Check out my new ad!

See myclassified ad

Lists Lists and More Lists

So I've been trying to think about my business rather than just forge ahead. Since I don't have myself to hire, I have to try and do my service for myself. This is as challenging as I tell my customers it is. Once you start thinking about your business, 1 or 2 things get focused on and very quickly, that 1 or 2 things becomes 50. I find that making a goals list (which includes a timeline), a daily and weekly To Do list and just a general list of ideas seems to work best for me. These have to be looked at and updated every couple days in order for them to work.

Another thing this does is establish priority which is vital to any business. One thing I found was this blog was not a priority every day so I've cut back the time spent on it for now. What also surfaced regarding this blog is that it is important and should be updated at least weekly or it's just a waste of time for the reader and myself. A lot happens in a week, even at this stage where it feels like a bit of a waiting game.

When I mentioned providing my service for myself, I actually meant sitting done and writing a plan, just like I do for my customers. Not a business plan, that's done, what I mean is an action plan that I can then build my goal and To Do lists from. I'm aware that this feels like a lot of paper pushing but it's really not, I use a computer...

All joking aside, it's vital to do this paper pushing in order to create your business and fuel it's fire. The way I do it may not be the best way for you to do it. I've certainly had ways of doing this proposed to me that fell by the wayside almost as soon as the words hit my ears. Not every idea works for everybody. What I'm really getting at here is, in the beginning, it's vital to put pen to paper and really hash out every detail of what you need to do. Make this a practice and you will find a way that works for you. I've already, only a few weeks into my business, discovered 30 year old businesses that need to hear and do this just as much as the start up. This helps bring your business into focus and helps you stay the course.

I didn't forget about you.

Boy have I been busy. Each day I'm accomplishing more and more. The response has been very good so far but no money, honey. This morning Martha and I had a discussion about how much time I spend on this new venture and how to structure our week. Starting Monday, I'm working 8 to 4. I'll do this Monday through Thursday and then everything else that happens is just gravy. Stay tuned for a real update. Today is Friday and it's family time. No matter what, this is an essential element to the success of this business!

To the zoo!

Tomorrow is a BIG DAY

So was today. I finished one plan and wrote another. All 3 that I have written have been so vastly different. I can't wait to see what a months worth of plan's looks like. I'm hoping it doesn't look like I did 3 for free and that's all folks.

As The The said, "This Is The Day"

Today, February 2nd, 2009 is the official first day of Southgate Small Business. Until now, I have just been preparing and researching. Today I turned on the open sign (figuratively). This is a significant day in our lives around here. After our last business closed we said we would never do that again, of course 10 minutes later we were discussing what our next venture should be, but we really didn't know if we would ever do it again. And here we go again. This is much different than last time. The most obvious changes are that Cella was a retail store with multiple employees and a store front and crazy expenses from the get go. What I'm doing this time is a service business with little to no overhead, no merchandise management and the only employee is myself.

So here's the big reveal for those of you who don't know anything about this. What I do is work with small business owners, managers and/or sales people to uncover and solve issues their businesses may be having. My goal is to guide them on whatever I can to help their business succeed. The whole reason my company exists is to make small businesses healthier and stronger. It's may way of helping out this country, it's economy and our families economy at the same time.

I started today by writing my first "Plan" and doing some research for my next client. I have three "Plans" that I'm am writing this week and expect to pitch before next week starts. I'm really pleased with the results of my efforts today and am confident that what I have to offer is unique and of a high quality. My goal is to really help these businesses succeed. My first plan involved basic marketing and limited PR. This is what this client needs desperately and has not done at all. I know that if he follows my advice, his business can only increase.

Monday Jan 26th

This was a day of research that really paid off. I've been searching for postings about new businesses in the area and found a great resource. I also bookmarked a lot of information on local Chamber's of Commerce. One thing that was eye opening, that I would suggest doing periodically for any small business, is to Google other businesses like your own. I did local searches and wide reaching searches. I tried a number of different ways to describe what it is I do and even some things that don't but may be incorrectly searched for. What it told me was valuable, both good and bad. It led me down interesting paths and should help shape some of the ideas I'm currently working on.

I wish that the muse was with me today and I that I could have written some of the pages I need to complete before next week but as you can clearly read here, my grasp of the language and sentence structure are sorely lacking right now. Hopefully my Advocare Jingle Shot tomorrow morning will set me straight.

The Day That Changed My Life Forever

So, not much happened today. My daughter is teething (2 year molars - yikes!) and all of us are a little out of sorts. What I have decided to do with days like this, since getting any actual work done is not going to happen, is I will make sure to write about an experience I've had, good and bad, to hopefully give you, my loyal readers, a little insight. Check out how many commas I laid down in that last sentence. Pretty impressive from my standpoint.

Let's start this off with a fun one. We'll call this one, "The Day That Changed My Life Forever". How's that for the dramatic? So my wife, Martha, and I had been seriously talking about opening our first business. We were living in Minneapolis and I was working for Select Comfort. I was a salesman. A good one, I'm proud to say. But I digress, on this particular day I was at a sales meeting. Basically once every couple months we were all pulled into the back room of one of our stores and taught how to sell Select Comfort Beds. Generally, as with most sales meetings I've been to, out of a 5 hour meeting there was roughly 6 minutes of real information and a free lunch. After being with this company for 3 years, these meetings were a real drag and I would much rather have been at the store making money. I mostly doodled, joked around and fought off sleep. This particular day it was mostly sleep I was contending with. As far as our business went, we had an idea that we wanted to move back to Chicago and open a baby store. Martha's brother, Mike, had offered up some money as an investor but at this point we had no business plan, no name, no identity for our business. Just a kernel of an idea.

When I had left for this snoozefest of a meeting that day, Martha had told me she was going to try and find us a location. "Right", I thought. To me, this was putting the cart before the horse. Just so you know, as an entrepreneur, this is where the cart always resides. I've got a lot more stories related to that for slow days in the future. But I digress once again, I left for this meeting thinking Martha would spend a little time on the Internet, not find anything, and spend the rest of her time brainstorming about our dream. Boy was I wrong.

Right before lunch, literally as I was giving and and letting my eyes close, one of the salespeople from that location came into our meeting and interrupted Alan, our Regional Manager. They said I had an urgent phone call. I jumped awake and ran out to the desk. I was panicked. Was Martha hurt? Had something happened to my parents or her parents? Was one of our cats dead? God only knew what the crisis was but I knew it had to be bad for her to call me out of this meeting.

When I picked up the phone, Martha said, "I found it".

"Found what", I asked.

"Our store", she said. "It's what I've been drawing as a perfect store"

She faxed the blueprints over to me and sure enough, it was exactly what she had been describing to me. It had two store fronts with lots of windows. It had a large room for furniture with an smaller room off it for strollers and bedding. It had a large main room for clothes, toys, gifts and all the other stuff we crammed in there over the course of 3 years. I guess I just blew the ending, we ended up getting the space and at the time, it seemed perfect. The reality that hit us later was it was $10,000 a month in rent and the utilities alone averaged $2,500 a month. This was way too much for first time store owners and pretty quickly we knew it but we were stuck with a 5 year lease and my horrible money handling.

To finish up the original story, I went back into that meeting and was no longer tired. I don't think I blinked for the next 3 hours. I knew from that moment forward, my life would never be the same. And it hasn't. That was the beginning of the most wonderful, painful, joyful, stressful, terrifying, exhilarating time of our lives and now I know, that it was just the beginning.