As creators, entrepreneurs, and startup heroes, we must constantly find ways to help ourselves in the current business market, and those ways are always outside of the box.
So many times people ask me for writing advice, website design advice, and how to get a freelance business started. My simple answer: Get organized. Ask for help. Find resources. Take a course. Pay it forward. Find 'your person'. The one who constantly coaches and cheers you on. Then they ask how I balance it all with travel and family.
I’m not alone, either. One of the hardest and best things that ever happened to our founder Amy, is her husband Sam pushing her to hire seamstresses. He knew he had to grow their team, and boy was it a process. One Amy describes as “Ugh!” She actually went through this process about five times before finding the right people, because product quality is very important to her. The ‘people’ you surround yourself and your business with make a HUGE impact on every aspect of it from growth, to success, and direction.
According to Amy, “It’s all the same feelings and processes for writers, designers, and developers. And! It’s totally worth it. Plus, you get so many new ideas and new talent coming your way. Being more open is so much better. Having an open mind in business is always the best, because being whole is not about gripping your hands to hang on to all you have.”
Take Amy’s process for developing our ring slings, for instance:
- She developed a professional pattern.
- She interviewed multiple people.
- Selected someone and sewed the whole piece in front of them.
- Taught this person all the things to do and to look for!
- Reviewed their first ring sling they made in muslin for practice.
- Made notes to help them improve.
- Provided them with fabric to try again and again.
It took a lot of my time and resources, as well as patience. It would have been easier to do it herself at first, but in the long run–had she not built a team of seamstresses, she would not be able to breathe let alone fill orders for stores across the United States. There would be no build up inventory for trade shows. Her passion projects in graphics would never get done. There would be no development of new products. She sure wouldn’t have time for her family.
People get so busy that they fight to balance family and work–so here's how to do it!
Find ‘your people’.
- First: Network. By network, you need to build a really good team of killer individuals who have the same drive, work ethic, and goals as you do. Whether your business is to help others or provide a service–you are always going to be busy in terms of the core of your business, so you need to balance that with ‘your people’.
- Second, learn to delegate. You need ‘your people’ to have your back. The things you task them with are important as everything you do, so make sure they also have the necessary means to get their tasks done.
- Third, get into good practices for your work in progress. This means creating deadlines, calendars and staying on top of things to do.
myheartcreative can help, too. We stay busy, and we succeed because of the amazing people behind us. We are moms, dads, aunts, uncles, kids–we're family. We can still be super heroes. We rock the job and our families. Want to know more about our story? You can read it here and also contact us here to make us ‘your people’.
