Last week, I will be honest, I felt a bit lost. The kids had been at home with me for three weeks, my husband had been working super long hours and I felt like it had been months since I had been able to do any work at all.
I noticed all the things that other businesses were doing – launching new products, speaking at events and posting endless Instagram stories (#addictedtostories). I wasn’t jealous of them, rather I felt I should be doing all that too.
I am not one for wallowing, so I did two things. Maybe these will help when you get distracted by the business next store?
Firstly I went to the monthly SheBusiness forum (part of the scholarship myself and two other awesome female business women won last year). It is a very open environment, so I felt comfortable sharing these feelings. The support and ideas I received following from my admission helped me flick the bad feelings away and get busy with trying a few things. This is #notsponsored, but I am encouraging you to be open about these feelings as, in my experience, openness and honesty always pays off. (Or maybe I am just an #oversharer ).
Opening up made me realise (again) that my time would be wasted on doing what other businesses do. Launch parties look fun, but with my home body nature I would struggle to give parties the promotion they need. Speaking at events? Something I’d love to do when things are more settled at home. Stories,? Well, I try.
The second thing I did – always the list lover – was to take note of four things:
- How do the bulk of my clients hear about me?
- How much time do I spend nurturing the marketing channel identified above?
- Where does the majority of my profit come from?
- What do I do to nurture and grow that part of my business?
When I took the time to think about this, and reflect on the advice I was given at SheBusiness, I was excited about my business again. I had a plan of action for the month ahead, a lot of which I could start before the kids went back to school.
AND, because I LOVE designing templates, I built one for the process I went through above. I will be sharing this template with my newsletter group next week. Be sure to sign up (on the right of this text!). I promise you I won’t spam you, I just want you to have fun, pretty planners for your business because you all know how happy I am when I see small businesses succeed.
Have a great day,
Eliza