I would love to take all the credit, but I definitely could not have created such a uniquely me space without the patiently talented Kristen at wildmagic.etsy.com. Please take a second to check out her shoppe and wonderful graphics and designs!
I had the images and the vision of what I was hoping it would look like, but without Kristen's help it would have taken me weeks of playing with HTML code and let's face it - I'm a writer and an artist - I do not need to be a master of all trades! (I'm still convincing myself of this...)
I am a financial wellness and wealth coach by day and I constantly find myself at my client's kitchen tables coaching them not to engage in tasks that will not net them their hourly rate of desired pay!
In business, you need to spend 90% of your time in productive activities that will create either more productivity or increase your income. It is my nature to obsess over "details". If I had committed myself to creating my new blog or recreating my mySpace page to the exact specifications that I wanted myself, I would have obsessed about it for weeks not days - and even when I would have achieved the desired look, I know that I would have continued to play having had reset my work schedule to include HTML coding!
Don't get me wrong - I did start playing with it on my own for about two hours that day, but I was able to snap out of it once I realized that half my work morning had flown by and I had accomplished nothing. One of my favorite business quotes, "Are you busy or productive?"
At the end of the day feeling drained by hours of tasking only to find that I really hadn't accomplished anything I set out to do, I decided to stop the insanity!
So I quickly logged out of mySpace and blogspot and contacted Kristen and sent her the images I was interested in using, the overall feel I was hoping for, got a quote, and set to work on the projects with someone who knew what she was doing! It was economical, productive and the net effect was a week of marketing and creating that I wouldn't have had had I done it on my own!
What it cost me to hire someone to do it was a mere fraction of MY cost per hour of my own production time! In simpler terms, I was able to produce and create in that time MORE than what it cost me for someone else to do the task...
As I write this I remember that I learned this years ago! When I started college, I was a full-time student and worked full-time in a restaurant but still lived at home. I would get home at 2am from work sometimes completely exhausted to my mother's fussing at me for forgetting to do the dishes or not cleaning the bathroom or leaving laundry in the washer...
After about a week of the ridiculousness - regardless how much I wanted to yell, "Are you kidding me?! I'm never home," I picked up the classifieds and hired a wonderful woman named Terry for $50.00/week to dust, sweep, mop, clean the bathrooms, scrub the kitchen... It was worth it to me to spend half a night's income to pacify my mother at home and give me peace the little time I was home...
Just because you're in business for yourself doesn't mean that you have to do every part of the business.
- Figure out what you're good at, the activities that bring you the best results and then STICK TO THAT PLAN for at least 4-6 weeks! You're not going to be able to measure the results of an activity if you change it every time you hear something new! Pick a few projects to start off with and go from there.
- Set a SCHEDULE and stick to it!
- Hire out your weakness and/or get help with administrative tasks
Working for yourself is the most rewarding job you can have, but you'll never work harder! I have learned a lot about entrepreneurship... anyone that works hard at anything for ten years will be successful in it - just make sure you're doing something you love - because it will still be work ten years from now if it isn't.
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