The Well-Balanced Life: The Turnaround

To all the world, Linda Yaniszewski's business looked wildly successful. The Rochester, N.Y., company she had started in 1989 to provide administrative support services primarily to the medical profession was growing faster than you can say "malpractice insurance." She had six employees, half a million in sales, and a roster of clients that seemed to multiply almost daily. It was the stuff that entrepreneurial dreams are made of, except for one thing. "I was miserable," she says.

Today, she operates a company and maintains a lifestyle that little resemble the ones that caused such anguish, all because of an act simple in retrospect: creating a life plan.

Ten years ago--a period Yaniszewski, 51, now describes as "a dark hole"--she had been working 80 hours a week without a salary and not spending nearly enough time with her three teenagers and her husband, Tom, 53. Her middle child, Scott, who is now 27, recalls that his mother routinely spent 12 to 13 hours a day at the office, including weekends. Even so, she did her best to maintain some semblance of a traditional family life. "I insisted that we eat dinner together," she says. "We'd eat at 9 when everyone else in the neighborhood ate at 6." Friends, who once called with invitations the time-strapped Yaniszewskis would inevitably decline, eventually stopped calling. "When Tom and I weren't working, we were sleeping," says Yaniszewski. Back then, Tom spent his days as a package designer at Kodak and his evenings as accountant for his wife's business, ExecuScribe. By 1997, both felt more like indentured servants than entrepreneurs.

So what went wrong? Overwhelmingly, business owners tell us that their primary motivation for starting a company is to control their own destinies. And yet a startling number of them end up like Linda Yaniszewski--with businesses that appear to control them. Yaniszewski, however, decided to do something about it. "There was so much compromise, and we really did the best we could," she recalls. "But we reached the point where it just wasn't good enough. I was 44, and I knew I didn't want to spend the next 30 years of my life like that." She can't point to one specific event that ultimately spurred her to seek help, but that's exactly what she did, with characteristic zeal. She hired a consultant to diagnose her business maladies and enrolled in an empowerment class at a leadership-training center to help clarify her life goals. She learned quickly, though, that if she truly wanted to restore sanity, her life plan and her business plan had to be far more intimately linked than she had ever imagined. Sound obvious? Maybe. But Yaniszewski had made the same assumption that traps so many entrepreneurs: If I work hard enough at my business, my personal life will fall into place.

According to Lanny Goodman, president of Albuquerque-based Management Technologies, that's backward thinking. Goodman makes a living teaching entrepreneurs like Yaniszewski that their businesses exist to serve their needs. Period. "Most of them have managed to build a good business, but they've lost their lives along the way," poses Goodman. And so he always begins his work by prompting clients to ask themselves four questions: What do I want out of life? How can the business help me accomplish that? What does the business need to look like? How do I get it to look like that? While Yaniszewski didn't work with Goodman, those questions are very familiar to her. For the past several years, she and her husband have been asking them at least once a year, and then recording their answers in a written document that informs nearly every aspect of their lives and the business.

Everyone mulls what they want out of life, but Yaniszewski learned that writing down life priorities accomplished two things. First, it gives those priorities more substance and ultimately holds your feet to the fire. It also may compel you to completely change the way you run your business. "Business is a design problem in a lot of respects," says Goodman. "And in any design process, you have to know what you want this thing to do and to really understand that deeply. Then the form falls out of that understanding." Yaniszewski discovered that ExecuScribe's "form" was completely at odds with her most treasured life goals. Tops on her list: spending more time with her family and less time at work, ratcheting up the family's lifestyle, paying herself a living wage, improving her health, traveling and entertaining more frequently, giving back to the community. All required time or money, and her business had robbed her of both for years. No more, she vowed, and made a radical decision: "If the business can't support these things, then we'll do something else."

Tom was her reality check. "Some of her goals were too extravagant," he says. He often thought her sales goals were too ambitious, and he worried that her determination to reach them would overtax the business. From a personal standpoint, he considered her passion for travel excessive. Indulging her wanderlust would have her on an airplane every weekend, while Tom would much prefer to be puttering around in his wood shop. Nonetheless, writing down both short- and long-term goals forced them to discuss and, ultimately, compromise on issues that may have become a source of conflict. "Being so different, we're forced into the middle ground," Tom says.

The next step for Yaniszewski was translating her "core values" into an action plan. She would strive to get dinner on the table by 7, which meant leaving work by 6, and she'd try to stop working on weekends. She also resolved that the family's annual summer vacation in the Adirondacks would be a real break. "Every other hour, she was checking voice mail, and we'd be yelling at her," recalls her daughter, Emily, who is now 21 and a sophomore at the University of Central Florida. Yaniszewski also pledged to exercise more and seek the advice of a nutritionist in order to lower her cholesterol and reduce or eliminate her dependence on diabetes medication. She wanted to more than double her income, and she was itching to move out of her 2,400-square-foot split-level home in the suburbs. It was, in fact, that last item that proved to be her most powerful motivator.

Yaniszewski has vivid memories of the first time she saw her dream house. She and Tom were out for a Sunday drive, casually exploring one of the Rochester area's more upscale and rural regions just north of the Finger Lakes. Linda spotted a "For Sale" sign and suggested they take a look just for fun. But when they approached the stately brick colonial framed by an expansive front lawn and surrounded by forest, she was completely smitten. "It was 4,200 square feet on two acres of woods, and there was a huge kitchen and great foyer, marble floors, and a spiral staircase," she recalls. At that point, she took a brief but significant break from reality and let her imagination run wild. She envisioned Emily on the staircase in a wedding dress, an 18-foot Christmas tree in the living room, and a string quartet playing in the foyer as a house full of fashionable guests sipped holiday cocktails. She saw herself drinking a glass of wine on the screened porch overlooking the back meadow. "You're dreaming," Tom told her. And she was, of course. Because the house would have tripled their mortgage payment, there was absolutely no way they could afford it. "But I never forgot about that house," says Yaniszewski, for whom it encompassed her dreams of a richer life.