Business Plus Baby

March 11, 2019

Striking A Balance

When you work from home either as a solopreneur or because of a negotiated agreement with your work, it can sometimes feel like you’re caught in a twilight world – not quite office-based professional, but not quite ready to sit around in your pyjamas all day. This feeling can become even more exaggerated when you have extra duties to take care of, such as taking kids to school, or the child minder and you always have one eye on the clock.

How can you make working from home feel normal and retain a degree of professionalism? We take a look at some top tips to get home and remote workers in the right frame of mind.

Accept Reality

You might really want to do and achieve everything, but the truth is that’s going to be easier said than done and there are times when something has to give. If you feel like you’re constantly failing to live up to your own or other’s expectations, then it’s time to rethink those expectations. If you have a limited number of hours in your working day, then you will have to accept that there is only so much you can do. Once you accept this, you’ll find it far easier to prioritise a time sensitive such as organising your digital printing from RCSDigitalPrinting.com over replying to an email that can wait until tomorrow.

And it’s creating priorities which is at the heart of working from home. This can be made easier with a solid routine in place, avoiding that feeling of panic when you walk back through the door after the school run and wondering how your day is going to unfold.

Be Even More Organised

Home workers need to be even more organised than their office-based counterparts. With no one there to remind you, those phone conferences can be easily forgotten. And because you are away from colleagues, there are likely to be even more of them. Whether you live for the smell of new stationery or love an app that syncs all your calendars, make sure you keep up to date with tasks.

Remember You

You are more than just a worker and parent, you are still you and there are times when you need to make your mental and physical health top priority. You won’t function properly as either a worker or a parent if you’re not feeling great, so make sure you put yourself first every now and again. Take a break from the screen and go for a walk, hand over the baby and go for a run, just whatever it takes to restore a little equilibrium in your life.

There are so many advantages for home-based working but some key concepts that need to be put into place before you find yourself lost in a sea of emails and deadlines. Choose priorities that make your life easier and place your well being at the top of the agenda for a work life balance that doesn’t neglect either side.

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March 11, 2019

Entrepreneurship In The Twenty First Century

If you’re a millennial, the chances are that you don’t remember the accounting books and filing cabinets of ye olden days. This was a time when scientific calculators and ‘doing the books’ literally meant opening your accounts book, working out your sums and writing down your tax obligations. Nowadays, things have shifted dramatically. Technology has enabled businesses in all industries and of any shape or size to become more efficient, more profitable and more successful. To make your startup a viable money making venture, you need to compete with your rivals using the technology available to you. Take a look to see if your business is fit for the twenty first century.

Finances

While you might still keep the hard copies of your receipts and you have a ring binder full of invoices, you don’t need to become bogged down in paper. While this might serve as giving you peace of mind should the cloud one day disappear, you needn’t worry. Even the government is welcoming the twenty first century with open arms with its Making Tax Digital scheme. This means that by April 2019 every single entrepreneur, freelancer, and small business will need to send its updates to HMRC digitally. This makes your business more efficient, it helps record keeping remain streamlined and it’s also good for the environment. Accounting software ranges from the basic and free software to the lucratively expensive advanced pieces of kit. Find one that suits your venture and stick with it.

Analysing Data

With the range of free online analytical pieces of software now available, you are able to monitor your website from anywhere in the world. Google Analytics allows you to track a multitude of useful pieces of data relevant to your site’s traffic and visitors. At the click of a mouse, you are able to see the most popular pages on your website, the country where most traffic is coming from, what is referring this traffic and the sorts of search terms that your visitors are using. This helps you reinforce and adapt your search engine optimisation strategy accordingly. If certain search terms are being used, you can replicate these keywords on more pages and start to embed them into your social media posts.

Social Media

The explosion of social media has been one of this century’s major advancements. Your online presence is now easier to craft than ever with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all offering something to the entrepreneurial market. If you work in a visual sector such as graphic design or photography, Instagram could be perfect to showcase your work and attract new clients. Facebook business pages and Twitter feeds allow you to converse with your customers on a more meaningful level and can allow you to communicate to a global audience. If you are a prolific social media user, transfer this into your business persona and seduce your potential market with your wares and services.

The twenty first century is seeing business technology developing rapidly. Ensure that you are at the forefront of this expansion.

Image: Pxhere

March 11, 2019November 27, 2019

How has your office changed since you started your career?

It’s thirty years since I first set foot in an office and it’s incredible how much has changed in that time. British Gas have created an infographic of the evolution of the office since 1700, and I’m sure a time traveller from 1700 wouldn’t even recognise our offices today. One interesting fact is that the typewriter was invented in 1867 – did you know they’d been around that long? I didn’t.

My first experience of an office was when I had two weeks of work experience as a 15-year-old in the late eighties. One of my GCSEs was in office technology – all of which would be laughably obsolete now! – so I spent two weeks as an administrator in the sales department of an engineering company. At that time staff could smoke at their desks, which would seem very strange today, not to mention it being illegal! The most obvious difference was the technology, though. There was no Internet or email, so a large part of the administrator’s role was typing up letters and memos, then circulating them.

The only electronic communication we had was a telex, used mainly for international messages. I had to type up my message on a computer, save it to a very large floppy disk, then walk down two floors to the only computer which was attached to the telex line. This was fairly cutting edge because until that time telexes had essentially been typewriters connected to a phone line. As far as I know there was no fax machine in the building.

By the time I was temping during my university holidays, around five years later, there was a PC on each admin person’s desk, running Windows, and we had a fax machine. As far as I can remember the PCs were used as little more than advanced typewriters. Files were printed on paper and kept in ring binders. I don’t remember any server where you could save files that could be accessed by other members of staff.

Working from home was unusual at that time, partly because it wasn’t part of the culture of most workplaces but also because the technology didn’t exist to make it feasible. If all the files you needed to do your job were on a shelf in the office, then you needed to be there too.

Fast forward to my first proper desk job in 1995 and we finally had email. But only one computer in the department was connected to the server, so you had to use that computer every time you wanted to send an email. Most internal communication was on paper and to contact someone outside the organisation we used the phone or post. I had my first peek at the Internet in 1995. I thought it was interesting but I couldn’t really understand what I’d use it for other than as a kind of encyclopaedia. How things have changed!

As you can see from the infographic, the Internet has created a revolution in the way we work. The Internet exploded in the 1990s, going from 500,000 users in 1989 to 248 million in 1999. But it’s not just the availability and the connectivity of the tech that’s made things possible, it’s the cost of the equipment.

By 1998 I’d changed jobs. I had a computer on my desk with email and internet access, which was a huge step forward. But I travelled a lot for work and the small business that employed me couldn’t justify a laptop for me as they were about £2000 each at the time. And that laptop would have been much less powerful than the smartphone an average teenager owns today! By 2001 I was a freelance software trainer and had to buy my own laptop, a mid-range one for £1000 which was still a lot of money at the time.

As the 21^st century moved on, Internet speeds became faster, devices became cheaper and mobile technology progressed at a rapid pace. All of this has enabled me to work from home when I had two young children in a way that wouldn’t have been possible ten years before. For us self-employed mums our offices can be anywhere from the kitchen table once the kids are in bed to a soft-play centre in the school holidays. I feel incredibly lucky that that this era in home working and technology happened to fall at the time when I had a young family as it’s given me an ‘office’ and a business that I could only have dreamt of at the start of my career.

How has your office changed since you started your career?

March 6, 2019

Why you need a system to manage your leads

Did you start your business because you wanted to do more of what you love? Maybe you love designing websites or running kids’ parties, for example. Or perhaps being able to work flexibility was your main motivator? These are typical reasons for parents starting businesses.

It’s fair to say most parent business owners are not driven by the desire to sell! Selling for most is just a part of business life, for some it’s an activity they have to grit their teeth to get through. This can be a problem, because – despite all the messages you get from small business experts about following your passion and making a difference in the world – the central activity in a business is selling. No sales, no money, no business.

It also means that many parents start businesses feeling – at best – unfamiliar with sales activities and terminology like leads, prospects, conversion and pipelines. Yet collecting and managing leads is vital if you’re going to eventually make a sale. Making sure you nurture your leads so they become prospects is the next step and keeping your pipeline full is crucial to avoid nerve-wracking periods with no sales.

So what is a lead? A lead is someone who may become a buyer at some point in the future and can be located in many different ways including your website, advertising, trade shows and many other marketing methods. Because leads can arrive in by many different routes, very small business owners sometimes find themselves responding to them as an when they arrive – an email here, a phone call there, a chat at a networking event over there.

The problem is that it’s easy to lose information like phone numbers, forget email addresses and even forget to respond in a timely way to requests. And if you don’t respond promptly they may buy from another business that does. If you have an inbox that’s driving you crazy then it may be because you don’t have an effective system for managing your leads. In fact, lead handling is so important that there are entire companies set up to do just this, such as Pronexis.

And what’s the best way to handle leads? Well, you could use an Excel spreadsheet, but there are tools designed specifically for managing leads known as customer relationship management systems (CRMs) Hubspot CRM is a good example. Some even have free plans, so it won’t cost you a penny to give them a try.

Here’s what you do. When a new lead comes your way, perhaps they found you on social media or someone mentioned your name to them, you put their contact details and a note of what they said in your CRM. The lead says they need to go away and have a think before they buy, so you then set yourself a reminder (in the CRM) to get back in touch with them if they haven’t come back to you within (say) a week. That way no information is lost and you won’t forget to contact them.

CRMs will do far more than this, for example you can enter your entire sales process and track your progress towards your sales targets if you want to. But simply setting up a CRM and using it consistently to manage leads is a huge step forward from relying on a notepad and bulging inbox!

Image: Free-photos

February 27, 2019February 26, 2019

A Guide To Setting Up A Home Business

Now more than ever people are setting up their own home businesses and it is easy to see why. Running a home business puts you in control, and it means that you do not have the stress of commuting into work each day – this is particularly beneficial for those that live in remote areas, new parents and anyone with other large responsibilities. While it certainly has its perks, running a home business also has a few unique challenges that it is important to be aware of so that you know how to manage these. Here are a few helpful ideas if you are thinking of setting up a home business.

Separate Home & Business

One of the biggest challenges that people face no matter what type of home business they operate is being able to separate your home and business. The best approach is to have an area dedicated to business which is away from distraction and to try and keep regular office hours. Make sure that people in the house know that when you are in your office that you shouldn’t be distracted.

Home Office

Leading on from this, you will also need to take the time to get set up with a home office that allows you to comfortably work throughout the day. This means that it needs to be a spacious room with plenty of light, you will need a comfortable office chair and ergonomic equipment. What equipment you will need will depend on what your industry is but it is always worth shopping around online to find the best deals. As an example, most businesses will need to do a fair amount of printing and you can find high-quality Epson ink cartridges for low prices online which will be much cheaper than buying in-store.

Schedule Time Out Of The House

When you run a home business, it can be very easy to get cabin fever if you do not get out of the house. It is for this reason why you should schedule time out of the house during the working day even if it is just to go for a walk or to have coffee with a client. Many people find it beneficial to take a walk at the end of the day to get out and to separate home and business (see above).

Develop A Routine

One of the great aspects of running a home business is that it is highly flexible and you are the boss. While this has its perks, it is also a good idea to have a routine so that you can achieve what you need to each day. Additionally, you may need to tell people that just because you are at home does not mean that you are available as work must come first.

Running a home business can be highly enjoyable and there are many advantages, so it is easy to see why so many people are setting up home businesses. It can also be a unique challenge and very different from any other type of work but the above information should help you to get up and running.

Image: Life-of-pix