Top Five Tips For Mumpreneurs | How to Boss Being a Working Mum and Business Owner
Afrotouch Design is like my 4th child, it’s so important to me that I also need to give it the attention and care it deserves. With that said, my family and my career also form a huge part of my life too. So how do I keep on top of it all? I have found that it is possible to fit it all; it just takes planning and dedication. It’s been a learning process, but I thought I’d share 5 of my top tips for you amazing mumpreneurs, which I hope will help you if you are also a working mum like me.
In my previous blog, I talked you through a day in the life of a mumpreneur, letting you know how I maximise the time I have in order to keep up with the demands of the business alongside my other commitments. This is an extension to that, and you can hopefully put these suggestions in action today to start feeling the benefit.
Routine and Planning
Let’s face it! If you fail to plan, you plan to fail – I’ve learnt this the hard way and not planning leaves me overwhelmed, anxious and stressed. Without a routine or pre-planning, time in the morning can quickly run away from you. No matter how early you wake, if you take your eye off the ball, you end up rushing to get the kids to school on time and to get yourself to work. With rush and panic comes ample opportunities to forget vital items like lunches, meeting notes, PE kits and pencil cases. You’re then not in the right frame of mind to start a productive day.
Having a morning routine for when everyone in the home wakes up, eats breakfast, gets dressed and so on means that everyone should be ready in good time.
In order to help this routine flow as smoothly as possible, planning the night before is essential. I wake at 5 am to get everything ready in advance of the children getting up at 6:30, but you could have your work clothes laid out in preparation, packed lunches made up and placed in the fridge, as well as details of meetings, school trips, visits and any other special appointments for adults or children, checked and factored in the previous night if you like. I often get the children to sort out their own uniforms the night before and getting them to do little tasks is really helpful.
Once your routine is refined, however you work it, you can take some of the time you save in the morning to start working on your business. This is a big part of the tips for mumpreneurs; you can’t invent time, but you can use time more wisely to free up space to dedicate to your work.
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Get Enough Sleep
There is a temptation for a working mum to stay up all night in order to get as much work done as possible. I used to do it and I learned that is this was not a healthy thing to continue. Fatigue can set in easily and, with no chance to catch up on the missed sleep, you risk becoming sluggish and unproductive.
Sleep is so important, especially when you need to make business decisions that affect the future of your company. You need to be as sharp and on the ball as possible. I don’t know about you, but for me a lack of sleep left me feeling grumpy and easily irritated and my family often got the brunt of that irritation This is one of those tips for mumpreneurs that is much easier said than done, but it is really worth trying to set a limit on the latest time you will work and sticking to it too! Now I try to be in bed by no later than 10.30 pm.
Cut Out the Guilt
You are running your business for a reason and you don’t need to feel guilty about that. Of course, you can’t concentrate your full attention on all aspects of your life at the same time, but that doesn’t mean you should give up on your dreams. Yes, you might have to occasionally miss bedtime with the kids, but the development of your business is a way of helping secure their future, so do not feel bad about it.
You simply have to work out methods of making sure the plates keep spinning. Which leads us to…
Get All the Help You Can Get
As a working mum, there are so many ways you get that extra bit of help that frees you up to work on your mumpreneur business. This could be anything from doing an online grocery shop, rather than spending time visiting the supermarket, to getting a cleaner to allow you to concentrate on your other priorities.
Can you enlist family members or friends to help out with school runs and mealtimes for the kids? Could they take the children out on a Saturday morning to give you extra mumpreneur time?
Outsourcing many work tasks can also give you the space to concentrate on driving the business onwards. A virtual assistant, like Chloe from Supportal, can look after your blogs, your social media, your branding, your website and anything else that takes up valuable time. All of these tasks are important but can be outsourced to allow more time for fulfilling orders and finding new business.
Be Kind to Yourself
The last of my tips for mumpreneurs is, very simply, to be kind to yourself. Look after yourself, pamper yourself and do things that make you feel good. You may have a day job, new business and a family to take up your time and that is an amazing achievement. You deserve a reward of some kind and you don’t need to beat yourself up if things don’t go as well as you would like. Honour the season that you are in and be mindful that somethings life just happens, but you need to acknowledge and work towards quickly getting back on track.
Look after yourself, you are doing something amazing!