Business Plus Baby

Lyn Blackledge won the Best Saleswoman Award at the Mumpreneur Conference and Awards this weekend. Antonia Chitty and I asked what advice she would give to a mum thinking of starting her own business…

Lyn has a number of direct selling businesses including Wikaniko, Barefoot Books and Utilities Warehouse and she’s recently brought them all together as Lyn’s Biz.

We caught up with Lyn just after she’d won the award and she was still buzzing with excitement! She explained that 2010 has been a tough year for her, so it was wonderful to see her getting the recognition she deserves.

The Mumpreneur Conference and Awards took place this weekend and it was fantastic for so many reasons!

Organised by mumpreneurs Amanda Farren and Laura Rigney, there were great seminars, inspiring presentations and the awards that genuinely left me with a lump in my throat. I’ve wondered many times if it’s really possible to run a business as mum to small children and the award winners show that you can achieve amazing things as a mum. It was wonderful to see Sam and Helen of Mums The Boss win the best Business Support Award and to finally meet so many mumpreneurs that I’ve got to know on Facebook and Twitter.

A highlight for me was that I finally met my co-author, Antonia Chitty. We’ve written the book Start A Family Friendly Business together but hadn’t actually met face-to-face until yesterday! This is a video of us together at the conference…

So what will I be taking away from the conference? As I mention in the video, this event proved to me that we simply can’t do this alone. It’s so easy to sit at home, making your thing and selling it over the internet and feel like it’s you against the world. Not only is it crazy to try to do it all alone when there are so many people waiting out there to help, you simply aren’t going to get very far on your own. We all need to connect with other people in many ways: to outsource, to start joint ventures, to take on projects that we don’t have the time or skills to tackle alone or simply to get the word out about what we do.

I asked Amanda and Laura just how they managed to run a business each, bring up almost seven children between them AND organise the awards. Of course there is a lot of hard work and organisation involved, but what really stood out was that they work so well together. They really understand each others’ strengths and divide the tasks between them according to those strengths.

I can’t wait for next year! Maybe I’ll see you there?

(Big thanks to Wini for agreeing to be our camera-person on the spur of the moment – you did a brilliant job!)