The Breakdown That Saved My Business

In this episode of Lemonade Leaders, I’m joined by Tamryn Dicks, founder of Pharsyde Solutions, a company on a mission to stop burnout from destroying small businesses.

Tamryn’s story is raw and real. Her own brutal burnout cost her health, happiness, and almost her marriage and business. But it also sparked the mindset shifts that rebuilt her life and shaped her mission: helping business owners create thriving companies without sacrificing themselves.

We talk about:

• Why 80% of small businesses fail before year five
• The dangers of hustle culture (and how to escape it)
• The difference between stress and burnout
• How Tamryn rebuilt her business, doubled her income, and cut her hours in half
• Why protecting your wellbeing is the smartest business move you can make

Find out more about Tamryn and Pharsyde Solutions here: www.pharsyde.co.uk.

Find us on TikTok and Instagram @lemonadeleaders

Transcript

Riannon: 0:00

Welcome to Lemonade Leaders, the podcast about conversations that do good and feel good. I'm your host, Riannon Palmer, founder of Lem-uhn, a feel-good PR agency for brands that care. Each episode, I'll be chatting to brilliant people who've turned life's lemons into something meaningful. Today I'm joined by Tamryn Dicks, CEO of Pharsyde Solutions, a company on a mission to help business owners avoid the burnout that takes down 80% of small businesses before year five. Her story is deeply personal. She experienced a brutal burnout herself, nearly losing her health, marriage, and business. What followed was a transformation that now fuels her work, helping others build thriving, balanced businesses that support their dreams while protecting their mental health. Hi Tamron. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Rl, and I'm

Tamryn: 0:50

very happy to be here.

Riannon: 0:53

Thank you. I would love to hear a little bit more about your story of that lemon moment that led you to start far side solutions. Well, I,

Tamryn: 1:02

I actually started my business by mistake, to be honest. I know that sounds weird, but I was quite happily employed as an accountant when I had an opportunity fall into my lap as someone needed accounting services and they quoted and it came through my dad. He's always been a big, big believer in me, always thought. Do more things. Everyone needs a dad like that. Yeah, definitely. And I quoted and was surprised when the person accepted my quote and then I was young, I was 26 and very stupid. And I thought, that's it, that's the beginning of a business. And I actually quit my job and went into opening an accounting firm and I had no idea. What I was doing. I really, I was a good accountant, but that doesn't translate to running an accounting firm. You gotta be a business owner. It's a different skillset entirely. And I didn't know that, and I learned it the hard way. And I kept pushing harder and harder and harder in areas that I, I didn't have the knowledge to push in. I didn't really know what I was doing. And I bought into, there's, there's a lot of info posts. Things on social media and books about hustle, culture, pushing through for success, pushing harder. And you know, things like, uh, no matter how you feel, get up, dress up, show up. I hate that saying. And, uh, and, and things like, pushing through the pain and all of, all of these things. And I did it. I did all of it. I just kept pushing because I figured that's what. And all that happened was I got more and more exhausted. I achieved growth, I got more clients. I, I got a bigger and bigger client base. I was bringing in more and more money and I was just exhausted because no matter how much I brought in, there was always something to spend it on. So I wasn't paying myself what I should be paying. I couldn't afford a proper team, and I was working ridiculously long hours, and I didn't recognize that I was burning out. I thought it was just stress because that's. That's what you get told. You get, it's stressful to build a business. And I thought that's what, it's because I didn't recognize it. I just kept going. And one of the phases of burnout is escapism. And I entered it without recognizing what I was then. So I'd lost my passion. Totally disinterested in in accounting by now. Thought that, you know. Don't wanna say it out loud 'cause some of those clients are still with me. But I got to the point where I hated my clients and it wasn't their fault. It was entirely just exhaustion. And I just just wanted to, to give up and do something else. And then this idea came across my path with a friend of mine and I, we were chatting about a shared passion, which is organic food. And we decided we're gonna, we're gonna open a organic food delivery business in the town where he was living. And we went into that and it, it was great fun. It is great fun to start something new. It always is. And, and in this particular instance, I had a partner, which I hadn't had before, so I thought it would be easier because now we, you know, we're sharing, sharing work, but I couldn't shut down the accounting business because it paid my bills. So yeah, I didn't double my income. I quadrupled my workload. I was a hundred percent responsible for the accounting business. I was 50% responsible for the, the organic food business I had. I had this extra LA layer of responsibility to a partner that I couldn't let down because he's, he's also working towards a dream. He's also trying to build something so I can't just suddenly decide that I don't feel like doing. And yeah, it just, it just got worse that burnout that had that I was already going through it. It basically got doubled. I went through it again. I looked through a second phase and because of that, I got to a point where my body was like not gonna let carry on. It just stopped me in my tracks. I sat down the one day to work, burst into tears, and I literally couldn't stop crying for two weeks. For two weeks. If I thought about work, if I thought about a client, if I thought about my partner, if I thought about my husband, if I thought about anything, I burst into tears because it was just, I'd just reached the point where I couldn't do anything. And that's where, and our bodies where I realized, just tell us when we

Riannon: 5:23

get to that point, which is the clever resource that they're able to say. Even if you can't realize that you've hit the end and you need to take a step back, our bodies will always do that for us.

Tamryn: 5:33

Yeah, it's, well, look, there's a, there's a lot more these days about burnout on the internet, which I think helps a lot a lot more about recognizing it. We have a, a quiz that you can fill out if you want to that helps you answer questions about where you are. The difference between a burn, burnout and stress, essentially, it boils down to how you feel when you're removed from a situation. So stress is caused by a, a particular thing. So if it's removed, you feel better. So if you're stressed at work and you go on holiday, you'll come back feeling refreshed. If you have a particular client that is stressing you out and that project closes and they move on, you're happy to go back to your, to the rest of your client base. But burnout it pervades everything. So you're, you're going to reach a point where you don't have enough in you for anything. I think if you're starting to feel that you can't handle everything and that it, because it's bleeding into your personal life, it's a big, it's a big problem. You're gonna start getting snappy with people that you love just because they wanna spend time with you. You don't have the capacity to spend time with anyone that you, you're gonna feel this burden of people constantly wanting something from you that you happily gave before. You happily were a wife, or a mother, or a friend or a daughter in the past. And now all of a sudden a phone call from a loved one is too much. You don't wanna answer the phone. You don't wanna go to a Bri barbecue, I think they're called in the uk. You don't wanna do these things. You just, you just can't, you don't have that capacity if you're starting to feel like life is too much for you. Stand burnout is, is starting, starting to creep its way through and, and it needs to be stopped.

Riannon: 7:22

Yeah. And obviously you had that moment where you had those two weeks where your body stopped for you, but you still had these clients, you had these two businesses going on in the background. What was your step after your body said You need to make a change?

Tamryn: 7:36

I had to do some, some soul, soul searching. You know, I had to really start being honest with myself about whether I, what I was pushing for and whether I could afford the cost. Because like I said, I was being snappy with friends and family, so I was ruining relationships. I, my emotional health was obviously shut at me crying all the time, but my physical health was shut. My, my, I was, my hormones were out of balance. My weight, I'd put on way too much weight. I was unfit because I never did anything except sit in front of a computer and I had to start adding up the cost of these businesses and going. What did I want from them? What was I doing it for? And work out who I was in all of this and where it was going and why, because I think that's one of the biggest dangers of, of the hustle, hustle culture, is that this push to grow without any time for reflection on why and what that growth is supposed to achieve for you, because it should achieve something you don't wanna, you don't wanna grow for the sake of growth. There's gotta be, and I think that's.

Riannon: 8:45

I think that hustle culture, you see the people who, in the moment, they seem to be doing amazingly, but I always think, what about these people in five years time, 10 years time? Or how are they in old age? Are they gonna be living as long lives? Because there's all these studies that show if we look after ourselves and we're happy and we get good sleep, and we eat well and do all of this, then we have longer lives. So we just see a snapshot of people on LinkedIn, hustle, hustle, hustle. But I think it's good to have that balance. Like for me. Sleep is a non-negotiable for me. I always wanna make sure I have eight hours. 'cause when I don't have a good sleep, my what day? The next day is never as good. It's never as productive. I'm never my best self. So actually, to do your best work and to grow your company, you need to look after yourself as well.

Tamryn: 9:24

Exactly, yes. I think that was a big lesson that I learned, actually it was a major mindset shift in, in everything I do now, was that recognition that you are your company's biggest asset. Your company needs things to run. Like it needs money and it needs sales, and it needs a team and it needs structure, but it needs you, you are the business. And particularly when you, when you started, you know, when, when you've, you've opened a startup. You are that business no matter what funding you have to pay for staff or, or not pay for staff or, or structure. You are the passion. You have the vision. You have the energy that drives that company. If you collapse, you take it with you. And that's precisely what I did. I collapsed, I nearly took two businesses with me in the process, so.

Riannon: 10:14

It was a hard lesson. Yeah. And, and what was your next step? Did did you close the businesses down? What happened next? So I

Tamryn: 10:21

think that, that soul searching, that decision, well, actually, one of my steps, I, I must say, was quite depressing. I, I went, I, I went, I decided I was gonna, I was gonna stop. Everything. I needed a break. So I went to a business broker to sell the accounting business. Because I, I thought if I sell that and whatever I make off it, I should be able to live for a, a year at least, hopefully with more. And then I can, I can heal and regroup and. Find myself and start again. And so I, I spoke to my partner in the organic business. I said This has happened, and, and I wasn't, wasn't able to put into the business what it needed, so I had to step, step out of it. Luckily, we were friends beforehand and luckily we, we were fairly good at communicating, so my being honest with him and talking it through we managed to solve that issue. He, I gave up my shares, he brought on team members that he needed and he could carry on, and he did a fantastic, fantastic job. Amazing. I didn't lose a friend, so that, that was lucky. And then I thought, well, I'll sell this accounting business. Cave everything to the the business broker, and discovered that after, and at this point, I'd had that business for 10 years. So 10 years of hard work and tears, and now the loss of my health and my business is worth nothing. It was worth absolutely nothing I couldn't say.

Riannon: 11:46

Well, I like how at the start of that, when you said this is quite a depressing story, you were laughing, and it really shows that when you look back on these horrible moments in our lives, when you can think about them and laugh these days is incredible.

Tamryn: 11:57

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And and I, I am glad it was worth nothing in that moment because I would've sold it. And now I didn't have the choice. I had to rebuild it. And, uh, and I'm glad because I really love what I'm doing now. So, yes there's always good from those horrible moments, but I rem uh, that that was a, a soul crushing moment. I thought that I'm stuck. I'm stuck in this thing. I hate, I can't get out of it. And so I had another week or two of, of crying, but you have to stop crying. Eventually you do, you know, you just have to, you'll use up all your tears. And I did. And then I figured the, there's no other way out but through. But I have to do things differently. Can't clearly what I was doing before wasn't working. So I began to learn. And I think that's what I try and, and teach everyone is you, you need to learn. You can't stop learning. Life changes all the time. Business changes all the time. The world changes all the time. I mean, none of us saw COVID coming and that changed the world forever. Things change all the time. If you don't keep learning, you're gonna, you're gonna be stuck. So, and I did, yeah, I started learning and, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot out there, uh, for free. You don't even have to have to pay for it. Although obviously it, it's faster if someone can need you through

Riannon: 13:15

what you need to know. If someone is sitting here listening to the podcast and thinking, how can I up upskill myself and what free resources can I use, what would you recommend?

Tamryn: 13:26

I'm gonna point out my own YouTube channel quickly. You can go have a look at that. I have a lot on there about all the things I learned, but, and, and YouTube in general is an amazing resource if you know, because it's such a great way to learn. If you are a visual person there's video. If you're an auditory learner, you can just play it in the background. If, if you learn best by reading, then maybe YouTube. Although you can read the transcripts if you really wanna but it is an amazing resource and there's so many experts on there. I think the danger, of course is, is vetting those experts. Yeah. So I think to me what I used was a combination of LinkedIn, Google, and YouTube. So I would find experts in certain areas on LinkedIn and go through their content and check. They're following and check their results that they're providing to people. And if I felt they were trustworthy, then I would, I would go follow the rest of their content because, you know, every, everyone does it. We've all got multiple channels. So you're, you're gonna have content on LinkedIn, they're gonna have articles somewhere, they're gonna have a website. So I just went and grabbed every single free resource I could get from these people that I could see were getting results for other people. And then, and eventually I did actually. For help as well. I think it is definitely a faster option. I joined a, a mentoring group for, specifically for accounting firm owners, and there was that, that really, that was a big turning point for me, was being able to, this was a mix of training from someone who knew what they were talking about and the mastermind effect of that group where you, you know, you met once a month and you, you said, I dunno how to do this. And people who had done it before or were also battling with it, they could chime in and, and help you through that. And that, that makes a big difference. It really, really makes a big difference.

Riannon: 15:19

Yeah. I think it's always really rewarding as well when you can learn from someone else, but you could also impart your own knowledge. 'cause then if we all help each other, then we'll all become better business owners.

Tamryn: 15:28

Yeah, and, and I think also because you're learning from other business owners, it's real. It's not theory. You're not reading some article, you're not watching someone's sales video. These are real people who are also battling with building their businesses and they're sharing something that worked in an, you know, in, in an area that, that you need to know more about and, and it really does make a big difference, I think networking. Is more important than people realize, but finding the right network is important.

Riannon: 15:58

And what of those lessons did you take into your business and how did it change the course that you were on? I

Tamryn: 16:04

think the biggest change was a mental one. I realized because I'd opened this business on a whim, I hadn't really questioned why. And I hadn't really delved into what it was that attracted me to owning my own business in the first place. And for me, it's, it's absolutely the idea of freedom. I think a lot of business owners, they do this, they open their own business because they don't want a boss. And then you discover that you traded one boss for multiple bosses called clients. And if you don't have the right setup, if you don't have the right structure, that just, it's a nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. And I had to really learn what it was I wanted from life and then translate that back into how would I achieve that with my business. I think it was a natural progression once I started to implement these things and, and practical knowledge in my business as well. There's, um, a big shift to, to, instead of focusing on what I do, because that's when you're hustling for clients. You talk all the time about what you do, and then I had to shift to how. How I do this, how do I be as efficient as possible? How do I keep standards while maintaining a team, for example, because I made the most horrendous hiring mistakes in the early stage of business. Absolutely horrendous hiring mistakes. And then because I made so many mistakes, I, I was like, no, I'm not. I'm not hiring. I'm just gonna do it all myself, which is an even worse mistake to try and do everything yourself. So I had to learn structure. I had to learn team dynamics. I had to learn things like processes that you'd think an accountant would know these things, but I had to learn how always learning to create them in, in ways that other people could understand them as well. I know how I want my business to run. I know how I interact with a client. I know how I save a file on a computer, how I name it. But if you don't share that information with your team, they're gonna do things their way. So that is information that I had to implement in my business. It was actually defining processes, putting in structures and, and reviewing them. Making that time, which is probably the most difficult part, but understanding that if I don't take time to work on the business, the internal structure itself, no one else was going to. So it had to be done. What does Farside solutions look

Riannon: 18:37

like today?

Tamryn: 18:37

That, I suppose that was as a another natural evolution, was when I got it all working for myself. Had the time to see that my clients had the same issues. My clients had also gone into business because they were good at something because they wanted freedom and now all of a sudden they were working harder than they ever did before and for less money. I think that's, that's 90% of business owners' story. And yet we keep doing it because we still have this dream and somehow it's still better than working for someone else. But, and I think that was, that was for me, the, the natural evolution was to go, okay, well, if I managed to get out of this, I mean, I I, I didn't give you the stats earlier, but before I had the breakdown I had was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And I, I. I wasn't any money, so it was soul destroying. And then by slowly implementing these, it was between 2017 and 2019. So it took two years for me to implement changes, starting with, with purpose and vision and then going into to structure and then going from structure to team building, um, and how, how to build. The right team. It took two years to get there, but at the end of two years, I had a team. I'd increased my payroll, uh, expenses. I had doubled my take home pay, and I'd reduced my working hours to, to less than six. Per day, Monday to Friday, took weekends off. Oh, amazing. So, you know, when I looked at that and I went, well, if I can do this and I didn't know what I was doing in the beginning, then other people can do this. If I can just share those steps that I followed and, and the way in which I assessed what was happening in the business and how I approached going, okay, this is what's happening. These are the steps that can be followed to fix it. And so I opened Far Side solutions, which is the advisory arm. And that's what it does it, it helps people to just.

Riannon: 20:37

Freedom. How much of the accountancy side of the, of the work do you still do?

Tamryn: 20:41

I actually, I do more than you'd think. No bookkeeping, no Day-to-day accounting. I have the most amazing team. I love my team. I don't, I couldn't do this without them. That's the bottom line. I'm so glad I learned that I needed them. But I have the most phenomenal team and they handle that sort of day-to-day accounting side for any clients that need it. Not all of the far side solutions clients have their accounting with us as well. We just use the numbers to help them. So I'm doing far more of the financial analysis side of accounting than, than the day to day. But I love it. It's very exciting. For me, I'm a numbers geek, so, and it's, it's really exciting to be able to look at, at those financial reports and work out what's happen. And then to know that I can use that information to make someone's life better.

Riannon: 21:32

It must be pretty amazing for you to be able to look back to where you were 7, 7, 8 years ago to that moment that you had the breakdown and you thought that this is the end of it. You tried to sell the company and now to look at where you are today with this thriving company and also that you seem so much happier. It must be an incredible feeling.

Tamryn: 21:51

Yeah, it is. It, it's, it's such a strange. Thing actually. I know. 'cause when, whenever I tell people about the breakdown, they'll go, oh, I'm so sorry. And I'm not, I'm not sorry. It was really unpleasant to go through it. I'm not even gonna sugarcoat. That was really hard. And it was, it's a long journey out of there. And I, I still have physical issues from burnout. That's, it can get that bad. There's still things that, that I don't have right yet, but it's so much better, and it would've just got worse if I hadn't actually reached the point of breakdown. I would've given up. I would probably be employed again, and I'm a good employee, so someone would've benefited. I work hard, but I'm glad I, I'm not, I'm glad that I'm, I'm doing what I'm doing and, and I love what I do and I know that I have a positive impact on other people, which.

Riannon: 22:47

From all the people I've spoken to on this podcast, it is really shown that actually everyone's lemon moments, people are quite happy that they've had them because without our lemon moments, we wouldn't have been able to build our businesses or create change. So even though at the time these moments are horrible and horrendous, if you look back at them. They make us who we are today. So even sometimes that you want a time machine to go back and to tell yourself, oh, don't do that. Do this. But without those moments, we wouldn't be the people we're today and have the lives that we have. So those lemon moments can actually be a good thing in the long run. It just takes a little bit of time to see that

Tamryn: 23:22

now. A hundred percent. I love, I love the name of your podcast because Thank you. I think it encapsulates it a hundred percent. It's lemon moments, but you get lemonade. Yeah.

Riannon: 23:32

And if you were gonna have a time machine as we're talking about that and take yourself back to 20 17, 20 16, what advice would you give to someone who is in that position? It's such a good question.

Tamryn: 23:44

I think the biggest shift for me came when I forced myself to take time. Actually. Mention that, but so what happened is, my, my personal life, we had some changes at the same time, and my husband and I, we decided we were gonna move house. We were gonna do like a, a change. I was gonna stop doing the delivery business. I was gonna take some time and relax a little bit on the accounting business and, and let's move house because let's just change up everything, do it all at once. And somehow that the moving house turned into, let's have a little adventure. So we love camping, we love moving around. We've always been that way. So we thought, well, let's do six months in reserves. There's a lot of reserves in South Africa, a lot of campsites. Most of them have power. I had mobile internet, so we can work at the reserves. Let's do it. So we did. We thought we'd do six months traveling around. We started with South Africa's biggest one. It's the Kruger National Park. We were just gonna take six months to live in beauty and work every day, but just tone it down in this peace, peaceful environment and something new. That six months turned into seven years. We did that for seven years. We went all over the country to different beautiful places, and I think in the process of doing that, that forced physical change. I opened up time. For myself to heal, which was very important. I needed the time. But I think this is the biggest mistake that business owners make, and particularly when they're in that burnout phase where you're hustling and getting nowhere because you're getting nowhere. You keep pushing harder and you think you can't afford to take time off. That's, uh, that's definitely where I was. I couldn't afford to not work a weekend. I couldn't afford to stop working at 5:00 PM on a weekday. I couldn't afford a holiday. I couldn't not be there. I had to be working all the time. That was what I believed. If, if I stopped then the world would collapse. So the business, my business world would collapse and I couldn't afford that. And then I was forced. To take that time because I physically couldn't work that hard anymore. And the change of scenery enforced the change of time, and that's what started the process of healing. That's what started the whole rethinking, the whole, whole change started because I had time to really, really think about it. And that's, that's what I would recommend to people. It's where I start with my, my clients as well, is how do we open up time. For you to just rest because that's what you need. It's, it's been scientifically proven that the harder you push, the less productive you become. The less effective you are, the less creative you are. You're actually harming your business by pushing so hard. And we bought this lie that it's selfish to take time off and we feel guilty if we take time off. And I think that's. That's a piece of advice I wanna give anyone feeling that way is that it's, it's not selfish. It's actually a business imperative that you take time off to rest. Yeah, definitely. 'cause you, I think that will work better when you come back.

Riannon: 27:17

I think that change of scenery can always be such a powerful thing as well. And I'm going to have to pick your brains at some point about, um, safari. It's on my to-do list at some point.

Tamryn: 27:26

Awesome. Definitely, definitely happy to talk about them.

Riannon: 27:30

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Tamron. It's been so wonderful to hear your story and so amazing to hear that you're in such a happy place now.

Tamryn: 27:39

Thank you. Thank you very much. It was lovely to share my story.

Riannon: 27:43

And where can people find you if they'd like to find out more about you or about the business?

Tamryn: 27:48

The best place is LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I'm there quite a lot and I do share, uh, post and content as well. So if they just wanna quietly learn without having to interact, they have that option as well. But I, and on LinkedIn there is my calendar link for coffee chat chats. I'm very. Free with my coffee chats. If you wanna just talk through, if you wanna see if you are burning out, if that's what's happening or you just want an opinion, I'm happy to do that too. So yeah, LinkedIn is, is probably your best option for finding me.

Riannon: 28:22

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been so great to speak to you. If you enjoyed today's episode of Lemonade Leaders, hit Follow and like for weekly episodes. Until next time, keep making your own lemonade.