Business Plus Baby

April 23, 2012April 23, 2012

Ten tips for market placement

Today’s article comes from Laura Rigney, author of Pitching Products for Small Business. Laura’s book helps you along the path from developing your product to branding and pitching your idea to buyers at high street and online retailers.

1 – Ensure you have a strong brand.

When you are trying to bring your product to market, you will be seen immediately beside your biggest competition so you need to stand out as much as possible. Think like a consumer; what sort of packaging appeals to you? What kind of branding do you like? Take a look at the branding of other similar products and see what they all have in common and use this knowledge to your advantage. Most importantly, make sure that it is clear to potential purchasers what your product is and what it does! Continue reading “Ten tips for market placement”

April 17, 2012April 16, 2012

How to stay a healthy mum

If you’ve got children, a business, clients, friends, family and a house to look after, it’s easy for your own health and well-being to come last. There just aren’t enough hours in the day, are there?

But it’s important for mum to stay healthy – otherwise who else will do all these important jobs? 🙂

So (keeping in mind that this message is as much a reminder to myself as it is to anyone else who may be reading!), here are five quick and easy tips for staying a healthy mum.

1. Eat. Obviously, you don’t have a lot of time to eat, but this is essential to staying healthy. The good news that it’s OK to snack, as it helps keep your metabolism going and your energy levels up – so no need for crash dieting. Just make sure you snack on healthy things like yogurt, fruit and nuts rather than chocolate, biscuits and crisps. Not that I ever eat any of those things, obviously *cough*.
2. Drink: Water that is. (Yep, cut back on the 15 cups of tea a day, Helen…) In addition to eating healthy foods, you need to be drinking water throughout the day.
3 Exercise: Although you may find yourself busy throughout the day and exhausted at the end of it all, it’s important that you squeeze in at least 20-30 minutes of exercise each day. There are several ways you can do this. For instance, you can go on a walk, play Xbox Kinect or Nintendo Wii games with your family or join a fitness class.
4 Be Happy: As women and mothers, we tend to overload ourselves with work, family and worries. There isn’t much time to focus on being happy. However, this is important too. Studies have shown that, generally, happy people are healthier people. In order to become happier, set aside a little time for yourself every day – or week – to do something you like doing. This time will help you feel refreshed and become happier. (Note to self – step away from the computer…)
5 Sleep: Getting a good night of sleep is essential to your overall health. Sleep is when your body recharges itself. So, if you aren’t getting enough sleep you aren’t operating on a full battery, which means you’ll wear out quicker. It also means your body will too, which depletes your immune system. Plus it means you’ll be irritable and less likely to be happy (see tip 4).

So I’m now going to take my own advice and get an early night. Night night!

If you enjoyed this post, why not make sure you stay in touch by joining my mailing list? I’ll also send you a copy of my e-book Running a business around a family: 9 steps to success.

Image: healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

April 15, 2012April 23, 2012

It’s the April Business Mums Blog Carnival!

If you’ve got a business blog, why not join in the April Business Mums Blog Carnival?

You don’t even need to write a post for the carnival, just pick your favourite from the posts already up on your blog and send the link to the carnival host.

This month your host is lovechicliving.co.uk

To enter, email the link to your post to jen (at) lovechicliving.co.uk by 20 April.

The carnival will be posted on 26 April.

If you’re not sure how it all works or what kind of post to enter, you’ll find everything you need to know on the Business Mum’s Blog Carnival page. And you can get your own blog carnival badge there too!

Want to know more about blogging to promote your business? Grab yourself a copy of my book Business Blogging for Beginners (only £2.99!)

April 12, 2012

You’re doing OK (yes really, you are.)

Are you feeling under a lot of pressure?

Pressure from you family and kids, pressure from your work, deadlines and clients. Then there’s the pressure you put on yourself.

We live in a culture that often values what we achieve over who we are.

I just want to tell you this: you’re doing OK. Really.

It’s OK to just be you.

You don’t need to be running a company valued in the millions, to have advanced degrees, a beautiful house or spotless children.

You’re OK just as you are.

(Need more convincing? Take a look at this post Your children need YOU and its 425 comments)

I know that sometimes the pressure gets too much and you end up flipping your lid.

Like shouting at the kids a split second before you switch to being Mrs Ultra-Professional when a client phones up. Or ending up in floods of tears because some old fool criticises your parking at the supermarket.

Yeah, it’s not big or clever. But it’s OK. It happens to us all.

So just for today, give yourself a break. Cut yourself some slack.

It really will be OK.

photo credit: theinfinite

April 10, 2012

This is why your tasks take longer than you expected…

Introducing new Business Plus Baby guest blogger Alison Bradford of www.alisonbradford.com…

Do you ever have a morning when you’re up really early but still late for the school / nursery run? The morning started so well – you were feeling relaxed and in control and then before you knew it there’s a last minute dash to get coats and shoes on, bags together and out of the door. How did that happen?

Or the other way round and the kids were up late (I wish! doesn’t happen often in my house!) but you still managed to get them fed, washed, dressed and out of the door at the same time?

This is Parkinson’s Law in action – a task will expand to fill the time you allow you for it.

So, roughly translated, if you allow two hours to get ready in the morning it will take two hours. If you allow half an hour it will take half an hour.

It’s like when you have a new baby and you cannot imagine being able to leave the house with both of you dressed before midday. Then you join a baby class that starts at 10am and somehow you manage to get out of the house for 10am. Then you go back to work and (by a miracle some days, I know) you manage to get your baby to nursery for 8am. (I’m not saying it’s not stressful getting out earlier by the way!)

The same principle applies to work tasks too.

When you’re running your own business it can be easy to keep going with a task and not set yourself deadlines. You don’t have a boss hovering over you wanting that report by 5pm and you can easily start to be busy taking your time over things.

Maybe you want something to be perfect and spend too long trying to get it so.

Maybe it’s something you don’t enjoy doing and keep getting distracted from.

Whatever the reason that means something is taking too long to get done – start setting yourself deadlines for completing tasks.

This may mean that something isn’t perfect (haven’t you heard that good enough is the new perfect?) It may also mean that you need to start making decisions more quickly. Both of these are great habits to get into when running your own business.

If you don’t have enough time to get everything done then you either need to not do some stuff or to start getting stuff done more quickly. By setting deadlines for even the smallest of things you really can start to get things done more quickly – just remember those late mornings when you still make school or nursery on time and think of Parkinson’s Law.

Biography:

If you want to get more tips, advice and inspiration for being a Mum running a business then visit www.alisonbradford.com and sign up for the free newsletter.

Alison works as a Business Coach and Life Coach with Mums who are running a small business from home and want to make more money in their business and have more balance in their life. To find out more please visit www.alisonbradford.com/about