Like many people my age, I have aging parents who need a little help. Case in point, next week my mom is having knee replacement surgery.
Both she and dad were worrying about how they’d manage when she gets out of the hospital. At one point she was almost in a panic. “Don’t worry,” I said. “If you need it I’ll just move in until you’re on your feet.”
They worried about me taking so much time off work but I reassured them. If I have my cell phone, laptop and internet access I can work from a coffee shop. Literally.
I once landed a new client, networked with a former client and created a marketing plan all while having a coffee and donut at Tim Horton’s. Setting up shop at their place is a piece of cake.
Yes, I’m having to do a little bit of juggling. For the first week or so after she gets out of the hospital I’m not booking any appointments and I’ve warned clients I may not be able to get back to them as quickly as usual.
But otherwise, I expect to be able to get a fair amount of work done. And since they live seven blocks from my house, if I’ve forgotten anything I can always run back home easily.
Being able to care for my mother and still run my business has given be a great deal of peace of mind. I could make the offer without having to ask permission or take time off work.
If I were working for someone else it wouldn’t be as simple. This is just one of the many reasons I’m so glad I had the courage to go out on my own eight years ago.
How has running a business given you the flexibility to do the things you need to do in your personal life? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.
I have a confession. While I can be kind and supportive to others, when it comes to myself, I’m a bitch. I expect too much and when I don’t meet my outlandish expectations I beat myself up. If you had a boss treat you the way I treat myself, you’d quit.
I’ve had a bad few months. Several family members have had serious, life-threatening health issues that have been on my mind. I really haven’t been fully in the game.
In addition, recently I hosted a webinar that was a total disaster. Although it was on a service I’d used before I had tons of technical problems. The screen sharing didn’t work, people couldn’t hear, others couldn’t get on the line. It was a flop! Seriously! I wanted to crawl under the covers and forget it had ever happened.
However, it was after the failed webinar that I made my big mistake. Instead of figuring out what went wrong, finding a solution and booking a date for a replay, I allowed this “failure” to bring me to a complete halt.
I began doubting myself, replaying the problems over and over in my mind. I became paralysed, finding it impossible to make a decision about what to do next.
Not only was I second (and third and fourth) guessing myself, I stopped moving forward at all. I wasn’t doing anything to build my business. Lack of forward progress made me beat myself up even more. And … well, you get the picture.
So how did I get off this self-destructive pity track? I finally recognized that I needed help and reached out for support.
It’s not that the support I received was earth shattering or even something I didn’t already know. It’s just that sometimes you need someone else to point out the obvious. It’s like that saying, “it takes a village to raise a child.” If you’re in business, you need your own village too. You can’t do it alone.
Just taking the action to reach out for support helped me get off the pity track and start being more positive. After getting the support, I was able to feel more confident and to create an action plan for myself.
So here’s my plan for dealing with setbacks.
Feel free to use it yourself when you get off track:
Build a support network and use it! Don’t wait until everything falls apart. Ask for support when you need it. Make sure you have at least one person in your support network who is willing to kick you in the butt or give you a hug depending on what you need.
Remember that shit happens. When it does, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and do something. It doesn’t necessarily matter what action you take, as long as you do it. After all imperfect, sloppy action always beats a perfect plan that is never put into place.
Commit to taking three actions EVERY day to work towards your goals. I find it’s best if I plan to do them first thing in the day. Then I can’t be tempted to procrastinate. However, if you find that sometimes you can’t get started because your action items are too hard or too scary, pick something simple and easy to do first. Sometimes just getting started on something can be just what you need to have a productive day.
Create a checklist of tasks that need to be completed for each goal. That way when you fall down, you don’t need to try to decide what to do next. Just pick up the list and move to the next item.
Have you ever had a really crappy, horrible thing throw you off course? Please let me know I’m not alone. Leave a comment and share your tips for getting out of a funk.
I’d venture to guess that many if not most small businesses are not up-to-date with their bookkeeping. I know I’m prone to falling behind. If your books are behind, using your bookkeeping to monitor day-to-day activities or to make decisions doesn’t always work. Your data may be a month to a year old.
Instead, we need to look at meaningful numbers that tell us how we’re doing. These are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Each industry has its own unique KPIs.
For small businesses working online, there are a couple of KPIs you can easily monitor on a daily or weekly basis to see whether what you’re doing is working. Also, you should be recording these numbers so you can track whether you’re improving or going backwards. Then you can make adjustments.
Traffic to your website
You should be checking your website traffic at least monthly, if not weekly. Make note of what promotional activities you’ve done so you can tell what’s working and what’s not. Your promotional activities might include blogging, commenting on other blogs, article marketing with links back to your site, social media.
Opt-ins
Getting traffic to your website isn’t enough. You need to capture people’s email addresses so you don’t have to wait for them to come back. If you have an email newsletter, start recording the number of opt-ins each week. A general rule of thumb in internet marketing is your list is worth $1/person/month so it is really important to track this number and grow it.
Social media
Choose something you want to monitor and work at it. Number of “Likes” on your Facebook page is a good one. In addition, you’ll want to monitor activity on your posts – number of Likes, Shares and Comments. For Twitter it could be new followers, retweets, or clicks on links you share. On LinkedIn you may track new connections, people who join a group you manage or the number of times you post in other groups.
Sales
This is the number one KPI for any small business – how much money you are making each month. The KPI you track may be online purchases or numbers of invoices your send or incoming cheques. If your sales are lower than you like, track your actions that increase sales.
These are just some of the KPIs you might want to look at. Talk to your accountant or coach to determine if there are others you should be tracking for your business.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Please leave a comment and share how you track what’s going on in your business.
When it comes to running a business, belonging to an organization or living your life, there are ups and downs – things beyond your control that impact you directly.
For your business, the economy can tank, making it harder for you to make sales.
A trusted employee can leave. A marketing strategy that’s worked for years can suddenly stop sending you new business.
Whenever things go bad, you have a choice – to be a thermostat or a thermometer. A thermometer reports current conditions – what’s the temperature right now. That’s all it can do.
Wow! It’s April already and I’m sitting here wondering where the first quarter of the year went. Only 9 months left to hit my goals for the year.
I find that the beginning of each quarter is a good time to pause for a moment and look at your goals and results so far this year. Are your goals still relevant or have you made a decision to go in another direction?
If your goals are still relevant, have you been working towards them or did you get distracted by the bright shiny object and forget about your main objectives? I’m convinced the majority of people who start a business are at least border-line ADD and we easily get distracted by something new.
If you found you did get off track, sit down and create a plan for the next 90 days: what are you going to do each week that will get you moving towards your goals. Write them on your calendar.
Too many times we lose track of our major goals because we become over focused on the day to day minutia of our businesses. But if you schedule your major goals on your calendar, you’re more likely to remember to work on them. Read More→
Both she and dad were worrying about how they’d manage when she gets out of the hospital. At one point she was almost in a panic. “Don’t worry,” I said. “If you need it I’ll just move in until you’re on your feet.”
