you ever thought about that with your business? I literally felt like that three times this week and it is already Wednesday. It is too hard. I am so done with Amazon. There is too much to do. This is too much for one person. This used to be fun and now it just sucks.

Is this worth it? Is this worth my time and energy and effort? Do I still want this? Am I burned out? I'm burned out. I cannot do it. I just cannot do this. Have you felt any of these things?

There is a deeper issue that we need to examine and understand so that we can make a healthy decision and not an emotional decision about quitting. I give it 24 hours first. I allow my feelings to come and go because they are fickle. I had disappointments, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation for thinking that I could go to this conference and do any sort anything. What is beneath the surface of these feelings of giving up and quitting and trying again?

There is no comparison. We are all individuals, unique people with unique circumstances. You are not going to measure your business or your success against mine or against someone else's. It will never measure the same. There are too many variables. They are just plain different. We are all unique and we all bring something different, special, and unique to the table. So no comparison is going to help you measure your own success.

Oftentimes when we grow in business, we tend to start things to shift. We start to forget the little things. We start to forget about the details that we have used to pay attention to. Your routine might have shifted from covid, from homeschooling, from being sick, from working remotely, from your spouse having a different job or you have to move across the country or you have an illness.

And of course, one of the biggest circumstances outside of our control that shifted how we must do things is Amazon. We are supposed to comply with it. Period. They change rules. They change policies. They change things.

We have all been in situations where we have put a lot of hard work, energy, and time into something and maybe have not got the results that we are looking for. My question to you is this. During that circumstance, whatever that was, when you put in a lot of hard work and still did not see results, how much farther did you go? Did you continue or did you get it, did you quit? Did you pivot? Did you give up or did you continue on the path of doing things and trusting the process? It takes a specific mindset to work for yourself. And whether you own an Amazon store or a chiropractic clinic or a farm, sometimes it is just downright difficult to play all the roles. You are a CEO and a janitor, you are a listing creator and a photographer, you are a product researcher and an Amazon Seller Central troubleshooter, you are all of the things, and guess what? That is hard. You are dang right. It is hard, but it does not have to be all hard forever. I know how you feel and I want to discuss the possibilities of whether or not you should stay and stay the course when it comes to your Amazon business. Or maybe it is time to pivot and change and move on and quit.

For those who are making money as not their primary reason to pursue business, you should be excited and passionate about your business. You should be excited to pursue your goals and your dreams. And this is part of your goals and dreams. Your goal and dream are not just to make money, okay? I want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. Yeah, me too. Okay, why? What do you think you will gain? What are you hoping, or expecting to gain with that goal? First of all, do you even have goals? Do you even know why or what you are doing? And why? Why are you doing it? Why do you own a business instead of working a nine-to-five, I am all ears.

I would love all of your DMs, all of your comments, and all of your emails. Send them all to [email protected].

Certain Expectations About Running a Business

Necessary evils - are things that you and/or your team members do not enjoy.

I do not ever enjoy talking to seller central all of the time, but that is required of me in my business to troubleshoot and to get things done, to get things going, and to get them to change stupid things that they have done in their business. Yes, I need to be on the phone with them or open support tickets on a regular basis. The main job in my business is to make sure that all these, the unplugging holes in the bucket is what I call it, are taken care of every time I have to reach out to seller central. It usually has to do with my bottom line and how they have taken from that and how I can make it more clear.

You're going to make mistakes.

It is normal to commit mistakes. Everyone does it all the time. And if anyone does not admit to making mistakes, having failures, and trying things that did not work, they are just lying. You have got to give yourself permission right now to make space for this. Telling yourself making mistakes is normal. It does not define who you are. As a business owner, I made hundreds of mistakes in the beginning. Trial and error.

I have lost thousands and thousands of dollars. I have invested in bad partnerships that have cost me almost everything. I have been screwed over. I have had fraudulent money taken from my account. I have been screwed by Amazon multiple times by other people. My courses have been ripped off and resold for pennies on other sites and other places. It is very normal, regular, and common to have problems.

Do I still want this?

Am I feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and stuck because I do not know what I am doing? Amazon changed something crazy and I cannot figure it out. Or because I really just do not want this anymore? Where have you lost your inspiration? Where is that motivation you felt when you are starting?

Someone has got to be honest.

From how many angles and for how long did you really try or did you put in some half-ass effort and hope for a big result?

Evaluate what's working and what isn't working.

What do you like about what you are doing? So if you have got a pen and paper, write this stuff down. Take a 15-minute to write things down. It is not just about tactics, tips, and hacks. We fail and succeed based on what is going on inside our heads, how we feel and how we take action about those feelings and thoughts, and our own wants, needs, desires, and outside influences. There are no tests here. So there is no pass or fail. This is just you getting crystal clear about what you want and what you do not want. What do you like about what you are doing? What do you enjoy? What do you look forward to?

What do you hate about what you are doing? What do you hate about your business? What is your least favorite task? And the one that you put off till absolutely last because it makes you want to pull your hair out again. What do you look forward to within your business? What would you do with your time and energy if you were not doing this? And what does your perfect world look like for your business?

If you have not heard about it, it is in my book, Dream Big Step Small. You can get it on Audible. You can get it on my website, I can send to you a personal copy. You can get it on Amazon, you can download it on Kindle. All the book is available. It is 10 bucks. It is not going to kill you.

In Chapter Three, you are building your in a perfect world and you are going to examine all of these things. I give you my demonstration of all this and show you exactly how to do your inner perfect world. What is your in a perfect world? I do it every single year, usually around this time because it just makes sense. Year-end taking a review, kind of looking at what is going on, what I want, and what I need. What is changed and what has not changed? All these things. Building your in a perfect world for your business and then your personal life, too. We are not just built to make money all the time and work.

You have a real life to get to.

Relationships, friends, family, hobbies, and enjoying your life. It is generally why people want to make more money so that they can enjoy things that cost money.

If you find that you are still enjoying many parts of your business, but other parts are stressing you out, figure out why.

Why don't you like these tasks? What part of your brain needs to be activated to do some of these tasks that you do not like? Can you afford to pay someone else to do them? Can you barter with someone to do some of these tasks and you can do something for them that you love? There is nothing like bartering away something that you hate for something that you love. So like data entry or I love data but I do not like to collect it. Figure out the fastest way to do the jobs that you hate so that it does not have to take forever if you cannot afford to hire them out.

If you are fine, you are not enjoying any of the business at all and you have given it consistent time and effort and I'm talking six months or more, maybe it might be time to move on. The reality is we do not move on because things are hard. We do not quit because we do not understand something. We learn, we ask, we ask for help, and we get help. We do not quit, we stop, we pause, we break, we evaluate, and we learn. Learning is so essential for every part of every business or every job. There is always extended learning.

We decide to make changes or pivot when our jobs and our businesses and our tasks do not align with our in a perfect world.

If you are doing tons of RA and it is not suiting your lifestyle, it is time to change to something different. Maybe it is time to introduce wholesale into your business. If you do not like packing it and shipping, it is time for a prep center or to hire someone a couple of days a week to help you. It does not have to break the bank. Even if it does at first, I promise you are going to be okay and you are going to thank me later. Every single time I have had to hire someone or outsource something, it hurt my bottom line for the first month or two. And then exponential growth happened. If you do not like to create listings, it is time to hire someone else or barter. If you are frustrated with pictures and images, it is time to hire a service or watch Module 4 of the brand-new Wholesale Bundles 3.0.

If you have not seen or heard already, Wholesale Bundles is absolutely brand new and fully released, and ready for you. Just have not made an official announcement yet. I am taking my own advice. I am taking some time off to just breathe and to just evaluate and to take the rest of the year off to celebrate that Wholesale Bundles is all brand new and that is all I have been doing for the past eight months.

Have your goals, your desires, or even your values.

Examine why you started this in the first place and whether has that changed. Are your goals still the same? What has shifted and how can you accommodate that? There was a time I knew I was getting really close to getting a million-dollar business. Now it was never really a goal of mine to be like, I want to hit a million dollars. And that excited me. It made me feel like it was possible. It made me want to work just a little bit harder to get to that goal. And sure enough, when it became a goal, I wanted it. I worked really, really hard. I and my team worked really hard and we got to that place and we stayed at that place for several years.

But after the reevaluation of a couple of years, we realized we do not really need to maintain a million-dollar business to have the lifestyle and salary that we want. We do not need to grow. We want to maintain where we are and bring new bundles to the table when other ones fill fizzle out. We want to be a well-oiled machine that is consistent, enjoyable, and helps us meet our goals. The million-dollar business was nice but was not necessary. We realized that it was fun and exciting to hit goals like that and do that, but we realized that the workload also doubled. We had to hire extra staff, we had to do different things and we realized we are actually a lot more content.

What is most valuable?

Something you have to figure out is what would be the most valuable to you and what are you willing to give up to have it.

After reexamining all these things, I do not want a million-dollar business. I want a happy and peaceful freedom lifestyle. I want my family and relationships to be happy and healthy. I want to feel well-rounded. I do not want to feel like a workaholic all the time. I want to do work that inspires me and motivates me and I enjoy and cannot wait to get to it.

How you can maintain it?

Constant reevaluation once or twice a year. A lot of my failures and problems are my own doing. I procrastinated too long, I waited too long. I did not get this box put together in time. It did not get to the prep center in time, therefore it did not make it there in time for Christmas. And I did not make any sales. Should I quit because I screwed up? No, I forgive myself. I examine what happened. What can I do better? What can I do differently? And I move forward.

It requires a little bit of sacrifice and a lot of self-evaluation because no one is forcing you again to run a business. It is your choice to do so. I just want to encourage you that anytime you are feeling like a failure and giving up and just throwing in the towel, it is not worth it. As that hurts, as that stings, as things come and go, we have to weigh things. Is this really what I want? Am I really going to give up? And how will I feel three years from now if I quit? Now your future self is asking you.

WATCH:

LISTEN:

QUOTE:

“Amazon changed another policy that really gives me a headache and forces me to do business in a different way. Sure, that's an option. Remember I gave you permission at the very beginning of this show to quit anything, anytime you want it after you evaluate it. Start something new, start something from scratch. Start, start doing something else, shifting something else. Sure, absolutely can. That's always an option.” - Kristin Ostrander.

RESOURCES:

Share your AHA moments with me on my free private Facebook group - the Amazon Files (use the code word EXAMINE) and tag me so I can celebrate with you!

Have questions? Email me directly at [email protected] with all your questions, concerns, or doubts. I would love to answer them all for you.

Keep on bundling…

-KO

Latest Blogs

Hey Hey Amazon Sellers! I’m Kristin, the voice you've grown to know on the Amazon Files podcast & familiar face behind Mommy Income. Today's blog post...