As a small business owner, you know all too well about stress. There’s the stress of paying the bills; the stress of finding new customers; the stress of retaining your current customers; the stress of finding, hiring and firing employees; the stress of keeping on top of the day-to-day management of your business… And yes, the list could go on and on. But that’s not what we’re focusing on here.

Instead, this article is about how to manage and ease all of that stress. Read on for eight ways you may not have considered.

1: Exercise

Okay, so this one’s a no brainer, and I know you’re sitting there reading this thinking “Where am I going to find the time for that?”. If it’s important to you, you’ll find the time and make the time to work out. Consider it officially important. Exercise in any format (spin class; boxing; running; walking; or whatever works for you) helps to heighten your level of endorphins, which are those hormones that give you a “feel good” sensation, and serves to alleviate stress. Pencil in some exercise into your calendar. It will help.

2: Meditate

Thinking a hundred or a thousand thoughts a second – like most small business owners do – can take it’s toll on your ability to think clearly. Quiet down your mind by spending time quietly focusing on your breath or a chant of some kind. If you need an introduction to meditation, Headspace is perfect. You can learn online for just 10 minutes a day through your laptop or through an app, and you can’t beat Andy’s soothing British accent. You’ll learn plenty of ways to begin meditation and those teachings will also help you in stressful moments to breathe and just focus on your breath instead of what’s stressing you out. Plus, how many times have you not been able to fall asleep thanks to a racing mind? Meditating before going to bed helps you calm your mind and will hopefully help you fall asleep faster.

3: Strike a Yoga Pose

This is basically a combination of the first two. You’re working your body while also working to quiet your mind. And you’ll quickly learn to focus just on the positions in yoga, as otherwise you could easily lose your balance. Yoga is all about being in the moment while stretching and relaxing your body, serving to counteract that stress.

4: Get a Massage

It sounds like an indulgence, but a massage is worth it to relieve stress. One note: If you’re new to massage, don’t jump into a level 3 or 4 therapeutic massage, which is when the massage therapist digs deep into your muscle tissue. You might wind up with a different form of stress from the “ouch” of worked out muscles instead of the “could almost fall asleep” relaxation from a soothing massage.

5: Reconnect and Laugh with Friends

You know that best friend from college you’ve been meaning to catch up with over dinner? Call them and make a plan to do just that. You’ll be able to revisit old memories and laugh about them (snort laughs are VERY good for the soul and to relieve stress) while also creating new fun memories.

6: Garden

Digging your hands into the dirt, planting, weeding, harvesting — are all excellent ways to quiet the mind. You’re focusing on simple, methodical tasks, stretching your body and giving your mind a chance to roam. Plus, returning to nature in any form (be it a walk in the woods, sitting by a lake, or gardening) helps to soothe the soul.

7: Delegate

You are only human and you can’t (and shouldn’t) do everything in your company. That’s why you’ve hired employees and that’s why you should also farm out tasks to those employees. Focus on what you do the best and delegate the rest to the smart people that you hired.

8: Talk it Out

If your stress is really getting to you, talk to a therapist. It’s okay to do so. Really. Therapists are trained to help you talk through your stressors and work with you to figure out the best way for you to deal with them.

When you think about your business, do you think about it in terms of separate, discrete elements? While this is a traditional way of thinking about your business, compartmentalizing systems and processes can result in siloed operations and lack of communication – impairing your ability to create an awesome customer experience and delight the socks off of your customers.

“Systems thinking” is an approach that looks at people, processes, and technology can work together for successful outcomes – primarily a better experience for your customers. It’s a way of envisioning your business not as a collection of independent processes, but as a holistic system of interdependent processes that affect not only each other, but the system as a whole.

For instance, Apple took a systems thinking approach when it integrated iPod features into the iPhone – and we all know how incredibly successful it made their business.

How Systems Thinking Benefits Small Businesses

So, you’re not Apple…how can systems thinking benefit you?

Systems thinking can actually give you a better handle on your business as a whole, so you can anticipate how changes will impact the customer experience.

For example, say you’re considering investing in a CRM for your sales team (and if you aren’t familiar with CRM, more in this later in the post).  The traditional, siloed way of thinking would consider only the impact a CRM would make for the sales branch of your business: Joe needs a better way to track his sales pipeline and organize his contacts, notes and follow-up tasks.

But, if you used systems thinking, you might think about the investment quite differently: How will giving Joe access to a CRM database impact the rest of the team?  Are there other workflows we can streamline or consolidate if we’re investing in a new technology? Can we leverage the CRM to track interactions with our customers as well? What about the marketing process? Can Mary, our marketing assistant, access the database as well? Should we look at a CRM that also has marketing functionality so that our customers and prospects stay in one system, rather than separate tools?

Systems thinking helps you look at problems creatively – for instance, it may be possible that the root cause of a problem in one process may actually take place in a different process. As a more concrete example, say that your monthly revenue is down.  That’s a problem, for sure.  If you’re taking a siloed-approach, you might think of it as a sales problem.  But, with a systems thinking approach, you might also consider that you have a problem retaining customers – helping you fix any leaks in the entire customer lifecycle – not just on the sales side.

Systems thinking also encourages feedback, both positive and negative, from every department, helping you catch problems early, and capitalize on success. For example, say you are a consulting firm looking for new ways to increase sales.  You go outside of the “sales silo”  and meet with an account manager who has insight into what your clients need most – a 30-minute on-demand Skype consultation. You love the idea – while sales is building lucrative relationships with new clients, you can quickly increase your customer lifetime value by upselling existing customers.

With companywide feedback, your customers get the best service and your team gets the most successful outcome.

CRM and Marketing Automation Are Natural Partners in Systems Thinking

Customer relationship management (CRM) is how your company manages interactions with prospects and customers. In many cases, the contacts in your small business CRM system come from your marketing campaigns. When you have marketing automation tools that integrate with your CRM system, prioritizing clients is easier, you’re less likely to let prospects slip through the cracks, and your customers enjoy a more consistent experience – from marketing, to sales, to customer service.

Your small business CRM system, along with marketing automation tools help you adopt a systems thinking approach to marketing and sales. Information from marketing campaigns can be automatically included in your CRM, laying a foundation for a better customer experience.

Finding a Small Business CRM with the Right Features

A small business CRM can be just as powerful as what larger enterprises use. In fact, they can be even more powerful because they are simpler to implement and easier to use. And, when you choose a CRM that includes marketing automation tools, you can take a systems thinking approach to sales and marketing, streamlining your process for capturing new leads, nurturing them with compelling content, and handing them to sales as soon as they’re ready to buy.

Your small business CRM system should also help you identify customer problems and create solutions efficiently. It should help you segment your contacts by their interests so you can develop solid buyer personas and better cater to your customers’ needs. A systems thinking approach can give customers and prospects a much more personal experience with your business, building trust and rapport, and ultimately increasing sales and revenues.

Small businesses that want to understand and make the most of their customer base often invest in CRM. The right small business CRM solution can allow you to take a systems thinking approach to attracting customers and strengthening relationships with them. The end result is better control over your business and better anticipation of problems, better way to take advantage of opportunities, and an overall solid process for delivering a consistently outstanding customer experience.

Francesca Geens is a small business tech and productivity strategist at Digital Dragonfly, where she works with solo business owners to make sure they have the right tech, tools and systems in place to run their businesses. She recently answered a few questions about how small business owners can use technology more effectively to run their ventures. Here’s what she had to say:

Tell us about Digital Dragonfly? What inspired you to start your business?

Digital Dragonfly is a technology and productivity consultancy that I set up nearly six years ago. There are ever growing numbers of people setting up their own businesses – they work from home offices or are very mobile and though they might be independent, they need to be as professional as any bigger business. Many will have left corporate life and so were used to good tech and a helpdesk. I become their tech go-to person and will work with them to make sure they have everything in place to be productive from a tech point of view. This covers everything from the essentials like good hardware, backup, email and structures to productivity hacks and tools to make for efficient working. I love untangling and simplifying and we make sure clients are setup in the simplest and most appropriate way for them and their business.

What are the most common technological needs or headaches your clients come to you with?

A big one is email. Both inbox management but also making sure that they have a reliable setup that syncs across devices. It’s amazing how many people still struggle accessing key business data on the go – whether it’s email or calendar and contacts. This is often a big muddle with data scattered and people not trusting their systems so having to duplicate. We love tidying up email, calendar and contact data and getting it into the cloud so that clients can work seamlessly across devices.

What areas of IT do you find small business owners overlook the most?

Unfortunately, it still has to be backup. There is so much confusion around this area and misunderstandings as to what they are currently using that most people are at risk of losing important data should they have massive hardware failure or lose a device.

What do you think are the most important tech tools business owners should use?

I am a big fan of the cloud and run the whole of Digital Dragonfly in cloud-based tools. So I think all business owners should make the most of cloud services for everything from email to backup to documents and key data and workflows. Not only does this give you the ability to easily work across devices but you can also share with a team and be sure you have peace of mind that your data is backed up.

What considerations should small business owners make when shopping for IT products?

That’s a good question and very often people don’t know how to go about choosing a new tool or online service. It’s important to look at pricing and how this is tiered, how you get your data in and out (the latter is especially important with tools like CRM), what security and backup measures are in place and always, always test the support. It’s really important to know how responsive and helpful a provider will be when you have questions or something goes wrong.

What technology trends or innovations are you most excited about for how they can help small business owners?

What’s really cool is that all tech companies seem to be offering the option to integrate their tools with others. So we have an amazing opportunity to automate and move data around seamlessly. Small business owners can create powerful workflows with just a few simple clicks.

How should small business owners be approaching digital marketing today? What tools should they make sure to use?

This should be a really fun area for small business owners but I often see people really stuck when it comes to digital marketing. There are so many tools out there it can be hard to choose. I always say start simple so that you build clarity on what you really want to do and they go from there. You don’t want to commit to something big and complicated from day one. At it’s most basic you are looking at a way to track prospects, build a list and engage with your audience. So I would say most people need a newsletter list management tool from day one and a way to capture leads and feed into this.

I’m sure I’ve read many times that you can’t start building your list early enough. You also need some sort of CRM to keep a track of your pipeline and clients. Choosing a CRM can be hard so I normally suggest starting with a spreadsheet to give clarity as to exactly what is important to your business and this will make it easier to match you up with the right tools.

What advice do you find yourself repeating to clients over and over again?

Make sure you backup!

Is your business ready for a CRM? Here’s how to recognize the signs of a sales and marketing process that could benefit from customer relationship management software.