Copyright Sophia King 2012

Running a solo-business isn’t always easy for busy women, especially when you’re working from home. Whether you have a heavy work load or don’t have enough work, both can be stressful. When adding a new work project or a domestic crisis into the equation, what do most of us do? We work all hours, doing whatever needs to be done and it is so easy to forget looking after No 1 … YOU!

But when you are juggling work with looking after sick children or older relatives, it can seem impossible to take even a couple of hours off! 

There are two key strategies that can make a huge difference to your sanity: Letting go of non-urgent tasks and asking for help. Both will help you to clear some important me-time in your hectic day and could even prevent long-term stress.

Once you have a bit of breathing space, try the following tips which are based on a principle that is actually quite simple, if not obvious: Sometimes the quickest route to achieving time out is doing the opposite of what you normally do. Let me show you what I mean by that:

• If work means being tuned in to email and phone calls, why not switch off your computer, tablet and mobile. Alternatively put your mobile on silent - if necessary prepare your work contacts or leave an appropriate voice mail. If you are in a position to delegate, this is the time to do it.

• Have an early night instead of a late night, or vice versa, and then watch that DVD or read the book you’ve wanted to get into for some time. Likewise, you can get up early if you’re a late starter, or if your me-time is at the week-end, have a lie-in instead.

• If you usually plan your activities, this time don’t plan your time off! Instead allow yourself to drift, day-dream, shop, sleep, exercise or do whatever you fancy. If you usually rush around all the time, even if it’s to the hairdresser or gym, then it helps to have a slow day every so often. On the other hand, if planning work and life is not something you enjoy, try to plan your down-time in advance for a change and see what it’s like!

• Make time for friends, if you don’t see them much. But if you do see them regularly, make sure that this time, you have some time on your own.

• If you usually cook, don’t. Instead involve your partner, or any older children in improving their own cooking skills! If you normally make do with fast food, ready-made meals or takeaways, try cooking something completely from scratch. Some of my own time-out activities involve baking or making jam and chutney, something I find very relaxing!

It is worth experimenting with a change of routine now and again, as you’ll be surprised how everyone around you can benefit, not just you!

———————-

Similar posts:

Running a home-based business? Here are 5 ways to stop life getting in the way!

How to stop a personal crisis impacting a home-based business

Hurricanes and Storms- How is turbulence affecting your solo-business?

Ute Wieczorek-King is an experienced trainer, mentor and business coach who specialises in helping busy women to be more visible, focused, effective and profitable in business. Ute also runs Success Network and the Inner Circle Mentoring Groups:   http://www.successnetwork.org.uk

The first thing that strikes us (apart from the fact that everything is purple, a first-rate colour choice) is that everything is geared up to the customer. The friendly smile from the receptionist, drinks on arrival, and when it’s our turn my friend bustles us into her treatment room immediately inquiring about the result of the event we had discussed the last time we were here.

Time is taken so that the treatment is not rushed. The conversation is always geared around our interests, and I particularly noted how my friend immediately slotted into the correct mode of communication with my daughter, speaking her language and acting as a good listener or ready give advice wherever needed. And since I pay for both my daughter and I, one of the treatments is complimentary.

What shouldn’t be done

So many businesses don’t understand that they take second or even a lower place where the customer is concerned. Looking at the About pages in their website (if they’ve been properly written) you’ll probably find they prattle on about how brilliant the business is and what it does. These sort of business owners are more likely to turn you off by delivering boring, self-centered elevator pitches, dominating any 1:1 opportunities, and thrusting their business card under your nose without bothering to look at yours.

Wake up to the 21st century

But now it’s important to progress further with marketing and sales by understanding that the customer is king, and everything needs to be geared towards that. Any communication, whether off- or online, should not say anything about the company at all. All references should be made concerning the customer, their needs, desires and wants, what benefits they could be getting, and the results from those benefits or products provided.

The language used should always reflect what the customer wants to hear. Sometimes you don’t even mention the product’s name, as that is not as important as much as the problem it solves and how it makes the customer feel after they’ve experienced it – in fact, the positive end result is the first thing you should be concentrating on and publicising from the beginning.

Use selfishness to your advantage

Customers are notoriously self-centered (like the old fashioned business owners), so why not take full advantage of this? By pandering to their desires, making them feel special, providing added value and something for nothing, you’ll turn their heads into your direction to take more notice of you. Anybody will react favourably if they feel the centre of attention, and all their needs are met immediately.

Therefore how you promote your business should be totally customer and positive result biased. Your website’s homepage should present the benefits or whatever the customer is looking for, rather than show the products or services on offer. If the customer immediately relates to what they can get from you, and totally desires or needs it, then they will look for the product or service that provides that benefit, feeling, lifestyle or whatever.

Why isn’t this done from the beginning?

I find this is particularly true when you dig deep into a business through the opportunity of a 1:1. If they had marketed the end result of their business from the beginning, you wouldn’t have needed to ask so many probing questions that revealed the most interesting and unexpected answers. Sometimes there are many benefits that are not obvious from the outside, but could easily be promoted in the top layer if they had been more customer focused, and could easily have drawn in a much larger audience and customer response.

–oo0oo–

About the author:
Alice Elliott is a digital marketer and blogger, who runs the Fairy Blog Mother, an educational website resource that trains, explains and creates awareness about blogs. Find out what she can offer you regarding blogs and digital marketing at http://fairyblogmother.co.uk

As my maternal grandparents had owned a large village shop and dairy supplying several villages with everything farmers needed in their homes, my mother had learnt to wear a business hat from a very young age. And when she left school as a teenager, she was sent away to be a live-in domestic apprentice in another large family business, adding further to her skills.

So it is understandable that a life of domesticity may not have fulfilled my mother’s ambitions. She felt lonely, surrounded by competitive neighbours and girlfriends who judged each other by how ‘spick and span’ their houses were. Social convention in our small town discouraged married women with children from working outside the family and if they did, many people thought it sent out the message that the husband wasn’t able to provide for the family.

And so as a way of coping with this limitation, my mother took responsibility for the family finances when we were young. She scrimped and saved, putting us children in handed-down clothes, and renting out the spare rooms in our big house which my dad had helped to build in his spare time.

Needless to say, she managed the household budget with great precision and by the time I was a teenager, we were reasonably well off and my siblings and I were well educated too. She encouraged us to be free spirited and happily engaged in what I realise now were quite challenging discussions when I was a teenager! However, although my mum was really proud of us, she was also extremely unhappy and I sensed that deep down, she always suffered from an underlying frustration of her own stifled potential. She knew that she was able to do all the above too easily without stretching herself or ever feeling challenged!

As I grew up my mother was a great role model: I learnt both how I wanted and didn’t want my life to be.

When she became ill and died aged 52, she left much more than a huge gap in my life. She left me with the awareness that every person has potential and that we just cannot let that potential go to waste. Sometimes we just need to push ourselves beyond the boundaries and what we see as our limitations — whether they are within us or happen to be external.

It still saddens me that she never lived to see what I learnt from her. Not only am I very proud of my own achievements (three lovely, now grown-up children, a supportive husband and doing what I love) I’d be incredibly disappointed if I wasn’t fulfilling my potential and my ambitions every day in my own business… and pushing the boundaries too from time to time!

So, what lessons have you learnt from your mother? And what learning are you leaving for your own children?

---

Ute Wieczorek-King is an experienced mentor and business coach who specialises in helping busy women to be more more focused, effective and profitable in business. Ute runs Success Network and is co-author of “From Contact to Advocate(TM)” – a 7-step approach to developing referral relationships in business. Network with authenticity and a simple and consistent structure to generate more business!

Networking can be Fun too! Photo by Alison Crown Photography

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word ‘networking’ recently as I’ve often thought it a rather unfortunate choice of word for a people skill deemed so important in business. Whilst you may hear that ‘networking’ may help you to run your business successfully, this word really doesn’t convey the power of people and strong relationships in business.

Indeed ‘net-working’ can at times seem slightly contrived and manipulative especially when people only start to network because they desperately need new customers or a new job.

Whilst stop-start networking activities also can also add to the feast and famine syndrome in business, networking itself may be unsuccessful when speed seems of the essence. Frequently people simply fail to grasp that good relationships just cannot be rushed!

Creating strong connections with people should always start way before projects or jobs come to an end. This will ensure you are not only well-connected but that your contacts both know you and trust you, by the time you ask for help.

Indeed ‘connecting’ often works best when you are not thinking of it as ‘net-working’, i.e. when you are not working at it and don’t even realise you are doing it! When changing your thinking about networking as an activity with an objective and an outcome, you tend to drop what may be seen as a hidden agenda that can prevent the development of a real and trusting relationship.

Everyone knows that strong connections in social circles and with previous colleagues can be much more effective. Therefore if we want to improve our general ‘connecting’ skills, then it may help to become more open to ‘talking to people’ generally.

So for now, I recommend you forget about improving any specific networking strategies, and instead try to take any opportunity to connect, talk and get to know people at:

• conferences, speaker, networking and other ‘work’ related events
• your children’s schools
• social events and sporting activities
• church or when volunteering for charities
• in your doctor’s waiting room, the bus queue, or on holiday

Even when you develop relationships that are not all about ‘business’, you build up your contacts.

So to help you connect with people better:

1. make an effort to attend a larger variety of events, to increase the number of people to speak to
2. try to be approachable, or initiate conversations. Whatever type of event you attend, it may be easiest to talk to someone who looks as if they are also on their own
3. show interest in people by asking lots of open questions
4. don’t underestimate the power of small talk, particularly at the beginning of a conversation.

Like with any new skill, the more you practise, the more natural you will become. By making the switch to becoming a people person who is genuinely interested in others and in making friends, you will get to understand the true essence of connecting to build powerful relationships, rather than just the mere act of ‘networking’.

Ute Wieczorek-King is an experienced trainer, mentor and business coach who specialises in helping busy women to be more more focused, efficient, productive and profitable in business. Ute is co-author of networking manual “From Contact to Advocate” – a 7-step approach to developing referral relationships in business.  Network with authenticity and a simple and consistent structure to generate more business!

PS This post was first published in May 2010.

PS These shoes were designed for Success Network in 2006 by illustrator Sarah Wimperis http://www.sarahwimperis.co.uk/

For as long as traumatic events like the tsunami or an earthquake were fresh in people’s minds, fundaising was quite easy for us. But three years later, I had to apologize to the representative from an Indian charity we were supporting, because our recent fundraising results left much to be desired. Initial sponsors – major global organizations – had started to support just one chosen cause and private people now seemed to lack the motivation and the emotional connection to help them identify strongly with our causes.

My contact who was an ex-Bhuddist monk, told me, “I’m sorry to hear that things were not going as planned lately. It’s always like that. Sometimes you work hard for a while, and you wonder if it’s worth it, but then you strike lucky and everything is nice again. There isn’t much we can do but try hard and leave the rest in the hands of Lord. When I lived in Germany, we used to say: einfach weitermachen (just carry on).”

And so ‘einfach weitermachen’ we did, and we achieved an encouraging result the following year, because we simply accepted that things weren’t as they had been, and adjusted our strategy accordingly.

My experience was by no means unique; for small charities everywhere things seem to have changed. I’ve also noticed, however, that no matter how hard things are for charities, they don’t lose their vision or their passion easily, as their purpose tends to be strong and crystal-clear.

Since the economic downturn started a few years ago, small businesses everywhere may have also been shunned by bigger organizations, customers or suppliers.

‘Direction’ Copyright 2013 Success Network

But during challenging times, our vision, passion and purpose can so easily get forgotten by those who carry on as they’ve always done!

Since successful people seem to understand where they are heading and why, try to tap into the long-term vision for your small business and think deeply about your purpose and who you can help most right now.

Clarifying your future direction and the reasons why you do what you do, will help you to grow new motivation and enthusiasm which will help you to engage passionately with your potential customers!

For me, having a purpose and passion in business is far more important than just making money!  Having a true purpose underpins everything you do, and will keep you fired up through all the ups and downs in your small business.  So why not stake a claim on purpose and passion as key ingredients for your business? Don’t just leave this to the charitable sector!

About the author: Ute Wieczorek-King helps busy female entrepreneurs to be visible, effective and profitable in business. 

Read Ute’s daily business tips on Facebook (Success Network Recipes) or visit the Success Network website and sign up for a free ebook with lots of tips for solopreneurs!

PS This blog was first published in October 2010.

To ordinary folk followers are measured in a visible number of how many people have ‘friended’ you in Facebook, clicked on the ‘like’ button on your Facebook page, signed up to be able to read your tweets or connected successfully in LinkedIn. These statistics are separate to each social media platform and do not cross the social divide.

Not so with WordPress. This is an interesting phenomenon, which stems from the fact that blogs are the brain or communal hub of social networking (thanks WordPress, I’ve been banging on about that for years).

Via the magic of RSS (really simple syndication, or the ability to publish in different media simultaneously) your posts can be made visible in a myriad of platforms. Therefore it is necessary to include all the followers in these other platforms into the equation.

So your followers are the ones who will receive your blog via social media (the Publicize settings), plus the subscribers that have signed up to receive the posts whenever they are published, but it doesn’t include those who have commented.

Interestingly, there is another widget that I like to use to measure popularity and engagement. It is a relatively new one, called My Community. It shows a ‘sample of users from your blog’, which includes likers, followers and commenters.

On the right is my ‘My Community’ widget in my nature blog that shows who appreciates what I have written over the past month.

It’s quite gratifying to see who has visited in a more visible form than purely the numbers in the usual statistics provided by WordPress, which I have proven does not show the whole picture anyway!

–oo0oo–

About the author:
Alice Elliott is a digital marketer and blogger, who runs the Fairy Blog Mother, an educational website resource that trains, explains and creates awareness about blogs. Find out what she can offer you regarding blogs and digital marketing at http://fairyblogmother.co.uk

Copyright 2013 Success Network

I’ve already written several articles about how to introduce yourself in a way that sounds compelling and gets your networking contacts interested in what you do. However what I have never really spelled out before is the realisation that very few people on the networking scene are actually interested in ‘what you do’.

I know from personal experience that coaches and other business consultants frequently don’t ‘get’ this: we assume that our potential clients will want to buy business services (raising my hand here!) and so we focus on what we do, perhaps combining this with superb qualifications or extensive experience.

Even if impressive, my own 20 years of experience as a business owner may not necessarily be enough to convince my contacts and potential clients to be interested in me. Whilst my experience may help me to stand out from my competitors – together with other ways in which I may be different- these just help my potential client decide who can solve their problem best. 

So, what you need to be able to understand when talking to people, are their real concerns and worries. Concerns such as …

• “I have too much to do, am stressed and don’t enjoy my work like I used to.”
• “My finances are in a mess and I don’t know what to do about it”
• “My business doesn’t seem to be growing.”

Whilst most solopreneurs know their problems (intimately) few of them actually think consciously they want to hire an accountant/ business coach/ marketer/ virtual assistant.

You can apply the above thinking to any business- people don’t really care that much about what you do. What they do care about is their problem, and if you’re lucky, that this problem causes them the kind of pain that makes them desperate to find a solution.

But please don’t get too excited yet – in my experience not everybody with a specific, even serious problem wants outside help for their micro-business. Many solopreneurs, in an attempt to solve their own problem, will rather take the risk of greater pain than to be seen to be needing help. Sad but true!

So even when you can see they need you, they may not want your help or at least not right now.

But there are two things you can do:  

The first is the sure-fire way to get the right prospective customer to sit up and be interested! Share the results that your clients have achieved with your help. Talk about convincing solutions that you have found for your clients’ problems. It is much easier for people to relate to that and make them want a bit of that too! And surprise, surprise, people then want to hear more about how YOU can help them!

And if they are indeed promising potential customers, who just don’t want your solution right now, here is the second thing you need to do:

Find a personal way to stay in touch with them. Don’t just send them your newsletter or the occasional impersonal sales email! Find a suitable way to stay connected to them so you can ensure that you are on the scene, or they remember you, as soon as they are ready to buy! 

About the author: Ute Wieczorek-King helps busy female entrepreneurs to be visible, effective and profitable in business. 

Read Ute’s daily business tips on Facebook (Success Network Recipes) or visit the Success Network website and sign up for a free ebook with lots of tips for solopreneurs!

Well, the digital world is really starting to hot up about content marketing, because as far as the search engines (Google) are concerned, it is a hit! It has succeeded in putting the cat amongst the pigeons (not necessarily the Panda amongst the Penguins) by putting all those specialist SEO marketing agencies’ noses out of joint.

Gone is the need to find out which words stimulate the search engines and then saturating your articles with them. Gone is the need to try and be clever by beating Google at their own game. Gone are the creation of boring and unreadable articles and blog posts that are totally illegible and incomprehensible all for the purpose of raising a website higher in the search stakes. Gone is the intense duplication of articles being placed around the net to increase the keyword impact with the search criteria!

Thanks goodness! The web was getting full of absolute rubbish. SEO was not helping real writers producing articles that had proper meaning, good content and exciting prose. The search engines were realising that people preferred to read conversations in social media than boring SEO-ed posts. They liked good writing styles, intelligent messages and collaborative communications, written by people like bloggers and professional copy-writers who had something worth saying.

But of course content marketing can go a bit further if you are ready for that sort of thing. Any article on the web doesn’t only have to be well written, but meaningful, authoritative, containing quality that can be consumed, experienced and then shared elsewhere. That is the crux: what information are you imparting that will make a difference to the reader, broaden their lives, tell a story they would enjoy, create awareness in a subject that wasn’t there before, give them something they can take away and act upon?  And it needs to be so good that it demands sharing and deserves being seen by a wider audience.

Content marketing needn’t be confined to just words (as neither should be blogs). People consume information in many different ways, and some better than others. If you want to capture the attention of everyone who is eligible, you need to be flexible in how you deliver your message.

Consider images (adapted into infographics, the latest trend in sharing information in an exciting, visual style), audio (it’s easy to create a podcast via Audacity or even using Siri on your iPhone) or video (captured easily on an iPad or your digital camera if it has that facility). Video can be extended into webinars and other screen-capturing mechanisms (I’ve just found one on my Mac that is totally brilliant: check out my first attempt about what is CMS), brilliant if you wish to show-case your expertise in a better light or promote your products another way.

And once you’ve made the leap and created your content marketing in a variety of methods, publish them on your blog! It’s so easy to expand from there onto your website, various social media profiles, groups and pages, newsletter lists, guest blogs – anywhere they will be seen by more people! All this will create valuable awareness of what you do, and to increase that all-important ROI, make sure the message is clear, the call to action is compelling and the links are relevant and directed to an appropriate webpage where business transactions can take place.

–oo0oo–

About the author:
Alice Elliott is a digital marketer and blogger, who runs the Fairy Blog Mother, an educational website resource that trains, explains and creates awareness about blogs. Find out what she can offer you regarding blogs and digital marketing at http://fairyblogmother.co.uk

Image courtesy of Inspirational Woman Magazine on Facebook

Reblogged from Success Network Recipes:

Your holiday is over and you’ve got to go back to work. You resist, don’t want to.  If  your ‘work’ place is your home office, you wonder if anyone would notice if you didn’t do much for a day or so? Of course, you could easily catch up once you felt a little more inspired.

That’s exactly how I felt after my last holiday.

Read more… 547 more words

One of the reasons why this is shocking is because it is a complete wasted opportunity. This is a vast area that is comparatively easy to implement that is just not happening.

In spite of a blog being classed as ‘technology’, it is not really that complicated. Many small businesses are quite happy to go onto Facebook and mess about with groups and pages, but they baulk at the word ‘blog’ because it sounds too hard to cope with.

Really there’s not much difference between a Facebook page and a blog. They should contain more or less the same information, but they will have different audiences. That’s why you should have a presence on all kinds of social media, because different people hang out on them and therefore provide a much wider audience.

And by being visible in a variety of locations will enable you to get noticed by more potential customers.

The most difficult bit is adapting your message and information you’re sharing so that it ‘fits’ in the platform you’re placing it into. How you say it on Facebook isn’t the same as on Twitter or LinkedIn, as well as a blog, because the expectations are different: style, content outcome, call to actions, methods of obtaining information, language used.

And basically if you can update your Facebook page happily on a regular basis, it’s just as easy to slightly adapt it for a blog: more words, more information, a more conversational style and the inclusion a headline and a call to action directed to a suitable webpage.

And if all of this is too much for you, then find out how to do it! Really it’s not that difficult once you’ve been shown how. Like with all things new, like learning to ride a bike or how to swim, once you’ve got the hang of it, it will become second nature. And there are plenty of tricks available to make it easier and more enjoyable for you!

So if you are one of those 87% of businesses who don’t have a blog, perhaps it’s time to redress that situation?

–oo0oo–

About the author:
Alice Elliott’s alter ego is the Fairy Blog Mother, training, explaining and creating awareness about blogs. Find out about her latest workshops for beginner bloggers at http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/workshops

Ps Apologies but I am unable to credit the source of this thought provoking picture:-( Sorry!

When starting a business most people recognise that there will be an initial period when all the cash is going out and none coming in. What is not so well understood is that, even once trading profitably, cash in the bank will not necessarily follow. In fact, in my experience even established businesses often require an overdraft at certain times in their business cycle.

Profit does not immediately result in cash because of timing differences. In most businesses you will incur your costs before receiving the revenue.

For simplicity we’ll assume the business is a shop. Stock of £1000 is purchased in the first month so the overdraft is £1000.

Stock is sold at a profit on cost of 25%. At the end of the second month all stocks are sold. The shop has received £1250 sales revenue, cost was £1000 and month 2 profit is £250.

But to continue trading shop needs to replace the stock, another £1000. The cash position at the end of month 2 is:

Month 1 overdraft                        (£1000)

Month 2 sales receipts                 £1250

Month 2 replacement stock       (£1000)

Bank overdraft month 2       (£750)

It will take some months of profitable trading to repay the overdraft. This is one reason that, when businesses apply for loans, banks will normally require cash flow as well as anticipated trading forecasts.

Perhaps counter-intuitively the more quickly your business increases, the higher the overdraft required. If shop knew it would be able to treble the month 3 sales, in month 2 stock purchases would need to be £3000.The overdraft then required would be £2750.

Over 3 months a shop with steady sales would have a profit of £500 and overdraft of £500. A shop with expanding sales would end 3 months with profits of £1000 but an overdraft of £2000.

Whatever your financing method you will need to carefully monitor your cash requirements. If you run out of cash however profitably you are trading you can run out of business.

To read a more detailed article on this topic, with illustrations, please visit http://www.bluenotesolutions.co.uk/cash-profit-and-your-growing-business/

About the author: Fiona McKenzie is the Director of Blue Note Solutions Ltd based in Oxford. Fiona helps SMEs gain clarity and control of their financial performance. She offers a complimentary Profit Improvement Review to SMEs based around Oxford and the Thames Valley.

Website:  www.bluenotesolutions.co.uk  Email: fiona@bluenotesolutions.co.uk

We all start in business with an idea, a product, a service we are so passionate about we think it is unique. Soon we find out there are many similar ones on the market and become unsure what makes ours different. Then starts the search for the marketing Holy Grail: that elusive Unique Selling Point. Much time and even money is spent on finding and perfecting the delivery of that USP in a 30-second commercial ready to roll out at every opportunity.

When listening to other people’s introductions or  ‘elevator speeches’  how often do we think what they offer is really unique?

And standing in the shoes of the person listening to you, what would they think about yours?

So, how does my product/service become the Coke or the Pepsi of my field rather than just a cola. Of course spending vast sums on promotion can help, but this is not something most of us can afford to do, and in any case, it certainly is not enough; the answer is branding.

Having a clear brand and marketing it effectively is the route to success. The misconception is that branding is something visible from the outside. In reality branding comes from within. Let’s be honest Coke and Pepsi are not that different from a product point of view, yet people are usually attracted by one, rather than the other. It is that ‘something else’ they recognise.

How clear are you about the ‘something else’ of your product or service? Can you express it simply enough so people recognise it instantly and know when to refer you to their contacts?

Hélène is an accredited bi-lingual (French) business coach-mentor/trainer who specialises in helping clients develop fresh perspectives and find a successful way forward. Hélène’s expertise is in blending a relaxed and creative approach with the structured pragmatism she has developed at senior level in multi-national organisations. To contact her please email Helene@btinternet.com

PS. This blog was first published on 1 July 2010.

Image credit http://thebettermanprojects.files.wordpress.com

In business terms this could make all the difference to your survival. Look at all the big names that have gone under this year, all because they didn’t embrace technology as it whizzed past them at breakneck speed. It seems if you haven’t totally embraced the internet and are using it to its fullest extent, you will become irrecoverably left behind, unable to catch up in time.

There is another downside to this – cost! One of the reasons I gave up being a graphic designer is because I couldn’t afford to upgrade my software every five minutes. Battling with stuff that is a year out of date meant that I wasn’t compatible with all the other firms who were. Something had to give, and it was me!

In this dog eat dog world, life can be very cruel if you are unable to keep up with the times. OK, things come and go, trends make a come-back and a good grounding in the basics will always stand you in good stead, but only if you are aware of what is new and how to cope with it.

It doesn’t help if you bury your head in the sand, or get bad advice from others who also don’t know what is going on. Usually these are those that shout the loudest, which is unfortunate, as they attract the most attention – but it is the canny business that will see through all this glitzy razzamataz and learn to recognise good value for what it really is: solid, straight-forward, uncomplicated advice with real, proven examples and a desire to help businesses rather than make money from them.

Another downside to this technology lark is that it’s very hard to understand it. There is a lot of jargon flying about, young whipper-snappers who make you feel stupid, a strange new world that doesn’t relate to anything you know. And anything that is out of this world is frightening, especially if it takes you out of your comfort zone.

Even I break out in a cold sweat when I’m confronted with something new. It’s only natural. It harps back to living in caves when anything unknown was dangerous and life-threatening. Tentatively coming out of my cave to try out some new software or system gives me the absolute frights. And usually I don’t have a nice person on hand to help me through this ordeal.

The last comment is particularly prone. It is so important to know that there is somebody else who has gone through the same ordeal, suffered on your behalf, pulled all their hair out so you don’t have to, translated this strange language into ordinary, everyday words so that you can understand it.

And why? So that you can embrace technology and not get left behind. That is so important in today’s business world. Don’t end up like a comet, jessops or woolworths. Keep abreast of what’s going on. And start today – there’s nothing like the present, isn’t there?

–oo0oo–

About the author:
Alice Elliott’s alter ego is the Fairy Blog Mother, a magical educational resource for all your blogging needs. Find out about her tuition and design services at http://fairyblogmother.co.uk

To misquote Tolstoy: “Successful business are all alike; every unsuccessful business is unsuccessful in its own way.”

This has been a recurring thought for me as I’ve watched the latest series of The Fixer with Alex Polizzi. She is focusing on family businesses – which is an additional stress factor in these cases – but each week it is the same things that are being done wrong contributing to the imminent failure of the business.

They are just being done wrong in a different way. But these businesses do have one very clear factor in common: the owners are good at what they do. Sadly, that isn’t enough to ensure their success. If you want to thrive in the 21^st century, you need to understand how to structure and run your business so that it supports what you do, you feel in control, you are confident that there aren’t ’nasty surprises’ lurking and you have time to concentrate on customers and growth.

So what makes the difference between a business that is successful and one that isn’t, if the owners are experts at what they do but they don’t have any experience or knowledge of how to manage their business to best effect?

The simple answer is that those business owners ‘don’t know what they don’t know’, but some of them recognize that fact and, as importantly, that there are people who do know. In short, they ask for help.

In the case of the firms in the TV series the owners have not only not recognized that they need help, but they also actively resist it when given. If you know how business works, it is immediately clear what their problems are and what are the solutions in all their situations. What makes this good TV is that these are businesses on the brink, their problems are long-established, and the owners don’t take advice kindly or easily.

It helps that the programme has a seemingly unlimited budget and access to top consultants, but each one of those businesses could have avoided their situations if they had asked for help a lot sooner.

This just leaves us with another question: Can any business be brought back from the edge of collapse or should some just be left to die? Well that’s a subject for another blog, but if you have a view – please leave a comment.

Susie Collings helps make businesses run better – to have higher profit margins, retain their clients and staff, win new business, easily adapt to change and grow sustainably. To find out more about Susie and Exilia please visit http://exiliabusinesstransformation.wordpress.com

If you would like to discuss any of the points raised please call on 0118 380 0545 or email info@exilia.co.uk

Helping each other (photo taken at Success Network event)

Many female solopreneurs pride themselves on being able to manage all the different roles within their business, even being able to juggle these with other family commitments.  But there comes a point when being director, bookkeeper, marketer, sales or admin person, and office cleaner becomes unsustainable and could actually threaten the success of your business.

Indeed, it may be counterproductive in the long run to spend your time micromanaging all the tedious tasks that need to be done.

If you are getting caught up in the day-to-day routine, it can be quite hard to work out when it’s time to stop juggling on your own and buy in some help. Here are a few tell-tale signs:

You are working all hours and you can’t switch off.

You are driven by wanting to do well, but somehow you can’t get it all done! When solopreneurs come to me for productivity advice they almost always want to be able to do more in less time. The trouble is, there are times when even the best productivity tips can’t help you stay on top of your task list. When you continue to miss deadlines and keep making excuses, you really need to think about employing some help!

You never have time to plan, look at the big picture and work ‘on’ the business.

This happens to many people and a client of mine summarised it as being “so pre-occupied with client work, that I just lost the overview!” The problem of losing the overview and not having a clear direction is that you could end up meandering, rather than heading to a goal. Not working enough ‘on ‘ the business can actually increase the pressure and can sometimes lead to us making the wrong decisions, which could be costly (financially and otherwise).

The pressure of working too much ‘in’ the business can even lead to stress.

Stress may not always be easy to recognise as for many of us pressure and adrenaline is part of the job. However when you consider that so many of us originally set up our businesses to have a better work-life balance, stress in your solo-business could be the first sign that you ought to get some help. Stress management may only be one way to deal with this; looking to share your workload can be the best long-term investment in your business!

You would like some help, but don’t think you have the budget or don’t know ‘which’ tasks or skills to outsource.

Always remember that if your time is taken up by too many back-office tasks then a) they won’t bring any money into the business and b) they are probably not what you set up the business for.

Considering a virtual assistant can be an excellent move as some VAs only charge increments of time which can actually be very cost-efficient.  The key is to get the kind of help that allows you to work to your real strengths!

I currently outsource all things to do with finance, websites, copywriting and editing — the things that I can’t or don’t want to do, or I’m simply not very good at! The real benefit of outsourcing and working to your strengths is that you will keep — or rediscover — the fun and passion you had when you set up your business.

A fantastic reason — and not to be sniffed at

About the author: Ute Wieczorek-King helps busy female entrepreneurs to be visible, effective and profitable in business. 

Read Ute’s daily business tips on Facebook (Success Network Recipes) or visit the Success Network website and sign up for a free ebook with lots of tips for solopreneurs!

You may also like “Hurricanes and Storms- how is Turbulence and Change affecting you?”