Truth About Dyslexia podcast
Solving Business Problems Without Burning Out When Your Brain Wants to Do Everything
Building a business can look simple from the outside, until the admin, decisions and delays pile up. Here is how I’m thinking about business problems without burning out.
Listen to this episode
Solving Business Problems Without Burning Out When Your Brain Wants to Do Everything
What you will take from this episode
- Business projects often take far longer than the version you pictured in your head.
- Not every decision deserves the same amount of worry. Work out whether it is easy to reverse first.
- Boring admin can be especially draining for an ADHD brain, so I try to tackle it when my energy is highest.
- Having more than one interest does not automatically mean you are failing to focus. The useful question is whether each project has a clear role.
- You do not have to beat yourself up for the way your brain works in order to build something worthwhile.
When a simple business idea turns into 18 months of decisions
Have you ever looked at a business idea and thought, “That can’t be that hard”? Then, a few weeks later, found yourself buried under platforms, paperwork, suppliers, launch plans and a decision you did not even know existed when you started?
That is pretty much where I am with Added Nutrition. Before we have even launched, I have been reminded that the picture in my head and the real work of building a brand are very different things.
Part of me thought creating a supplement brand would be fairly straightforward now. There is more technology around, more information, and AI can help with some technical work. I was very wrong. There is a huge amount of work, energy and effort in the bits around the product itself.
For me, this is a familiar ADHD and dyslexic entrepreneur pattern. I can see a clear, exciting outcome, then get surprised when the route to it takes three times longer than expected. I thought six months. My gut feeling now is that it could be closer to 18 months before we are selling through a good amount of stock.
That does not mean the idea is bad. It means I need to plan with a bit more reality built in. One of the strongest business lessons I have learned is that things tend to take three times longer than I imagine.
Why ADHD decision fatigue can make business feel heavier
The challenge is not only the number of tasks. It is the number of decisions sitting behind them.
There is so much information available now that it can become overwhelming. I absorb information quickly and I can learn fast, which is useful. But if I move too quickly, I end up with a pile of options, opinions and questions all asking for an answer at once.
As a small business owner, the decisions can feel high stakes because a wrong turn may cost time, money or momentum. At the same time, everything else still needs doing. You are trying to build the product, make the website work, think about marketing and answer the inevitable random problems that turn up from nowhere.
This is where decision fatigue can really kick in. It is not always that I cannot make a decision. It is that I have made 40 already, and then someone asks me to make number 41. Suddenly, choosing a checkout platform can feel like a personal attack.
If you recognise that in yourself, it is worth remembering that overload is not a character flaw. It may be a sign that too many meaningful choices are being held in your head at the same time.
Do the frustrating admin when your energy is actually there
One of my current headaches is getting a word mark trademark sorted for Amazon through the US patent system. This is one of those things you need to do to protect a brand as it grows. It sounds simple enough. It has not felt simple.
The identity verification and platform process has been incredibly frustrating. Messages do not arrive, steps do not work as expected, and a task that should be basic becomes a week-long battle. For someone without much patience, it is not exactly a calming hobby.
This kind of laborious admin is particularly painful for my ADHD brain. It is boring, detailed and repetitive, but it still matters. I cannot just wish it away because it is not the fun creative part of running a business.
My practical move is to put it in my diary first thing, when I have the most energy, and give it a proper go then. I am not pretending that makes it enjoyable. It just gives me a better chance of getting through it before the rest of the day drains my focus.
Sometimes business is not butterflies and rainbows. Sometimes it is a clunky government website. The win is not loving every task. The win is knowing which tasks have to be pushed through and giving yourself the best conditions to do them.
How to solve business problems without burning out: separate reversible calls from bigger bets
One idea that has helped me comes from Jeff Bezos, although I may not have the labels exactly right. The core point is that some decisions are easy to reverse, while others are much harder and more expensive to undo.
For example, if I change the website from yellow to pink and decide it looks terrible, I can change it back. That is a reversible decision. I can be quick, nimble and agile with those.
The bigger question for Added Nutrition is whether we begin on Amazon or sell direct through our Shopify site. We only have a limited first run, and shipping most of that stock to a fulfilment centre is a much more committed move. Changing direction later could come with a substantial cost.
Amazon may make buying easier for people who already shop there, but it can mean losing margin and having less direct connection with customers. Selling direct could give us more control, allow us to know our audience and keep their email addresses, but it asks us to do more of the work ourselves.
I am currently leaning towards selling direct, but I do not get to know whether it is the perfect call in advance. That is the uncomfortable bit of business. The useful thing is recognising that this is a bigger bet, slowing down enough to think, then making the best decision I can with what I know.
For more ideas that speak directly to this kind of business reality, I have pulled together practical support in my guide to help for dyslexic entrepreneurs.
You may need more than one project to stay interested
There is another part of this that I have stopped giving myself such a hard time about. My brain likes to have a few things going on.
I have my web design and AI software business, which has been running for nearly 10 years. It pays the bills, it is consistent, and I have learned a huge amount from it. Then I have Added Nutrition, which I see as a mission-led business. I want to build a meaningful product brand that helps people with similar challenges to mine.
And then there is my bookcase-door idea. We have built a prototype in my office, and I find the whole idea genuinely fun. I am not putting financial pressure on it right now. It is something I am testing slowly and seeing whether there is interest.
From the outside, that may look like too many irons in the fire. At the beginning of my life in business, I would have beaten myself up for that. I would have told myself that if I could focus on only one thing, I would be rich.
But I have learned that trying to force myself into someone else’s version of focus can make things worse. If I get too bored, everything starts to fall apart. For me, enough variety helps keep me engaged.
That is not permission to say yes to every shiny idea. It is about being honest about the role each project plays. One pays the bills. One is a bigger mission. One gives my brain space to play. Understanding that has been much more helpful than shaming myself for not being a one-project person.
Get clearer on what your brain needs, not what it should be like
I am still working this out as I build. There are decisions about launch timing, advertising, whether to bring in someone with the right skills and passion, and how hard to push in the early days. There is no neat finish line where every option suddenly becomes obvious.
What I do know is that working with good people helps. I can subcontract support from my existing team for social media, the website and platform setup, but the major calls still come back to me. That is part of holding responsibility for a small business.
If you are thinking about starting something, or you are already in the thick of it, do not assume the hard bits mean you are doing it wrong. Problems will turn up at every level. In my experience, the problems get better over time, and you get better at breathing through them.
You do not need to become a completely different person to build a business. I am trying to understand how my own brain works, put the boring jobs where my energy is strongest, move quickly on smaller reversible calls and take more time on the bigger ones.
If you are wondering whether dyslexia might be part of your own work and life experience, the free adult dyslexia quiz can be a simple place to start.
For a wider view of the conversations I have been having around dyslexia, ADHD and everyday life, you can also browse the adult dyslexia articles.
If the people around you do not always understand why your mind needs variety, ideas or room to think visually, 20 Things to Remember if You Love Someone With Dyslexia may help them see it from a different angle.
And if you want more of these honest conversations from me, you can find the full adult dyslexia podcast whenever you need it.
Build around your brain, not against it
I am not saying having dyslexia or ADHD makes business easy. There are days when the admin is awful, the choices are exhausting and the timeline feels ridiculous. But I no longer want to spend my energy telling myself I should work exactly like someone else.
My next step is fairly simple: keep moving Added Nutrition forward one meaningful decision at a time, without pretending every decision is equally urgent or permanent. If you are building something too, try listing what is reversible, what is a bigger commitment, and what needs your best energy rather than your leftover energy.
Read the full episode transcript
The challenging problems business owners go through. In today's episode of the Dislexic Entrepreneur, I'm going to share three different problems I'm running into at the moment as I build the added nutrition brand. We haven't even launched. And I wanted to share some of the highs and some of the lows as we go through this because, you know, whether you're thinking of starting a business, whether you're an entrepreneur and you're looking to get better, it's really important to understand that many people are going through similar stuff and how to deal with it. So let's dive into this episode. OK, so I'm really enjoying this case study.
If you want to follow the Added Nutrition brand, you can go to addednutrition. com. You can sign up and get a $10 credit when we launch. I appreciate everybody who signs up at this point. We've got a good number of people in our database already, but we can always have more guys. I always appreciate it.
So if you are listening to the podcast and you want to give me some support, just popping your name and details in there makes a massive impact. So addednutrition. com, I'll put it in the show notes. But what I want to share today is some of the challenges of building a supplement brand. And when I first started this, I kind of, there was a part of me when I first did this that thought it's actually not that hard to create a supplement brand now with Chechi BT and that helping you design your product and do some of the more technical stuff, it's pretty easy. How wrong was I?
There was so much work and effort and energy and it's such an ADHD dyslexic thing to do is to picture an outcome that seems so simple and then wonder why it takes you 3 times as long to get there. Deep down I knew this was probably going to happen, but you know, there's always a part of you that just thinks maybe this time will be different. It's usually the thing that catches you out. So you know, one thing I've always learned in business is things take you 3 times longer than you imagine. I thought it would take six months. It'll probably take 18 months before we're starting to sell through a good amount of our stock, which is hilarious.
Literally took three times as long. This is my kind of gut feeling. So I've learned a lot during this period, if I'm honest. Things that I didn't even know I needed to learn. But I keep coming up against some challenges, so I thought I'd share. You know, and there are these three different tiers of challenge.
And again, when I say challenges, some of these are just decisions. And I think this is the problem with being a business owner in this day and age is with the benefit of AI, you can get a lot of help from around the place. There's so much help, there's so much information, it can just get overwhelming. Like I'm someone who absorbs information quickly and can learn quite quickly. I'm quite lucky that way. But then you just, if you're going too quickly, you've just got all this decision fatigue.
Everyone's asking you questions. You've got to make these decisions that if you go down the wrong path could slow you down or break the machine and it gets tough, I'm not going to lie. And then you come up against roadblocks that just keep kicking you in the nuts is probably the way I would frame it. It really feels like that. I'll give you an example. We're trying to get a word mark, a trademark for Amazon.
This is something you should do when you set up your brand so no one can steal it once you start to go well. And we're trying to go through the US Patent Office. I think it's got a longer name than that, but it's basically the office where you registered trademarks and and that type of thing. And my God, America, you're some of the government web platforms are horrendous. This is such a terrible platform. It is so hard to verify your identity, to go through the steps.
It is driving me nuts. And for someone who doesn't have a lot of patience, it's not teaching me patience because it's just teaching me frustration. It is that bad. And it's getting me to a point where like we've been messing around with this for like a week. It either won't text message us or it'll just decide not to work in certain places or I'm just it's killing me. It's like killing me inside.
Like it's seriously is, you know, this kind of basic admin stuff just murders the ADHD brain because it's so boring and and it's so laborious. Is that the word like that? That alone is just it seems so simple, but it's so painful. Minute it's done, I'm going to be stoked. So that's one like little thing that hits you as a business owner, the things you just got to do that you really can't be bothered doing, but you've got to push through. So I've got it in my diary first thing tomorrow when I've got the most energy, I'm just going to nail it.
But it's, oh, I hope I can if, if everything works. But it's just an example of of some of the, the peep pees. But I know I've got to get through it. You know, you can't, it can't all be butterflies and rainbows, right? The second piece that's come up because of that, it's got me thinking and I listen to a lot of podcasts. It's got me thinking, should I be selling through Amazon as our main channel or should I be going direct to market through our Shopify website?
We've built and I keep talking to different people and different people have different beliefs. Some say Amazon is great, others say it is way too. It's so busy at the moment. Like it's a great place to be eventually, but it may not be the best place to start. You might be better going direct to market. Build an audience through Facebook and other places.
Use those ads to get in front of the right people, but but stay away from Amazon at least for the first six months because you've only got so much bandwidth to do one thing well. And I found a really cool 3 PL. These are the people that will take our product, package it up and ship it out across America. That looks pretty good that I'm considering. And when I do the numbers, it kind of makes sense to do it that way. It actually works at about the same price.
The big difference with Amazon, Amazon's a bit easier for people who are already customers to buy, but you lose a bit of margin because of that. When you're doing it direct to market. The benefit is you get to keep everyone's data, you get to keep their e-mail addresses, you get to know your audience, you get to ask them questions and, and do more there. And I, I really do think we're going to build a more of a consumer brand where we want to know our customers. We don't just want to be a commodity where Amazon a lot of the time does feel very commoditized, especially in our market. So like, I'm really sitting on this fence now going, OK, do we, we've only got 1000 models to sell in our first run.
Do we actually go to a three PL. and do it direct through Shopify, which is I'm kind of starting to lean that way or do we go through Amazon? And this is quite a shift at this point. Let me let me tell you that. So it's crazy, if I'm honest, like it's yeah. And the problem is if Amazon decides to get a bit cheeky and, and, you know, frustrating, they can really slow you down as well.
Whereas if we go to direct market, we have a lot more control. So I am, yeah, toys are up in the air. I'm likely going to go direct to market. But again, this is a huge decision that you have to make as a business owner. And if it's the wrong decision, I won't know till later on. So that's really tough.
It is really, really tough. You know, we're having some great success on Facebook with some of our kind of posts, our kind of ADHD based posts. We've had three posts reach 60,000 views, another get to 672,000 and starting to build our followers. We've got up to about 1200 now following us on Facebook. Oddly, Facebook's algorithms really interesting at the moment. It's changed a lot.
So they are, they've really changed what they promote, which is pretty cool. So that helps us a little bit. Plus we know a little bit about meta ads, so we could go down that path. Like this is the challenges of business, right? As a business owner, you're making all these high level decisions while you're trying to do everything else, especially when you're a small business. Like I'm lucky that I run this through my web design agency as well.
So I'm able to subcontract some of my web design team if they're quiet and a really good price point to help out. So I got one of them helping with our social media, some others helping with our website and another one helping us get listed on Amazon or wherever we go. But again, all decisions lead back to me because, you know, there's a lot of money, like we've thrown a chunk of cash into this to make it run and it's learning as we go. So like it's, it's been, it's, it's been a massive decision as well. We also now have to decide when do we launch and what do we do for that launch advertising wise, You know, some people say launch quietly and just make sure everyone's happy. Get some more testimonials.
And then others are saying just go all in, you know, really push, try and become a bestseller and go nuts. It's so we're all over the place. And then there's also this ADHD dyslexic part of me who just wants to play and create new products like, which is really some of my skill set. So I'm kind of in the zone, you know, I've got to make these big decisions. Do I bring someone on to help us with advertising? You know, do I try and find maybe someone who's dyslexic and ADHD who wants to become a, a shareholder who wants to own that part of our business and maybe they're an influence of themselves, or maybe it's they want to do something different in their career and give them an opportunity.
I've definitely learned over the years, working with good people can be super helpful, especially if you find the right people with the right passion, you can do some pretty cool stuff. Who knows, there may even be a listener out there who gets in touch. But it's, it's, you know, I guess what I wanted to share on this podcast as I go forward with this case study is wherever you are in business, there are challenges. Your problems just get better over time and you get better at breathing through the hard ones and going, you know, asking yourself some deep questions. And there was something I learned from Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Not a huge fan of his, if I'm honest, But one thing he does talk about a lot is, you know, I'll probably, I'll probably stuff the naming of these up.
But type A and type B decisions type, I think type A decisions are decisions where you can go backwards and you're not likely to lose. So like say on our website, we change it all to pink rather than yellow. Say we'd make that decision and we decide it's a bad idea. We can go back and change the color of the website. It's not the world end. But if I decide that we're going to sell direct to market and we ship 950 or 1000 bottles, whatever the number is to the fulfillment center, get them all set up, it's a lot harder for me to move that to Amazon.
There is a big, you know, challenge there, right? If we change those platforms, it's a big shift. And so that's kind of a Type B. There's like there's a door you're going through. You can't go back through the door the other way without cost, quite a substantial cost. And So what I try and do is on type A decisions, I'm really quick, I'm really nimble and agile.
Type B decisions, I try and think about them a little bit longer, even if it slows down the flow. And I know that's hard for me. Like I think I've talked about it. I've also, I'm also considering starting a bookcase door business at the moment, which is pretty cool where we make doors like like Murphy doors. But in New Zealand where I'm based, it's a small margin, but a small business, small margin business. But it's something I'm really passionate about.
I really like the idea of it. We've even had a prototype done in my office. I'll try and put some photos up if people are interested. But again, like playing with these, like these decisions that I'm trying to make for all of these different things at the same time, you know, I've got to mix, I've got to take some time with it. And like with the book a store thing, it's been a real slow burn business. I've been kind of on and off of it for a year and a half as well.
Not completely committing to it, but committing enough to test it out and see if there's an interest. And it's, it's interesting because I'm not too, I'm not really pushing myself in that business. Things are kind of coming to me as they should. So like, you know, if you've got an ADHD brain, you can end up doing a lot of things at once, which can be tiring, but it can also be the way we're built. And over time, you know, I, I think when you're starting out, what I would say is, is pick one, like what I'd say like hell I do. It is, I have one pay the bills business.
That's my web design, my AI software business. We build a lot of cool stuff. I love it. It's been around nearly 10 years and it's consistent and I've learned a lot about business through it. And it pays my bills. I then have my, I want to sell it one day for a lot of money and I want to help a lot of people kind of mission business, which is added nutrition.
Like I think 1 I can make that a large product business. I also think I can help a lot of people that are like me that have similar problems. I can build a brand that does that job really well. And then I've got this kind of wonder doors thing, which is kind of like my brain messing around with doing something else. Like it kind of needs something to play with. So I've got no financial goals in it per SE.
I'm happy to do it with other people. I kind of just want to see if it can it can work out, but I'm not going to put pressure on myself. Every time I put pressure on myself, I get my family to say, don't mess around with this. Don't, don't slow down. Put it to the side of you're too busy. Focus on the other two things big.
But I have to have enough things, enough, enough ions in the fire to keep me interested or everything falls apart and then I get bored. It's actually worse. Does that kind of make sense? I'm not sure if you can connect with that. You can connect with my kind of vibe there. And I think it's understanding how your brain works like this.
The key is that you, you know, don't beat yourself up. The old days, I used to beat myself up about this and go, oh, if only I could focus on one thing, I would be rich. Yeah. But that's just not who I am. Like, I'm. I'm just not that person.
And, you know, there are things I can do to help myself in that respect. And I do from time to time. But I just don't beat myself up anymore. I am the me that is sitting right here chatting to you guys on the podcast. So I'm going to keep sharing my stories. If you've got any questions about the business growth, any thoughts, again, the districtscontrepreneur.
com pop along, reach out. I appreciate everyone's comments and I'll be back next week. Thank you for listening to today's podcast on the truth about dyslexia. If you're looking for a group of awesome humans to help you with ADHD, dyslexia, and the neurodavergent brain, maybe the Right Brain Resetters is for you. You can find us at Right Brain resetters. com and for just $7.
00 a month you can join our amazing group where you'll get Q&A's. You're going to get little mini courses and heaps of stuff. It's way more value than you will invest in joining, so make sure you head to rightbrainresetters com and we'll put the link in the show notes.
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