Most mumpreneurs go into business to spend more time with their kids, support their family and have a flexible yet fulfilling career. But, once established, you can quickly discover that your business can be even more demanding of your time than your kids.
Wearing so many hats from sales, marketing, administration and bookkeeping, to product/service development and delivery, customer relations, managing staff and growing your business, it can quickly become overwhelming, especially when you still have to balance it with motherhood and keeping house.
So how do you manage and grow your business while still having plenty of time for your family? Here are five tips for building a kid-friendly business.
1. Streamline and systemise
As you go about your tasks each day, look for ways to make them simpler and quicker. Create templates of emails, forms, proposals, quotes and documents, use auto responders, do automatic payments, schedule emails and social media updates. Almost every area of your business can be systemised to be easier, faster, and cheaper; sometimes you just need to get a little creative.
2. Outsource
To save yourself time and stress look at what jobs you can outsource. Maybe you need a virtual assistant, bookkeeper or an employee, contractor or alliance to pass work onto and make a profit on top of their fee. Or maybe you need to outsource some of your home tasks to free up more time for things like cooking or cleaning.
If your earning potential in your business is more than what it takes to pay someone (or bribe a family member) to do the jobs you don’t enjoy or have time for – then by all means do it! Never let the fear of a task not being done to your standard or timeframe ever stop you from outsourcing, instead focus on what you will gain by not having to do the task yourself.
3. Make your work portable and flexible
Being portable and flexible is vital when creating a kid-friendly business. When you have kids, a normal 9-to-5 work arrangement isn’t suitable and, if you have young kids, being able to sit at your desk for longer than 30 minutes at a time while they are awake is, well…a miracle.
For this reason it’s important to be able to take your work on the run, whether it is to the park, the backyard, or an indoor play centre so you can make good use of the time your kids are happy, busy and distracted. A laptop, smartphone, wireless internet and cloud computing facilities are all must haves.
4. Leverage
The real key to minimising the time and money you spend in any area of your business is leverage. You want to find ways to leverage your time, knowledge, money, influence and contacts, and find ways to leverage off others by giving them an incentive. Some high leverage ideas include forming strategic alliances and host beneficiaries, affiliate programs and offering advertising on your website, blog and/or e-zine.
5. Create passive income streams
In many cases, when someone goes into business they simply create a job for themselves (having to work in order to earn money) instead of looking for passive income streams (regular income with little to no effort on your part). Passive income is the ultimate leverage, finding ways to earn more while you work less.
Online affiliate programs are a great way to generate passive income, simply by having an advertisement on your website, blog and e-zine you can make a fee for every click through or a commission when a sale is made (depending on the agreement) which takes little to no effort on your part.
Creating e-books, audios, videos, printables and other downloadable resources and selling them individually or through a membership site is also a great way to generate passive income – once they are completed and available for sale on your website you get to reap the rewards ever after.
So as you go about your business this week, look for opportunities to streamline, leverage and create passive income. Also identify any jobs that you could outsource to a paid professional or family member to give you more time to focus on what you value and enjoy most.
Do you have any tips for creating a more kid-friendly business?
Amanda is the founder of Velocity Media and Communications.
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