This last week has been incredibly (blessedly) busy, busy, busy. We’ve had all kinds of things going on, but they are GOOD things, so I feel more relaxed than I’ve felt in a long time. Oh, how I hope this lasts!

We had a FABULOUS show at Baby Celebration LA. Here’s the nice thing about being a year+ into the business -we have finally invested in enough display items and signs that each and every show isn’t a bank - breaker anymore. We’ve been so busy that we didn’t get everything together for the show until the day before - no joke.

We did SO much better this year than we did last year. And it wasn’t so much the traffic as it was our confidence, our display, and our ability to apply what we’ve learned from all the shows we’ve done over the past year. It felt really good to have a really successful event that was relatively low-stress. I also want to point out to everyone that might not have the greatest first show that there is no telling how much brand-building you did; how much exposure you got. We heard NUMEROUS times - “oh, I’m so glad you’re here again” or “I was looking for you” and my favorites: “those are THE blankets” and “hey, there’s Baby Fabulous”.

And we’ve been rolling like mad ever since. Which is fabulous! Since there isn’t down-time (I haven’t even had a chance to catch up with everyone on the boards),we’re getting a lot done. I always manage my time better when I have none of it to spare.

As for today, I have offsite appointments, kids to get to and from school, product to ship, orders to drop to the contractor’s, lunches to make, and definitely, definitely, sales calls. So hi ho hi ho, it’s off to work I go…

Well, the one thing that has remained consistent in our business is that pretty much everything we need to accomplish is pushed to the very last minute. Our big event this weekend is no exception. At this point (1 1/2 years in business), we’ve done our share of events. So we have a lot of display materials and signs and of course, plenty of product. I’ve been non-chalant about prepping for this event - which cost us a pretty penny. Now, we have to be out the door tomorrow and I’ve still got to book the hotel.

Every event has been like this - I usually chalk it up to a combination of poor planning and parenthood. There’s just too much going on all the time. Every single day is a balancing act between meetings, kid schedules, sales (my BIG focus right now), processing orders, homework, household errands and chores. Sure, we’re dreaming of the days of house cleaners and personal assistants -but it’s not a reality yet.

This time though, I think that the whole last-minute thing has more to do with burnout than anything else. This is something I just admitted to myself yesterday. It’s been too long since I’ve had a vacation and I think I’m really feeling burnt out. Not the best mode to be in as I go into a two-day show where I must, must, must have my happy-go-lucky-sales-face on.

Or maybe it is. I have to admit, I’ve been a lot less stressed. And that’s even with the really big kicker - we have a scheduled power outage all day today. Yes, the day before we have to leave for an event that we haven’t really prepared for, we will be without power around the office.

And still, I throw up my hands and say “it is what it is”. I have a sneaky feeling that I’m going to learn that being less stressed is actually going to have a big impact on the whole thing. And feeling burnt out might, for the first time, keep me from trying to do too much.

There has been a lot of talk on the mompreneurs message boards about business blogging. So, since I am “Blogging Mom”, and I’ve been blogging for my business and about my business (two separate blogs) for over two years now, I figured I should go ahead and start touching on the subject of blogging in the mompreneurs® blog. I’m hoping to tackle business blogs one subject at a time, but I know I get wordy at times too.

The main questions that all pre-blogging business owners have are: “Is a blog necessary for my business?”; “Why do I need a blog?” and “What am I supposed to write about?”.

Today I’ll touch on why there is no question - you must blog!!

A blog is necessary for your business for a number of reasons, but the top two are the transparency (customer relations) aspect of blogs and the search engine optimization advantages.

Transparency:

• Customers and clients want to know your story! Blogs should be conversational in tone and should accept comments. Your customers will feel that there is a real person behind the business and that they will be able to get the information they need if they do need to contact you.
• The blog can touch on product updates, awards your business has received, and press and publicity, but it should also have a personal aspect to it and should share information that your target audience is interested in (and are therefore likely to “google”). For example, we have a baby accessory and apparel line, so I’ll blog about tracking your pregnancy, or the top baby names of the year. We get searches from pregnant women, exposing our brand to them early on - and early exposure is key!

Search Engine Optimization

• Blogs are a dream for your site’s search engine optimization. SEO basically means how well your site is set up for the search engines - do you cover your title bar with keywords, use keywords in your URLS; does your content match the headings; are you using alt text for images; etc. The right blogging software sets up all of these crucial SEO factors for you automatically
• Content is king - blogs are easy to use and enable you to create a lot of content on your site with little pain involved. The more content you have on your site, the more the search engines are going to like your site. Blogs make it easy to use keywords, add images, and create links.
• The more useful information, and outbound links you have, the more inbound links you’ll gain. As you grow your content, more people will find you in natural searches and will start to link to those pages on your site that they found useful. In addition, outbound links will notify similar sites (those you are linking out to) of your existence. If those site owners see the similarity, many will link to your site.
• Blogs keep the spiders and bots coming back - the more often you update your site, the more often spiders will visit. With easy-to-use blogging software, you can update your site often.

Speaking of blogging - I owe content to another site I’ll be a new blogger on (that was a mouthful), so I’ll talk about “what to write about as a business blogger” next time.

Leave comments if you have questions so I know what they are and can try to answer them!! I’ve had my head in this stuff for years now!

Spring break is coming on the heels of a very busy week. I’ve been going non-stop all week, like a chicken with my head cut off, convinced that I CAN catch up - somehow. How did I get so behind?? It’s due to a good thing - sales are on the rise all the way around. The boutique’s sales are up, our online orders and wholesale orders are up too.

Which has presented a whole new level of challenges, and a whole new level of craziness. I can tell that we are in this weird growth phase, we’re leaping to the next level, but we’ve got just a couple more steps to climb to reach it. And we have to push to that level (I’m yawning even as I write that), and it’s going to take a real push. Come on feet, don’t fail me now!

Our newest boutique sold out of their first floral onesie order in a week!! This is good on so many levels - we got an immediate re-order, the new boutique is very happy with us, and we know our newest designs are going to sell really well.

This week is also killing me because of the time change. I get up before the kids as it is, now it literally feels like the alarm is going off in the middle of the night. But if I don’t have time to check in at the office and (usually) get a blog post done before the kids rise and we’re off and running, then my stress levels sky-rocket and the day goes nuts.

Now I have to try to plan for Spring Break. There will be less nuttiness in the mornings, but there will be a lot of entertainment needed too.

I’m quietly getting some work done while my children are playing “paleontologist” this morning. They each have a compacted dirt egg on which to perform their archeological dig. The 5 year old just finished and found her buried dinosaur. I overheard their simple, but powerful, conversation:

3 yr. old to 5 yr old: “WOW Mirmir, I’m so PROUD of you.”

5 yr. old to 3 yr. old: “Yup, C-buds, all you have to do is NEVER give up. If you give you, you won’t get it. So just don’t give up. OK”

It was the sweetest,  most heartfelt conversation. We can learn so much from our children just by listening.

Not to mention it’s SO nice to have something come out of their mouths that I’m proud to say we’ve passed down (as opposed to the “DAMMIT” my daughter exclaimed last week as we walked up to her kindergarten gate, and when I was shocked, simply explained that she had learned it from me).

I share my startup journey on a blog about starting a clothing line from scratch. One of my blog readers sent us a scathing (and unsolicited) critique of our Baby Fabulous website - well, she really spent the majority of it letting us know that everything about our STYLE, from our business name, logo, & color scheme, to the designs on our shirts, is “unappealing as a whole”. So, walk on by, we’re not going to please everyone, it takes a zillion styles to make the world go ’round.

But the part that stung a bit was her personal critique of me (based on my personal blog I can only assume) “you hold yourself back WAY too much”.

I wanted to scream against that at the same time I wanted to face it. Part of the selfish reasons for doing the startup clothing blog was to hold myself accountable - make myself feel like if I was going to be talking the talk, I’d have to keep everything on the up-n-up. And here one of my readers was, holding me accountable and basically telling me I talk too much of the talk and need to keep walking, and all I wanted to do was rant about the billion ways she’s wrong (I have launched my own products, have a celebrity clientele, have a strong customer base, lots of press, and on and on!!! No one who “holds themselves back” goes that far, right?)

But after taking a day or so with this, I’ve given myself a new perspective. I DO spend moments of my day that aren’t focused on the business. But I DO do enough. I try my hardest and I try my hardest not to lose my focus on my family; the whole reason behind all of this business stuff. A LOT of my energy goes to my kids and I’m going to remain unapologetic about this. So the business grows a little slower while my kids are little and this precious time with them is flying by…there’ll be time enough for growth as the years go on, and they’re off to school more often…

My daughter received a “Horseland” movie for her 5th birthday and the theme of the first story is “Doing your personal best”. The whole concept is “compete against yourself only”. Every design I create, every trade show I do, even every web page I create, I’m constantly trying to remind myself to do just “do my thing”.

Walking in to set up for our first trade show was very overwhelming. All these BIG companies having BIG booths built up by professional builders and there we are, hand-carrying a couple boxes of samples to our booth - but it didn’t matter. We weren’t competing against them, we were there to show our stuff, to do our thing. We had boatloads of confidence and we got orders!

My daughter’s movie served as a nice reminder for me and got us talking about practice and doing the work it takes to be ready when it’s time for the “big show”. I think this is a crucial thing to remember when starting a business because it’s easy to look at the competition and start comparing yours to theirs. But you can’t do this too much. Sure, you have to study the market, know what’s out there and what prices the industry are holding, but you have to do your own thing. It’s how you’ll set yourself apart as a startup.

For our next trade show, competing against myself means how much better can I make our booth this time? How much can I improve our product offering, our display, our presentation? I can only measure our improvement based on how far we’ve come and whether or not I feel I did my personal best.

I have to write a post just to get back on the wagon. I ended up taking an unintentional sabbatical from blogging on this mompreneur’s blog over the summer, but I’m back. I did keep up blogging for our baby business and my start up kids line blog, because the blogs bring us a lot of traffic.

This summer, and now the start of the school year, has been about finding a better balance between my work life and my home life. The baby step I’m starting with is stressing less. I’ve come to realize that things are about as stressful as you perceive them to be, and I was letting everything stress me out way-too-much. I needed to chill.

I’m the first one to tell others to take a break, or cut out early at the first sign of a cold, but I’m not good at taking the same advice. I need to be. It is true that there is always work left to be done. And at the same time, I’m trying to work on my horrible procrastination. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today”…

The great thing is that when I do manage to make myself buckle down and get rid of a few tasks that have been hanging over my head (like writing this blog post after it’s been SO long), then I feel a lot LESS stressed in general. I also find that I’m less stressed if I actually put the work down and spend 10 minutes of quality, focused time with my children. It lifts my soul.

I think that balance becomes the main theme for every parentrepreneur in one way or another. My daughter started kindergarten this year. We put her in a Spanish immersion program, which is fantastic (I know there are a couple of mompreneur’s here who will be happy to hear that). She goes to school all day and I just have to say that her schedule has forced us all into a better routine. It isn’t just babies that like routine, a good rythem is good for all of us…

I have a love / hate relationship with email. I’m trying to get a grasp on it, but I feel like I’m always trying to get a grasp on it. I’m one of THOSE people who has an inbox with a ton of emails piled in it. Every once in a blue moon I get around to filing some of the emails into archive folders.

I never get the inbox cleared completely. The inbox is only half of my problem; the other half  is that emails inevitabely slip through the cracks with my cluttered mess of an inbox. It will often hit me weeks after I was supposed to email someone that I never got back to them.

If identifying the problem is half the battle, here’s the other half of the battle for me - sticking to my new plan to tackle the email beast:

• Answer emails immediately if I can
• Flag emails the require follow-up - and I will flag the email according to priority, so that I can filter my inbox by flagged emails and get an immediate snapshot of who is waiting on me.
• Delete and file emails on a consistent basis (scheduling a time to do this every two weeks is probably sufficient)
• Set reminders on my calendar with alerts

I’m taking on simplifying the disorganized parts of my business and email is a huge piece of that disorganization. Having my inbox in a state of disarray is incredibly time consuming and costs me in productivity. I hope I can stick to my plan, it should make my life a lot easier.

Since I’m finally getting back to writing a blog post again, it seems like balance is the perfect topic. Balance is an art that I work hard to master everyday, and that’s because it takes a lot of work. I’m sure I’ll forever being striving towards better balance, because just when I get the knack of something, something else changes.

I’ve tried numerous different work schedules, from late-at-night to early-in-the-morning. Those few hours while the kids sleep are usually very productive. But sometimes I’m too tired for the late nights OR the early mornings, and I opt for sleep instead. I tell myself there will always be work to be done, but if I let myself sleep, I feel stressed by the lost time.

There are two things that are working well for me right now. First, if I at least update my to-do list every night, then I feel prepared for the next day and it helps me to rest a little easier. I put the highest priority task at the top and work my way down each day. I mix all of my to-do’s on one list, from kid stuff to house stuff to business stuff. Anything that is my responsibility and HAS to get done goes on that list. I can’t believe how much it’s helping my sanity level.

The next sanity-keeper is devoting small spurts of time with each of my kids. I’ll even set the timer and tell them they each get to choose what we’re going to do for 5 minutes. It makes nice refreshing breaks for me, and makes me take those breaks. We all truly enjoy each other’s company, and just devoting those few minutes to my kids everyday has decreased all of our stress levels tremendously.

Even though I’m learning little tricks to help balance my work life with my family life, it’s still a struggle. In business, “fires” come up all the time, and in life “fires” come up all the time, so at times, it’s nothing short of nutty. Luckily, everything goes in phases, and there are times when things just flow.