Читать книгу The Entrepreneurial Mom's Guide to Running Your Own Business - Kathryn Bechthold - Страница 4

I decided to write this book for three different groups of women:

• The women who continue to believe that their business is their “baby” and have their identities so wrapped up in it that they cannot see when it is broken.

• The women who want to become work-at-home entrepreneurs while being the primary caregiver to their children.

• The women who have businesses that are leaving the infancy stage and need a new set of lessons in order to move forward to a more sustainable business model.

For the last decade, women in North America have quickly surpassed men in starting new businesses. It is an economic reality that full-time childcare is difficult to find, expensive, and for many women, not their ideal choice going forward. Although corporations are still trying to figure out how to keep professional women after they have children, working 80-plus hours a week for someone else while not being able to be with your kids lacks a certain appeal.

Since the loss of the charity I founded, a real pet peeve of mine has been women who refer to their businesses as their “babies.” What I want to emphasize is that while your business is something you should be passionate about, it should be a vehicle to making you money and leveraging your career. If it does not, then you have basically built yourself a very expensive hobby that will eventually suck you dry. You have to learn to evaluate your business on a monthly basis so that you can properly discern whether or not it is achieving your goals. If it is not, you need to learn to fix it now or cut it loose and move on before it overtakes you.

Now, I know that the last time your four-year-old smeared peanut butter across your new cashmere sweater or barfed on your latest financial statements you considered selling that child to the nearest nomadic clan, but I also know you got over it and remembered how sweet he or she really is once the child is asleep for the day and looking like his or her old cherubic self! What I want you to be able to do is to quickly assess whether or not your business model is broken, fix it, and recognize that if it is not fixable, you need to either walk away or sell it — fast. This is not something we would do with our babies, but you have to be ruthless and more practical as an entrepreneur. We are here to make money — priority number one when it comes to working — let’s not compare this with our children. We also need to recognize that we are more than our businesses. Businesses will come and go; we need to be secure in ourselves, and tough enough to say what needs to be said in order to not go down with a sinking ship like I did.

For the women who are interested in leaving the corporate lifestyle and becoming an entrepreneurial mom, congratulations! This is going to be one of the most fun, chaotic, and exhilarating times of your life and you get to do it on your own terms! What is most important for you is to know what your terms are. Is it a set amount of income each month? Being the primary caregiver to your children? Achieving a certain amount of clients? Or manufacturing a certain amount of product? You must know each of these key targets and have them embedded into your business plan in order to know where you are going and plan for how you are going to get there.

For the women who have had a business for a few years and need a new injection of inspiration and some new skills, I hope this book will be the vehicle to provide that to you. I have included interviews with other successful women in business in the book as well; I hope you find them as inspiring as I have.

If you are feeling a bit lost in where your business is going, the following are some questions I want you to start asking yourself. If you answer no to the following questions, I still want you to read this book because I have been there, too. In fact, I have learned that balance is not really achievable. To quote Julie Freedman Smith, “What we need to find is harmony in our day and profit in our businesses.”