Mental Health for Business Owners: Build a Business That Lets You Go Surfing
In 2005, Yvon Chouinard published a book with one of the best titles in business: Let My People Go Surfing.
Chouinard was the founder of Patagonia, the outdoor clothing brand, but he was a climber and a surfer long before he was a businessman.
The subtitle of his book even calls him a reluctant businessman.
So when he built his company, he built it around the thing he loved most.
When the waves were good, his staff could leave their desks and go surfing.
The only condition was that the work still got done.
Nobody had to ask permission or invent an excuse to slip out early.
They could grab a board, head for the water and come back to their desks with a clear head.
Plenty of business owners would assume a rule like that wrecks productivity.
But Patagonia went on to become one of the most respected outdoor brands in the world.
Chouinard had designed his business around the life he wanted to live, and then made the work fit around it.
Why most business owners do it the other way round
Most people start a business for freedom.
They want to choose their hours, pick their clients and stop answering to someone else.
A few years in, the business has quietly become the boss.
Every problem, every decision and every late invoice lands on the owner’s desk.
The phone comes to bed, the laptop comes on holiday and the weekend becomes a chance to catch up.
Most of us build the business first and hope there is some time left over for everything else.
There rarely is.
In 2024, research by Simply Business found that 47% of small business owners had experienced poor mental health in the previous 12 months.
The same research found that 61% of them kept working through it rather than taking time off.
World Mental Health Day comes round every October, and most of the advice that comes with it asks you to fix yourself with better sleep, meditation and a gratitude journal.
Those things help, but very little of the advice looks at the business itself.
Chouinard’s story suggests the business is where the real fix starts.
How to build a business that protects your mental health
1. Decide what your surf is
Everyone has their own version of the waves.
For Chouinard it was the ocean and the mountains.
For you it might be the school run, a Tuesday round of golf, Sunday lunch with your parents or a long walk with the dog.
The important part is naming it.
When you have not decided what matters outside work, the business will happily fill every spare hour you give it.
Once you know what your surf is, it becomes much easier to say no to the things that eat into it.
For our founders, Pete and Sarah, it was more time with their family, and they built Mastermind9 around exactly that.
Every decision about how the business runs, from session times to how the team works, gets measured against that goal.
Write yours down, put it in the diary and protect it like your biggest client meeting.
2. Build the business to keep moving when you step away
The surfing rule only works if the business keeps running when someone leaves the building.
In most small businesses, it does not.
The owner holds the passwords, the client relationships, the pricing decisions and the knowledge of how everything actually works.
That makes you the bottleneck, and a bottleneck can never switch off.
Start by listing every task that currently needs you, then ask yourself which ones truly do.
For the rest, write down how the job gets done, step by step, so someone else can pick it up.
Then hand those tasks to your team, a freelancer or a virtual assistant.
The first few handovers feel slow, because explaining a job takes longer than doing it yourself.
After a few weeks, every job you have passed on buys back time and headspace you can spend on the work you enjoy.
3. Trust your team to manage their own time
The surfing rule has a second lesson hidden in it.
Chouinard did not track when his staff came and went, because he trusted them to get the work done.
Plenty of business owners do the opposite, and it wears them down.
Checking every email, approving every decision and wondering whether people are working takes a huge amount of mental energy.
It also tells your team that you do not trust them, which usually makes them less likely to take ownership.
Try agreeing clear outcomes with each person instead, such as the results you expect and the deadline for them.
After that, let them decide how and when they deliver.
You will spend far less time supervising, and your team will feel more like partners in the business.
4. Let your values decide which work you take on
When Chouinard realised his pitons were damaging the rock, he stopped selling them, even though they made most of his money.
Continuing would have meant running a business that went against everything he cared about.
Most business owners face smaller versions of that choice every week.
It might be the client who pays well but drains your energy every time their name appears on your phone.
It might be a service you only offer because a competitor does, or a contract that pulls you away from the work you started the business to do.
Work that clashes with your values is one of the quickest routes to burnout, because you carry the tension around with you all day.
Sit down and write out what you want your business to stand for, and what kind of clients you do your best work for.
Then review your current clients and services against that list.
Letting go of a client that does not fit feels risky at first, but it frees up the time and energy to find better ones.
5. Stop making every big decision alone
For most owners, the heaviest part of the job is the decisions.
Should you hire, raise your prices, take on the big contract or let a struggling team member go?
Every one of those lands on your desk, and most owners have nobody to talk them through with.
Your partner and friends care, but they do not always understand why a lost client keeps you awake at night.
Your team cannot always be the sounding board, because many of the decisions affect them directly.
That leaves a lot of business owners turning problems over in their heads at 2am.
Talking decisions through with other business owners lightens that load and usually leads to a better call.
They have faced the same problems, they can spot the blind spots you cannot and they have no agenda other than helping you get it right.
That is exactly what happens in a mastermind group, where a room of trusted peers helps you think through the decisions that matter most.
If you would like to see how it works, come and sit in on one of our sessions with a free virtual tour.
Onwards and upwards our friends,
Pete, Sarah, and the Mastermind9 team.
