Gold Medal Minded

In previous posts I’ve discussed the necessity for a business plan.  The goal of a business plan is to get your awesome thoughts on paper.  Not only does it help to get investors to invest their hard earned cash on your superior idea, but it also shows that you are intentional.  You are already proving yourself active and concientious (at least more than most) simply by putting the pen, or more likely the printer, to the paper.

When athletes train for the Olympics, they often perform a series of mental exercises.  They imagine themselves crossing the finish line in first place; they envision themselves performing perfectly in front of the judges.  Golfers are known to watch professionals swing their clubs nearly perfectly over and over to engrain the perfect strokes into their minds.  When they go onto the green. themselves, these images will be easily recalled and the golfer is more likely to perform better.  This mental imagry is an integral part of the training for professional athletes because they have the goal of winning the gold in their heads.

As a mompreneur, you also need to have your goals defined and you need to write them down so as to impress them upon your brain.  There are no dreams in the business world.  There is hard work, self-discipline and the willingness to follow the plan you set forth.  Your hopes for your grand business idea are just that until you put them in writing.  Once they are written down, your brain then understands that you are no longer wishing and it shifts into gold medal gear.

Here’s an exercise for you to jump start your goal setting/business plan:

1. Write down your wildest vision of where you would like to see your business in 10 years.
2. Break down your vision into one and five year goals.  (i.e. Rock the World Cradles, LLC will net $100,000 to pay employees in 10 years.  RTWC, LLC will have a storefront and warehouse with $500,000 in inventory in 5 years.  RTWC, LLC will have a strong online presence, one employee and $150,000 of inventory in 1 year)
3. Write down 15 things that will help you get to your 10 year goal.  No matter how insignificant they may seem, write them down.
4. Choose one of the 15 things you wrote down every day and do something intentionally to work toward reaching that goal.  (i.e. hire an accountant, secure real estate, open a bank account, etc.)
5. Reassess your list monthly and mark things off as you complete them.  As you mark one off, be sure to replace it with another item that will help you toward your 10 year goal.

Go make your dreams reality!

Image used with permission CC 2.0

The Timer is Your Friend

As a mom, your time is invaluable.  How do you manage to get it all done?  Juggling your business, your family and your own self-preservation is more than a full-time job!  The best tool you will ever invest in is a tried and true kitchen timer or “egg timer” as my grandma used to call it.  At first you might expect a timer to be a little like micromanaging your life but I think it will actually free you up to get more done with your days.

I was asked to be a guest writer on a popular mom blog about 2 months ago.  The owner told me all the things she was looking for and gave me the “d-word” (aka:  deadline).  The deadline she requested was about 3 weeks from the day she requested the article.  No problem.  I had plenty of time!  Do you know when I finished the article?  A few minutes before midnight on deadline night.

Why is this?  Why do we procrastinate?  If she’d given me a year, I’d probably have taken 364.5 days.  If she’d asked me to do a rush post ready for print in 48 hours, I likely could have done that, too!  The point is, most of us work well under pressure.  The egg timer is your new pressure.  It’s your deadline.  Set it for 15 minutes and stop working when it goes off.  That’s right – walk away from the work.  Work hard, focus for 15 minutes and then be done for the next 15.  Your kids will learn to believe you when you tell them you need “5 more minutes” and then you’ll play.

After 15 minutes of working your business, try 15 minutes of working for your family.  For 15 minutes, put together a puzzle or read a book with your kids.  Take a brisk walk or start dinner, but only for 15 minutes!  You’ll be amazed to find you really can change a diaper, peel the potatoes for dinner and wash the dishes in only 15 minutes.  The difference is the focus time.  There is mild pressure and you meet the deadline.

Try it – I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

The Postal Person Cometh

It’s nearly May and April showers apparently, grow higher U.S. postage stamp prices.  Look for the $0.02 increase (from 42¢ to 44¢) on May 11th, 2009.  And, be sure to watch for it again next May, and again the following May….you see the pattern, right?  April taxes – May stamp price increases.  Gotta love the government in the Spring!

The silver lining behind this dreary seasonal storm is that Express Mail & Priority Mail will NOT be affected by this rate hike.  Dance in the rain, fellow business owners, until you remember that these shipping prices were already increased in January 2009.

How are you adjusting your business to deal with these financial impacts?

There’s a Sidewalk in my Flowerbed!

We can all relate as mothers and business owners to the “best laid plan” mentality, can’t we?  Good ideas for blogging, gaining new clients, carrying a new product or creating a newsletter are swimming all around us as we peruse the infrastructure of the web.  We get revved up and excited!  We see greatness at our feet!  And then, well, life happens.  The baby gets a fever, the dishwasher springs a leak, and the car gets a flat tire.  How does our business compete with life?  What happened to all those superb ideas of success that we almost put into action?

These are the detours that as entrepreneurs, we must learn to take.  Notice, I didn’t say road blocks.  When you get ready to plant a lovely garden, you first plan.  You plan your seeds, your layout, the pH of your soil, fertilizer, full or partial sun/shade, and spacing of your plants.  You gather your materials – gloves, trowel, kneeling pad, seeds and dirt and head out to the plot.  What happens if you start to dig and hear “chink” as your shovel hits something that doesn’t budge?  Do you trash your plants and equipment?  Of course not!  You dig around or under your new-found obstacle or you move your garden.  You are forced into Plan B.  This is life.

Life throws us the old sidewalks under the layer of dirt where we’d plotted our lovely business to grow and flourish.  To be successful mompreneurs, we must learn the art of detours. 

Your business plan will help in these situations.  As Woody says in Toy Story when discussing moving buddies for the big transition, “If you don’t have one, GET ONE!”  You must have a plan.  You never know when you’ll unearth the sidewalk just before planting season.

Curb Appeal

You know the old saying about a picture, right?  Well, picture this – Home Page – store logo at the top followed by this text.  (I  HAD to change the name of the store and the city/state to avoid embarrassing them.)

STORE NAME is located in CITY, STATE. We carry stylish maternity wear and children’s clothing, unique gifts, high quality children’s furnishings, daddy gear, and cool toys.We also provide Gift Registries so please email, call or stop by and register your event with us – we’ll make it easy for you!

Seriously?  Even when your site is under construction, you can do a better job than that! 

Your homepage is the door to your store.  It’s where you roll out the proverbial red carpet for your customers.  How long they stay at your “place” depends a lot on what they see on your home page. 

You never get a second chance, ya know?

Your Address is Your Calling Card

In your home, how do you make sure to keep the electricity and water turned on?  Simple answer – pay the bill.  But, what if they never sent you a bill?  It wouldn’t take long with your family in the dark and without running water for you to get in touch with these companies to sort out why you hadn’t received their mandate for your money.  Is there a glitch in their system?  Do they have your name and address correct?  If the address is wrong, you can guarantee Mr. Smith three blocks over will NOT be paying your bill! 

Location is all important – think real estate.  The location of your brick and mortar store…

• are you close in proximity to a competitor
• is it easy to access the road from your parking lot
• is there ample parking close to your store front or will you share space with other businesses
• are the grounds kept clean and free from shrubs and trees that could inhibit the presentation of your business or make it difficult for customers to see to pull into traffic
• can your business be seen from the main road or is it nestled in the back
• how much window space do you have
• are there sidewalks, ramps, stairs, elevators, etc. allowing all types of customers easy access to your front door
• will your signage be cluttered with many other businesses
• will you be found in the Yellow Pages

….website…..in this case your address IS your business….

• is your web address unique
• is your web address so unique no one will be able to remember it
• will you have a .biz, .net, .com or other suffix
• how often is your hosting company down
• does your hosting company provide backups of your site included in the fee they charge
• can you register more than one domain name with your account
• will you have an address that advertises another business (i.e. “www (dot) YourBusinessName (dot) YourDomain’sBusinessName (dot) com”
• is the design attractive
• is there ample white space
• do your eyes naturally gravitate to the most important part of the site
• is it too busy
• is the navigation easy

Get trusted friends who have a little interest in the items you are selling, to look at your store or your site and give you honest feedback.  (If your store sells  fishing tackle, don’t get your diva girlfriend to give you advice.)  Be ready for their feedback.  You’ve put a lot of work into your store once it gets to this point and any suggestions others make may seem like negativity to you.  Write down their comments and assess each one with an open mind.

Name is on the Mailbox…correctly!

When I was graduating from college I wanted to get some of those neatly printed cards with my full name on them to send out with my announcements.  I called the local print shop and explained what I wanted and they took down my information.  A week later, I went to pick up my pretty cards.  Unfortunately, the company left off the first three letters of my first name.  What?  When I kindly brought the error to their attention they blamed ME saying I spelled MY name wrong over the phone.  Are you kidding me?  After 20-some odd years of spelling my name THEY are claiming I mispelled my own name?  Needless to say, I got my money back and had no cool cards to send to my friends and family.  I should also mention, I never did business with them again and I was sure to tell all my friends what happened.

 How many times have you received certificates or awards with your name spelled incorrectly?  As a child, my brother and I had a last name of German desent.  OH MY!  You wouldn’t believe how creative the YMCA Soccer League and public school system could be!  Our poor 5-letter last name was murdered with every perfect attendence certificate, honor roll award and first place trophy we received!  Why didn’t they take the time to double check to be sure they spelled our names right?  It showed us they were that disinterested in us as people because they wouldn’t check it twice.  Even Santa does THAT!  (On the bright side, at least they didn’t blame us like the printing company did.)

In business, obviously, you can’t be perfect.  What you can do is double and triple check.  Get a little OCD for your customer’s sake.  Let them know they are NOT a number or too unimportant to justify that you were sure to spell their name correctly and get their address right.  In the business world, we rely heavily on computer databases and spell check systems – wonderful tools!  Certainly, though, you’ve witnessed in your personal life how these tools are not foolproof.  For example, “I am very detail-oreinted” or “I am a rabid typist.” 

Mistakes happen – just be extra careful in your customer service dealings to get it write, errrr, right.

(For your reading pleasure, there are several spelling errors within this post.  Can you find them?)

Measure Twice, Cut Once

My father is not in the construction field professionally, however, as a dad he found himself quite knowledgeable in a construction environment.  Small projects gave way to larger projects and eventually, my patriarch found himself building a house for his family to live.  Dad made plenty of unwanted dents with a hammer, ruined his share of expensive materials my mistake and learned how to salvage a project when all seemed lost…sometimes.  Regardless if the 2×4 was destroyed beyond repair or the shingles littered with a dozen misplaced nail holes, my dad adopted a mantra of sorts that is not uncommon in the construction business.  His philosophy:  “Measure twice.  Cut once”

Like so many others builders, it didn’t take too many “oopses” for my pop to discover prevention of the error is much more simple than trying to put the pieces together after a mistake.  What he passed on to me was that the foundation of the project is the key.  Don’t rush through the time consuming, sometimes boring steps of the project to get to the more exciting parts and be done the fastest.  If you happen to cut it too long, it won’t fit and you will need to take the time to cut it again.  On the other hand, if you cut it too short…well, there’s not usually a whole lot of easy solutions than to “go back to the drawing board.”

Same thing with your new, potential business.  Measure it at least twice.  Talk your numbers over with a trusted friend or colleague.  Search out someone you respect not only to keep your new business idea quiet, but also someone with a sharp brain.  You need someone who will challenge your thought process about your business plan.  Make sure you put it in writing.  Think about it.  Think about it some more.  Add new thoughts to the original plan.  Submit it to your trusted friend.  Let them think about it.  Let them think about it some more… Do you see how this works?  Slow and steady, tortoise.

Don’t feel pressured because of a rumor that someone else in town is opening a store that will service the very need you just discovered.  Your speed to “beat them to it” will likely cost you in the long run.  Any errors not accounted for in the “measuring” (i.e. planning) process will be painfully obvious once the “cut” is made.

Let’s Be Backdoor Friends

In the last decade, I have personally owned three businesses.  Though I hold a bachelor’s degree and have taken a few grad classes, none of my studies had anything to do with the business world.  If I’d only had a crystal ball showing that I would only work for two years in my chosen field and then spend the remainder of my work-world as an entrepreneur…  Surely a little bit of business and/or marketing education would have enhanced my profitability.  If it didn’t make me profitable, at least I may have had a fighting chance.  Maybe. 

With what few skills I took with me going into my first business, in addition to the training I sought out, when I shut it down I was feeling used, abused and generally defeated.  (Do I need to mention I was also several thousand dollars in debt?)  What had I done?  How had this happened?  I’m not a braggart, but surely it wasn’t MY fault!  Or was it?

In short, yes. 

It was my fault.  I owned the business.  My name was on the window, so-to-speak.  Though I don’t blame myself for my naivity or lack of knowledge, I do blame myself for my lack of foundation.  I had done my research.  I had thought through the options.  I had considered the possibilities.  I thought I was ready.

But where was the business plan?  Where was the proposed budget?  Was I even the person to do the job?  How would I know when I was successful?  Who will file my taxes?  How will I get my name in the hands of the right people?  What happens if I am sued?  Do I need insurance?  What do the laws of the land mean to my business?  How will I know when it’s time to “get out”?

Some of these questions I did ask myself and thought I’d sufficiently answered.  Some of these questions never entered my scope of thought.  These and many more need to be thought through before you lose your hat to your personal dream of owning your own business.

Place Welcome Mat Here

Greetings and salutations!  Welcome to a knowledge (or lack thereof) dump – you get to decide.  If you like what you learn – share with everyone you know!  If you don’t like it – why are you still reading? 

I am open to debates.  I don’t claim to have all the answers.  I have learned through successes and failures and want to share what I have learned.  You may already know what I have to share.  Feel free to share what you know, too!