Tag Archives: new business

Jun 10

Small Business Sunday: Representing your Company

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I’m back again, getting involved with the lovely Vintage Fee’s Small Business Sunday feature. Have a good read of Fee’s post and see exactly what we’re chatting about this week although of course, we have different takes on the same issues I imagine. Well we’ll soon find out anyway.

So, after a week of talking about organisation (I have a whiteboard on its way!) this week the theme  is representing your company and I have taken this to mean, how to keep your personal and business lives separate, if you deem it necessary. For me, this is a yes and no situation. Obviously, this post is appearing on both my personal and business blogs on the basis that I want to attract as many readers as possible and I also like the idea of cross posting relevant posts to both my sites. However, I do maintain separate Twitter accounts for work and personal purposes and this is mainly to keep my mind focused on the right thing and of course, with the wonderful Tweetdeck at my fingertips I can manage multiple accounts without too much difficulty and am able to promote my business via my personal account, which I do a lot but not so it becomes desperate.

Equally, I have a business page on Facebook, which is of course connected to my personal page but there are very few interactions between to two, save sharing links and the occasional post from my personal account nudging folk in the direction of my business page.

I never share links to my personal sites from my business site because it seems irrelevant and of course, my general chit chat on my personal blog just isn’t very relevant to my work, aside from being written by me, I don’t really think there’s a connection at all. That being said, pretty much everyone who uses my business site is aware of my personal sites so it can’t all be bad.

I think I am managing to represent myself pretty well online although I need to work much harder on my face to face interactions. I’m new to business and not ashamed to say it can be very intimidating when you’re making your first moves into a new area. I am tentatively looking at networking opportunities but need to research the options and expectations in more depth. I am very proud of what I do and confident in my abilities to do it well but saying this in front of a room full of strangers is a different matter. Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated, I’m learning all the time!

Jun 03

Small Business Sunday: Organsation

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I have jumped on someone else’s bandwagon  and I am really pleased that this facility exists as I sometimes find it hard to think of what I should even talk about, when I’m talking about work. So, I’m piggybacking on Fee’s idea, she blogs at Vintage Fee and can be found on twitter under the same name.

Anyway, back to the the subject of Small Business Sunday, which I just had to get involved in. Fee describes it thus:

Small Business Sunday is a weekly feature about my personal experience as a small business owner. I will be explaining how I handle the ups and downs. I am by no means an expert and ultimately only you can be responsible for your own business. Think of this as some friendly advice!

Now I’m afraid I can’t guarantee to live up to those words but I am certainly going to give it a good go, although me and advice don’t often go hand in hand. The first of Fee’s topics is ORGANISATION and this is something I often think about.

I work three days a week as full time as possible, which means I am at my desk (approximately 25 seconds from my bed) by 9am and I try not to leave until 5pm, the other four days of the week I am up here between 2 and 3 hours when my daughter is napping to fill in any of the gaps that I haven’t managed to do on my work days. I am busy. I have several regular clients, one of whom has a particular time scale/deadline for the content I supply which cannot change and therefore, I work with these constraints in mind and ensure I am always ahead of deadline.

For me, disorganisation is much like lateness, it drives me literally to panic and although my current set up (I am a one woman business after all) is less than perfect, I ensure that I know where I stand on a daily/weekly basis. I am working on a properly organised system, with the introduction of a whiteboard and some sort of calendar facility in my office, rather than just using the scraps of paper I currently survive on but at present, that’s what works for me.

Excuse the handwriting and poor photography

A lot of my core workload is based on promotional items and news, so I am at the mercy of the companies I need to write about updating their websites and therefore, I cannot plan a whole week’s work in advance, I go on a day to day basis, making endless lists full of what look like gibberish and codes to anybody but me, as the awful on the left kind of shows you.

Anyway, lists like this mean I can fit in urgent work, ad hoc stuff and never have to miss out on a single opportunity which is extremely important to me as if I don’t pick up the work I’m sure someone else will, I’m not going to lie and pretend there aren’t hundreds out there looking for the work that I do.

I realise this picture isn’t a great representation of my organisation for potential clients but believe me it works and I am building upon it and what’s more, current clients seem happy with the service I provide.

On top of anything else I love my work and keeping it organised has got to be in some part key to its success, right?