My Story – Page 4 – Business Plus Baby

August 3, 2009August 1, 2009

Getting started as a mumpreneur – how am I doing?

You might remember that I had a breakthrough in deciding which business to run when I realised that I must do what I want to do instead of what I could or should do. (If you missed it, you can read more about this here.) I said I’d let you know what happened next, and with a week until my baby is due I’m in a reflective mood, so now seems like a good time. And I don’t have the energy to do much other than type these days!

I worked my way through Paul and Sarah Edward’s book ‘Finding Your Perfect Work’ and it felt a bit like going back to my careers adviser at college, except it was easier because I know myself so much better than I did at eighteen. If that sounds like a drag, it wasn’t really. Maybe it’s the coach in me, but reviewing your progress, likes, dislikes, achievements and even failures every few years can only help you move forwards.

At the same time, I was starting to get some really positive feedback from my blog. I discovered that one of the themes in my working life was pulling together confusing and complex information then delivering it in an easy-to-understand way, so I wondered if I could change my main method of working from training to writing? After all, I had written a lot of training courses and manuals over the years. I seemed to be doing pretty well so far with my blog and it was a good way of exercising my writing muscles.

Reading Antonia Chitty’s book ‘Commercial Writing’ has opened my eyes to the paths I could follow from here. I’ve got too much to think about at the moment to decide on exactly which path, but I’m going to gently mull things over during the coming night feeds.

I was planning to move from my freebie WordPress blog over to my own domain name in a few months time, but what was the point in encouraging people to visit a blog that was going to move? It made sense to move over sooner rather than later. So with lots of work from the fantastic Sally at Squashbox Media and my equally fabulous part-time web designer husband, we got businessplusbaby.com up and running last weekend.

Looking back, I’m surprised at how much progress I’ve made in the last month or so before my baby is due. During the last month of my previous pregnancy I couldn’t do much other than sit on the sofa watching TV. Which just goes to show how much motivation you can get from doing what you really want.

July 2, 2009June 4, 2010

Mumpreneur Mistakes Number 2 – Following Your Passion When Nobody Wants To Pay You For It

I was delighted with all the comments and feedback from my post 'Mumpreneur Mistakes Number 1', especially from people who have succeeded at running a business from home around their children. But one comment from Chloe Wilson really got me thinking, 'I think it’s very hard to find work that is really what you want to do that actually pays you any money!', she says. I've had some personal experience of this when I tried to set up a coaching company. I was fully qualified by a well-respected coach training company, I got great reports from my tutors and I took their advice to find a niche I was passionate about. But it was incredibly hard to make any money. One of the tough lessons I learned from my coaching experience was this – it's great to follow your passion and to do what you really want in life, but you must also offer something that people are prepared to buy. And at a price high enough to both cover your costs and give you a decent standard of living. Otherwise you end up as a starving artist – doing what you love but struggling financially. It's surprising (and depressing) how you can end up hating what you used to love when you feel you're failing. Another way of deciding what to do is to look at your skills, your talents and the network you already have, which is an approach suggested by many careers books. But what if you are skilled in something that just doesn't set you on fire? I'm pretty good at helping kids to make things and I enjoy doing it too, which is why I started off as a design and technology teacher. But doing this all day, every day took all the fun out of it. So the secret must be to look at where my skills and passions coincide with an opportunity. A service or product that people are prepared to pay for. I can also see that I mustn't be afraid to not make use of some of my skills , because that could keep me hanging on to my old working life when I need to be stepping off into my new one. There's no easy answer here, but the journey is certainly interesting. Stay tuned…

June 30, 2009June 4, 2010

Mumpreneur mistakes number 1 – one week on…

working mum After last week's light bulb moment (see Mumpreneur mistakes number 1) I've been working through 'Finding your perfect work' by Paul and Sarah Edwards. It's a much bigger book than I expected! And it's full of worksheets, which will take me a little time to work through, but I'm hoping it'll be time well spent. I've realised that I'm not just starting a business from home which has to work around two small children, I'm also planning a complete career change. Which is a tall order for anyone, especially as I'm also coming up to eight months pregnant. But then again, I never do things the easy way! I'm still stunned by how much having a baby has totally turned my working life upside down. A year ago I fully intended to go back to my old job full-time while Little Lindop went to nursery five days a week – so much has changed since then. I feel a bit daft for being so naive and my head is still spinning from all the changes that have happened to me in the last couple of years, but I feel positive about the future and that there IS a business out there for me.

June 22, 2009June 4, 2010

Mumpreneur mistakes number 1

baby hand Remember in my last post I said I had a few more Mumpreneur ideas on my drawing board? Well, I was playing around with one of these (was there a market for it? How would I get clients? How long would it take before I got an income from it? And so on). I felt a few sparks of "yes, I could do that" but most of the time it didn't really grab me. I was missing something, then I found a book by Paul and Sarah Edwards, authors of the excellent "Getting Business to Come to You". This book is called "Finding Your Perfect Work" and unlike the usual careers guides that point you towards a job, it specialises in helping you find the right self-employed work for you. (You can get this from Amazon or download it as an ebook from http://middleclasslibrary.com/). Finding your Perfect Work gives three questions not to ask when deciding what work is right for you:

Don't ask what COULD I do – you'll get lost in a forest of endless possibilities
Don't ask what SHOULD I do – you'll get lost in a barren desert of unappealing ideas
Don't ask what's BEST for me to do – you'll get lost in a quagmire of impossible choices

Instead ask "What do I really want to do?" Then I realised I've spent the last eight months going round in circles with the three 'don't' questions. I know exactly were this came from. On the day I decided I couldn't put my daughter in nursery and go back to my full-time job, I decided that my work options were now so limited, I would have to take whatever I could get. Maybe it wasn't a totally conscious decision, but it's been steering my thoughts and actions ever since. Now that I've done some research I'm realising that my options are very different than the ones I had pre-baby, and yes, they probably are more limited, but I have a lot more possibilities than I first thought. With two very small children to care for, I'll need a passion for any business I run. My energy is going to be pretty low at times so I need my natural motivation to be as high as it possibly can be. If my business idea doesn't grab me now, it's not right for me. But what is right for me? So far I've only read chapter 1 of the book, so I'll let you know when I've finished.

June 16, 2009July 27, 2009

Is there a market in my gap?

online training

My background is in training, mostly IT training. So I thought there would be a a good opportunity to bring the online training I’ve delivered in big organisations to small businesses. A few weeks ago I asked solopreneurs and small business owners to take my survey to see if there really was a market for my training.

Here is my plan. I thought that small business owners are probably frustrated by at least one aspect of their computer software. Chances are that they’ve not had training on how to use it and they’ve picked it up as you’ve gone along. They don’t have time to do a whole day’s training or to plough through huge manuals to find the quickest way of getting a task done. But if they add it all up, struggling through software is costing time (=money), effort and frustration every time they use it.

They could take an online training course, but virtually all are pre-recorded and don’t feel much different to ploughing through a manual. What they need (so I thought) is the speed and accessibility of an online course, but with a real, live trainer like you would have in a classroom – live online training. And they need it broken into short chunks so they can pick and choose the topics they need, when they need them.

I was right to some extent, but I found that people tend to deal with their frustrations in two main ways. If they are confident with IT, they’ll read a book, go to an online forum or talk to the software supplier’s technical support. If they are less confident with IT, they’ll tend to outsource to someone who is. This left me with very little ground in the middle, where people’s training needs were few, far between and very fragmented. One person might need to know a small part of Photoshop and another would need a little bit of Sage. I was hoping for a number of people to say something like “great, my accounts software is driving me nuts, can you help?” but this wasn’t the case.

I saw a gap in the market, but there wasn’t a market in the gap.

I’m not despondent, in fact I’m feeling rather pleased with myself. This is the first time I’ve done any proper market research and I’m delighted that I’ve saved myself a lot of time and money pursuing a business that doesn’t have an easy and hungry market.

So it’s back to the drawing board, but luckily my drawing board has a few more ideas sitting on it, just waiting for me to get researching. Keep reading to see how I get on.