Here she shares a few tips and secrets she’s picked up en route to help other mumpreneurs’ ideas also take off.
1. What’s the best career advice you’ve ever got?
Never be afraid of competition – so many people concentrate on and worry about what their competitors are doing and lose focus on their own goals and objectives. Concentrate on your own business and let your competitors concentrate on theirs.
2. What’s the biggest secret you’ve learned to having a successful business from home?
You cannot run a successful business from home without The 3 P’s! Proper planning & preparation is so important when juggling family and business life. However, you must be prepared to be flexible – you cannot prevent those endless nights with sick kids and mornings spent re-scheduling everything because you can’t send them to day care or school.
It’s imperative you don’t forget to schedule family time in the same way you do work time…. No one ever sat on their death bed wishing they spent more time working. Don’t miss these glorious days of your children being young… as hard as they are, they are beautiful!
3. What’s the best money habit every successful woman should adopt?
Budgets and forecasts! You must know what’s going in and out at all times and always keep on top of your cash flow. I met a business owner recently that had a really fabulous product that was selling like hot cakes… but she couldn’t keep up with the orders and kept selling out resulting in weeks and sometimes months without stock. She told me it just kept happening because she never had enough cash flow to buy enough stock. This is craziness to allow this to continue to happen – she’d taken care of the hardest part of business by achieving sales… but kept missing out on the opportunity to sell!
4. What’s the secret to keeping your career and home life in balance?
This is one of the hardest parts of running your own business. You probably find you have more passion for your own business than you’ve ever had for anything else so it’s really hard to switch off. Endless work hours, late night and early mornings are all perfectly acceptable when working on your own business. But not at the expense of your family! One small way to get closer to achieving this is to limit screen time. Set some house rules for every family member to switch off and shut down. Our reliance on 24/7 technology is a grave concern. Be proactive in beating this modern day problem.
5. What would you say to others thinking about becoming a mumprenuer?
Be brave and go for it, but do it with your eyes wide open. Set yourself a time limit and be prepared to double it. Set yourself a budget and be prepared to triple it! Stick to what you’re good at and outsource the rest as soon as you can afford it. It’s a false economy to constantly work in your business at the expense of working on your business.
The Fly Babee director and founder has also recently created a Facebook page called Mumsomnia, which connects and supports mothers with young children. The Facebook page aims to connect like-minded mothers online with the goal of taking the conversation offline in order to create meaningful friendships.
