Month: March 2023

It’s all about a camel and a piece of straw.

Posted on March 20, 2023 by - Future dreams, Networking

Recently I was talking to a new business contact, let’s call him Gilbert, about his business which he had started a days before. I remembered how excited and frightened I had been in equal measure. I remembered lying awake making plans and feeling excited about this new adventure and, at the same time, overwhelmed by what I had to do and what I knew I didn’t know with a side issue of realising that there was probably stuff I didn’t know I didn’t know! Thankfully I found networking.

We began talking about how long we had stayed safe in paid employment, with a feeling of restriction, before we made the decision to make the leap into self-employment. What do I mean by restriction? Well, as my beloved summed it up when he said: “You’ve never done bosses well”. This is true: I love being the decision-maker in my business, and I’m not saying that all my decisions have been good ones, but they have all been mine.

Gilbert and I agreed that, at some level, this move to self-employment had been made more difficult because we were paid well and there is no guaranteed income when you are paying yourself. Added to this both of us had support teams, who did stuff and knew stuff so we didn’t have to be involved. So, in the main our jobs were more interesting and rewarding than other jobs we had done. Then he asked “When did you know you had to leave?”

No one who knows me will be surprised that a holiday was involved. Because we have always liked to travel we would always hit the annual issue of having “no leave left till the end of March”. And we like long holidays. The moment I knew I had to leave was, having returned from a month’s holiday when we had completed a circle of the earth, I parked my car in my personal parking space in London, walked back into my lovely office, saying hello to my fabulous team and thought “well this is no fun”. That’s when I started to plan my exit and less than six month’s later I was self-employed with no real idea of what I was going to do. I just knew that, whatever I did my number one rule was it had to be fun.

That was my “moment” and I asked Gilbert what his “moment” was. To be honest I was expecting some story like mine. He said he had been thinking about it for years and he knew what he would do and how. His final-straw/camel moment was he said when he started to think about what he liked about the work he was doing, the employment package he had and the people he worked with. He knew that he definitely had to start his own business when he realised that the best bit was that…he had a chair that swivels! The next day he started to negotiate his way out.

From my swivelling chair I would like to help you with your networking, so here’s a gift to you: my Top 20 networking tips. Just follow this link: ebn.uk.com and complete the form to receive your copy.

Have fun,

Glenys

Definitely not a vanity move!

Posted on March 6, 2023 by - Business strategy, Future dreams, Networking

Recently I was talking to a business contact about his move into a business unit. I have known this particular contact for over 20 years after meeting him at a networking event (where else!). At the time he was working from his front room, with his lovely mum as his only member of staff. Over the years his business has grown and yet he has remained in his home office, now an actual office rather than his front room, staff have changed and he and his business have survived even the devastating loss of his mother at an early age. He has worked hard, been amazing at marketing and seen the resultant success.

While talking, I said that no-one could say he was making a vanity decision and we began to talk about how tempting these vanity decisions are. What are ‘vanity’ decisions, often involving vanity purchases? They are using money either from your business (or investing it from your own money) to buy ‘things’ and these ‘things’ are often not needed but give the business owner’s vanity a stroke. The nice new desk to replace a perfectly good desk. (Of course, always get a great chair to sit in, or stand at, because you may spend a lot of time at your desk and you don’t want to undermine your spine etc.) You see people with large shiny offices, staff, every piece of equipment you can imagine…and no customers!

Now the conversation I was having with my contact was definitely, from my part at least, not based on a history of “Well I’ve never done that” because I have stroked my vanity many times by buying stuff that was lovely and shiny and I didn’t need! When I set up my first business, I bought lots of stuff that I had occasionally used when I had worked in the corporate world but didn’t actually need for my small office at home, or, if I did, I didn’t need the super deluxe version. The same was true when I started my catering business. I had a storage unit which was full of stuff, and, unsurprisingly, because I am sometimes a slow learner, the unit got larger as I bought more stuff, and then reduced in size as I learnt that I didn’t need to own all the stuff I had. In the process I wasted a lot of money. But I did learn.

Obviously, my contact, being wiser than I, didn’t need to be taught this. He has seemed to know instinctively to only spend money you must spend. Save the money, don’t buy, buy the less shiny one, buy second hand, you get the picture. This last part is what I have learnt. I also realised that by saving money in this way I had more money, at the end of the year, to have more money to spend on shiny things for my home, for holidays and as soon as I realised this the vanity decisions became less and easier.

So I wish my contact all the success he deserves as he moves into his lovely shiny, and absolutely necessary, new business unit.

If you are not sure about spending money on networking let me help with a gift to you: my Top 20 networking tips. Just follow this link: ebn.uk.com and complete the form to receive your copy.

Have fun,

Glenys