Month: February 2019

people working at a busy desk cutting markers pencils multi level marketing

When Did “Busy” Become a Four Letter Word?

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I follow a person on social media that I met through a past blogging job. She was always pleasant, but never warm. We were merely acquaintances, but I still follow her on social media, mostly for the eye rolls her posts give me.

I couldn’t figure out what was bugging me about her posts. But sure enough, ever time I read them, I found myself irritated. She just joined a MLM – multilevel marketing company – and of course, it’s changed her life. But when I thought about it, that didn’t bug me – why would I care if she wanted to hock products to people and make money off of it? I didn’t buy her stuff and if other people wanted to, more power to them. So what was it??

It finally hit me – she is NEVER busy. In fact, her entire sales pitch is how positively unbusy she is. How much time she has and yet can still make SO much money. She’s able to be with her kids – and make money! She’s making money while she sleeps! She’s making money at Starbucks! She reads books – and makes money!

[insert vomit emogie]

Maybe it’s all true and that’s awesome for her. More power to her and what she does to earn a living. BUT, as a small business owner, I find her posts to be disingenuous and frankly, a little dangerous. The impression given is that she is doing something so right by running a business with little to no work and a plethora of free time. And for budding small business owners, what could be more discouraging than seeing someone “make it” with little to no effort?

Owning a small business is work. And why wouldn’t it be? If you’re building something from the ground up – that takes effort. And grit. And stick-to-it-ness. And that makes you busy. Like in bed at midnight, up at 5am, scrambling to come up with dinner and get to practice, hustling for new clients, networking, organizing a schedule, verge of pulling your hair out busy. But that busy isn’t bad – it’s the work that will make you proud when you get that first check. And next client. And new idea….

Tom Hanks said in A League of their Own, “the hard is what makes it good. If it was easy, everyone would do it”. If you’re a small business owner that is discouraged by posts like that – unfriend, delete, unfollow. This is a tough job. You will be busy. And that means you’re doing it right. 

black and white calendar pages with triangle patterns

Resolutions v Goals

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As I began to write down my business resolutions in December, I got a little nuts. Well, really it all started out with more a dry spell and turned into a waterfall of ideas…

I sat and evaluated where BW Concepts is now and where I would want it to go, and the truth was, I hadn’t really thought about it. Which lead me to really dig into which of the services I offer were the ones I really liked and wanted more of. Then I needed to figure out how to get more of that work – did I need more advertising? Better social media? More word of mouth? The more I thought about it, the more ideas that came flowing out of my brain. And suddenly I was looking at a paper of ideas that weren’t all quite the same.

I realized I had a lot of resolutions, but there were also some business goals that had gotten mixed into the resolutions. Or more accurately, some goals that my resolutions would help me achieve. The difference is that a resolution is a change that leads to something else – it’s not the end game, it’s just the map that’s going to get you to where you’re going.

So! In 2019, my resolutions for BW Concepts are:

  1. Get organized

    • I am an organized person so this is thankfully not a foreign concept. The need for better business organization comes from the many irons I’ve got in the fire. Between this business, the family business that I run, volunteer commitments and well, life, it can be easy to have something fall through the cracks. I made a huge list of all the “to do’s” and created a color coded Excel calendar. I then used that to populate my Gmail calendar and our family wall calendars as well. Having a visual of my to do list is so helpful. I now block out an hour-ish a week to update the calendars and start planning for the weeks ahead.

  2. Work ahead

    • Speaking of that calendar… now that I have a working task calendar, I started checking items off the list. I made a rule that I had to work in order, not skip around when working ahead. This forces me to stay on track and ahead of the game. It also allows me to take more than just one edit at a project to make sure it’s really perfect before it goes out. 

  3. Start the BW Conceps business blog

    • Ta da! This has been a really fun resolution to work on. Putting fingers to keyboard and spilling out ideas and words is awesome.

  4. Consistently engage with IG for business

    • When the IG algorithym changed, it changed how we have to use IG. No longer are likes rewarded, but rather our interaction with IG and other users gets our posts seen by more people. So I’ve committed to spending at minimum 10 minutes a day watching stories, commenting and liking posts to boost my views. 

What are all these resolutions working towards? I defined my goals as:

A. New Clients

  • More specifically, new blogging clients. While I always would say yes to 1 off projects like bios, About Me pages and other marketing materials, I want the predictability and consistency of new blogging clients. It allows me to create a marketing calendar which feeds the content for the blog and creates an ongoing uniform style for the blog. My goal is to have 3 new monthly / bimonthly clients. And so far as of January, I already have one of the three! We’re off to a good start.

B. Stronger Social Media Presence

  • Being able to put my ideas and tips directly in front of people who can use them is too powerful a tool to overlook. So getting organized and increasing engagement is going to help build a solid following on social media that will keep BW Concepts on the minds of clients and potential clients too. 

This is it! I hit the ground running in the beginning of January and I haven’t slowed down. I’m looking forward to seeing what exciting outcomes these resolutions yield!