As it is with every business, meal prep business comes with its own stress and challenges. It is often a cycle of planning and preparing customer meals, as well as business administration. In the midst of all these, it is easy to lose grip on other aspects of your life. It is for this reason many meal prep business owners rarely achieve work-life balance.
Work-life balance is however an important part of life for any individual and for business owners like yourself. It is very crucial to your well-being. As a meal prep service provider catering to the nutritional needs of consumers, you must have a stable mind. Losing work-life balance is being unable to handle the different parts of your life outside work. Consequently, this will affect you in the long term.
The struggles of Meal Prep Business owners
Consider the day-to-day operations of Tony, a meal prep business owner as he navigates work.
Tony wakes at 4 a.m. thinking of what meals need to be prepared for the day. He goes to bed after curating and penning down his shopping list for the next day, long after his family has gone to sleep. He spends the early hours of the morning grocery shopping and cooking meals based on each customer’s individual orders as they come in. By the time he is done with the morning rounds, the kids have left for school and his wife has left for work.
He hardly had a bath when he received an unplanned order that was not pre-ordered. After answering that, he commences stocktaking, calculating profit and replying to emails. When it’s almost lunchtime, he gets started on preparing the last batch hoping no customer has a complaint about any meal. In all of this, there is hardly any time to play a quick game with the kids or just hang out with friends.
Does that describe your daily operations? You spend your day cooking meals and running deliveries all the while hoping that customers get what they ordered in the right condition that you sent it. You are also mentally calculating costs to ensure profitability and thinking of more ways to scale your business. The workload is overbearing and all that physical and mental stress eventually takes its toll on business owners and many of them rarely get the time to destress.
Unfortunately, all of this has negative effects on your personal health and relationships. Stress causes less and infrequent sleep. Lack of insufficient recharge leads to low energy and low productivity. In the midst of this, there is no time for outside relationships with family, friends or other hobbies. Even for a meal prep owner who works with a team, you do not want an overworked and unmotivated team. Work becomes monotonous and people cannot produce food that makes people happy. It still comes back to your business in the long run. All of the above shows the importance of work-life balance to any meal prep business owner.
The Role of Effective Coordination and Delegation
To achieve work-life balance, you must master how to coordinate and delegate. Coordination keeps the various aspects of the meal prep business balanced by overseeing each aspect in an orderly manner. On the other hand, effective delegation recognises that certain duties and responsibilities may require more than one person.
Additionally, effective coordination and delegation create a system that you can adopt to achieve work-life balance. When you have your work system under control, you can have time to deal with your personal life. Since delegation also means that certain aspects of the business are being handled with very minimal or no involvement from you, you can focus on relaxing or devoting that time to some other life areas.
Meanwhile, it is understandable that the manpower needed to achieve coordination and delegation does not come cheap. This may be why many meal prep business owners avoid it altogether. However, the good news is that today, there is a software that can help you handle different aspects of coordination and delegation. Routine tasks such as scheduling, compiling grocery lists and ticking deliveries can be taken care of with these tools. In fact, a good meal prep platform takes these into consideration to allow you some balance between the workload and every other aspect of your life.
Interestingly, our meal prep ordering platform, LazyFit helps you achieve the seemingly impossible task of work-life balance. When we set out to create a meal prep platform we were particular about helping customers achieve their wellness and fitness goals without stress. How much more do our actual meal prep business owners like you? Our customer segmentation and history provide you with information that can guide you in choosing which meals to prepare for which customers, saving you mental stress.
Furthermore, you get to save the time spent on doing tasks such as meal tracking and delivery with our inbuilt features for that purpose. Easily schedule deliveries without racking your brain. It’s safe to say that you can delegate it all to LazyFit and use your spare time to interact with life. Read tips on how to optimize your kitchen operations for meal prep efficiency.
If you have a team, LazyFit only makes the experience better. Here are some additional topics for delegating tasks effectively;
- Decide and clearly illustrate the goals for delegated tasks. This is so that everyone can know what is required of them.
- Delegate tasks to employees based on their strengths and weaknesses. It makes it easier and faster when everyone is in their familiar zones.
- While delegation is essential, it is in your best interest to handle some tasks. You should therefore know what to delegate for maximum results.
- Communication through the process is essential as well. Both the assigned and the one assigned to tasks must keep constant communication about the progress and possible challenges.
- Ensure that all necessary resources that will facilitate ease of completion are provided. A good meal prep platform can ease a lot of processes.
- Effective delegation also includes some monitoring of the process. Have oversight of the task and what the progress is from time to time. Some meal prep platforms also integrate solutions that enable sharing among multiple users.
It is very important to note that trust is quite necessary when it comes to delegation. You must trust your workers or whoever is handling a duty on your behalf. If not, the work-life balance you aim to get would be for nought. The time that should be spent freely will be punctured by moments of clashes and conflict with your team more often than not. In the end, it is double work and a situation you want to avoid.
Meanwhile, here are a few other ways to incorporate balance into your work-life activities.
- Set clear boundaries and stick to them. Have specific opening and closing hours for work and be strict with them. Minimize having to do any work activities outside your official work hours.
- Time management is important because it means that you do what is necessary at the right time. Set blocks of time for each task that guides how you spend the day. Effectively save time by automating several tasks with a good meal prep ordering platform so that you can have more time on your hands.
- Intentionally set aside time for family and friends. You can try all we have recommended in this article and still not have the intended balance if there is a lack of intentionality to back it up. So create time to hang out and catch up with friends and family, and develop your personal hobbies outside work. Have a day out with your employees. Plan vacations and holiday trips in advance.
In conclusion, in the fast-paced world of meal prep business, it is important to strive for work-life balance. Meals should improve the quality of life of your customers. It can be counterproductive for a meal prep business owner to work under the stress that comes with an unhealthy work-life balance. Take action, be intentional, create a system, and work with our meal prep ordering platform built to take the workload off you and experience a more balanced life.