Being emotional in business.

Your emotions can be real enemies in business. But they can also be powerful allies.

In this video, I’m going to tell you how I’ve used them in ways where they’ve been both.

Firstly, I think emotions get a bad rap as an entrepreneur.

Everyone always talks about making business decisions irrespective of how you feel.

And that can sometimes be the case.

But it’s not that black and white. At least it hasn’t been for me.

When I first started my business, I ran it on heart and instinct. Which felt really good.

The company grew, we had heaps of awesome staff, culture was amazing, and we had multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue.

We were also negative $280,000 for the year. As in, if we got $2.2 million in sales, it cost me nearly $2.5 million to produce.

So as happy and awesome as everyone felt, I wasn’t making the right business decisions needed for the company.

And a lot of those decisions were around people.

I had too many staff, because I aligned my identity to having a big team (mistake). I liked the energy and inspiration certain creatives gave me, and I was trying to build too many things at once and had hired for a bunch of departments that hadn’t brought in a cent yet.

My accountants — notorious for being emotionally void — showed me a spreadsheet full of red.

So I started getting better at making the business decisions without emotion.

I looked at the financials and operations of the company. I looked at what the reality of situations were — not just their potential.

And we started turning a profit again.

Here is a big thing I learned:

As creatives, we have a strong emotional side. That is actually our creative side — we feel things to create things. In an energetic sense, it’s a feminine energy.

Business, and money, and operations — that’s our masculine energy. It’s what we need to tap into to get shit done.

I feel, for me personally, I need both. I think any good relationship does.

So I think as entrepreneurs, you use emotion to come up with ideas and tap into your instincts, your gut — but you need logic to then back it up and make the final decision on whether it’s worth it or not.

So as a general rule now, I strip emotions out of decisions around financials, systems, clients, pricing, accounting, etc.

Where I do keep my emotional decision-making is around people. Anything that requires a soul. And I said before that decisions are mostly feelings backed up by logic — when it comes to my staff and team, I’ll often make decisions based on my heart over the financial justification.

Yes, I’ve had to fire and let people go based on what the company needed at the time, despite feeling shit about it. But I’ve also helped a lot of staff out personally and taken a lot of action I didn’t need to do — at actual detriment to the books.

And I’d do it again.

Because at the end of the day, I decided I wanted a business that supports creatives and helps them get paid to do what they love. Myself included.

My agency isn’t there just to make a lot of money. It’s actually not the vehicle for that at all. But it’s got heart, and it’s got soul. And people, most of the time, leave in a lot better place than when they arrived — which I am very thankful for.

So the reminder for me always is: yes, make business decisions based on logic and reality, but still keep heart and soul for the people within it.

Go too hard one way or the other, and I wouldn’t enjoy any of it.