How to build a business around your family

There are 5 pillars that you need to build a business that fits around your family and although they all look a little different to everyone, and that’s important too, you still need all 5 in place.

I want to share what these 5 pillars are and some success stories of moms I have worked with in SPARK Mastermind and how they use them.

1. DESIGNING YOUR LIFE INTENTIONALLY

Knowing what you want as a whole. Not just your business but what you want your whole life to look and feel like is the starting point. I wanted a business that I could fit around my family rather than fitting my family around a business.

I wanted something flexible that didn’t have me tied to a desk, classroom or anything else. And something that was fun!

I intentionally built the business I wanted rather than just jumping into the bro-type hustle. It was slower but then I also had a lot of quality time with my family, and we homeschooled for a chunk of my son’s education. Long trips back to the UK and other overseas travel, are all important to how I want my life to look.

But why?

My dad was an entrepreneur and I saw very little of him when I was little, it was all the whole got to work hard and hustle ethos rather than giving 100% to his business but when at home, giving the family 100%

I didn’t want that, it’s not my ideal life setup.

I want to be my own boss, set my own rules, or not! And not have to answer to anyone else and make money for my family, not someone else!

Ileana’s Story

Ileana is insanely creative, multi-passionate, loves travel and is a trailing spouse and mom. So having her own desk-free business fits her lifestyle.

But… she, like many of us creatives, gets super excited about the creative side of a project but then when it comes to finishing, setting up the tech and the selling, interest wains and then you start looking at the next project.

Ileana thought she knew what she wanted, which was to build a membership based on creativity and money coaching for artists. But then halfway through its creation of it, she decided it wasn’t working for her. She felt like it was zapping her energy and she wasn’t enjoying the creative process as much.

So we had a rethink, she had already put a lot of work into what she had created so far, and it would have been a waste to kick it to the curb. So instead of sticking with what she wasn’t enjoying, we repackaged it in a different way. She loved what she had created it was the delivery method that she didn’t enjoy so she changed things up and made it into a DIY course.

Giving her a passive income product to sell, all hands off for her. Which gave her space to work on the next new idea. Although she loves the desk-free option she also realised that she loves in-person group work. So she added that in as an offer but set it up in a way that it still remains flexible so she is still able to travel. Moving forward she has a clearer idea of what types of offers to create that suit her needs and how to package them up.

It’s important to listen to how your body feels about something, if you are constantly pushing at it, you will burn out, and that’s not good for anyone. Sometimes it takes time to play with things to work out what is a fit for you. And not get too attached to the idea if it doesn’t work.

Ileana knows that she only has a few hours to focus on work a day and she wants her family to come first but also wants her work to be meaningful and fun.

Being intentional about what you create is important.

2. Boundaries – a tough one for moms.

boundaries for self well-being
boundaries for your business – who you work with, clients, contractors
boundaries for family – what you expect from them and vice versa.

When you build a business around your family and when working from home, as 2020 showed us, it can be hard. Mostly because of the interruptions and distractions.

Getting the family on board and having them helping around the home and an understanding from all parties around work time makes a big difference.

This often means having a hard conversation with your partner. Deciding what is and isn’t acceptable. Should you take the day off when the kid is sick because you work from home? What about housework, does that fall on the shoulders of the work-from-home parent too?

For me, having a routine where I separated home and work stuff was the best way for me to do it. Although, when my son was little it was much more complex, and more of a juggle. For those with little ones, know that it does get easier!

Nur’s Story

Boundaries, were really important for Nur this last year. She is super smart and was doing her master’s degree, gunning for a distinction (which she got) but was also working part-time, doing volunteer work, raising two boys, running the home and she has ADHD so you know, a lot on her plate!

It was really important that she embraced her learning style and set boundaries with work, the family and herself so that she had the time and space she needed to get the results she wanted.

Although when she started with me in SPARK Mastermind, she wanted help and accountability staying on track with her studies. The only way that was going to happen was by having systems and boundaries set up to give her the time and space she needed. We worked through the things that we causing her stress and where she was time-poor to form a system that would support her, not run her to the ground.

Part of Nur’s success was having a clear idea of her learning and working style. She knows what does and doesn’t work for her, so rather than trying to fit her study sessions into someone else’s plan, she did it on her own terms and in her own way.

3. SOLID GOAL

A solid goal with the path to get to it. There is an art to goal setting. Setting the goal is the easy part, the hard part is figuring out the best route to get there. And there are a lot of false starts, wrong turns and hard decisions to be made along the way.

Although I’m a productivity coach and I’m great at setting goals, I still have support from my business besties to help me come up with alternative ideas to solve problems, different ways to reach the goal and just to have someone to sound out my ideas is important too.

Di’s Story

Di, is a long-term best mate (we met at uni) and she is also in SPARK mastermind. She is a pro blogger at Superlucky.me and comper. She writes a blog for people who love entering and running competitions and sweepstakes. She’s also a great example of how to build a business around your family and your passion!

In 2022, Di had 3 big goals

Win a specific set of prices and/or the cash equivalent
Double her blog revenue, which meant increasing her blog traffic significantly
Write and launch a new book

Goal 1, is her area of expertise and she of course nailed it winning around £17,000/$21,000 worth of prizes.

Goal 2, she worked on throughout the year, tweaking things on the blog itself and working on publicity. She was on the UK TV and national press several times and smashed this goal.

Goal 3, that’s where the plot twist happened. She had already started writing the book but in Q1 she had an idea for a completely different book, a planner specifically, for compers. To begin with, she was writing both books, side by side but it soon became obvious that she needed to pick one to focus on. The planner won out.
She launched before Christmas with an initial goal of 200 pre-sales. Well, she smashed that out of the park in the first 24 hours and had to up the goal to 500. She ended up with 600 pre-sale books and has sold many more since.

Using the kaizen system, she was able to reassess and adjust accordingly so that she could get the results she was after without suffering burnout.

And the first book? That is on the goal list for this year!

4. SUPPORT SYSTEMS to build a business around your family

The biggest takeaway I have had from years of working online is making sure I have suitable support systems in place. Building your own business can be hard and it’s not always rainbows and unicorns! You need to have someone there who understands, has a shoulder to lean on on the tough days, and who are all-out cheerleader when the magic is happening.

Often moms don’t get the support from friends and family that they hoped they would and this makes things really hard. If you have someone forever doubting your ability, putting you down, telling you ‘it won’t work’ you do start to question yourself.

The other common problem is when someone quit the corporate world to set up on their own. I have had moms tell me that ex-co-workers have told them they are stupid, throwing their careers away, not smart enough and worse.

Not what you want to hear when you are taking a big leap into the unknown!

It’s really important to surround yourself with people that do understand and have your back.

Angela’s Story

Angela had worked in corporate for years but decided she wanted to go back into consulting, running her own business on her own terms.

She works with fraud investigators on the data analytics side of things, which, as you can imagine is very much a male-dominated area but she loves the work!

Much of the first part of the year was taken up with the legal gumph, which because of the nature of her work, has to be all correct, all t’s crossed and i’s dotted. She also needed to work on her networking and putting herself out there to find her first clients.

Part of that was getting in touch with her creative side to create blog posts and social media that weren’t going to take up a tonne of her time and also help her connect with the right people in the right way.

Having the weekly calls, which Angela never missed! Was important for her to feel connected. And discuss and navigate parenting and somehow have family and business fit together. It’s challenging, and as the kids grow the challenges change. Angela’s boys are now teens so it was helpful to have other teen moms to talk to.

Although Angela is extremely experienced in her line of work, online networking and marketing is something she needed to get to grips with and within the group calls we could brainstorm things to try and ways that she could position herself as the expert in front of her peers.

Being part of SPARK helped with that transition.

5. FLEXIBILITY

One thing that I feel is not talked about enough is how moms need to be flexible, way more than dads are expected to be. For moms really, the only way to go is to build a business around your family rather than grow a family around your business.

If the kids are sick, who gets called nine times out of ten?

Mom.

When it comes to housework, who gets the bigger share of jobs?

Moms!

When anything comes up, whether it’s a snow day, having to homeschool due to a pandemic, or the plumber needing to come by, it is more often than not, moms who have to shoulder the tasks.

And then all kinds of things can happen, usually with mom feeling resentful and guilty for wanting to put her career first but having the opportunity to do so taken away.

So tied into the need to build an intentional business, as a mom, flexibility is a must.

Abbie’s Story

Abbie has two little girls, and she teaches and runs her own business. Like most of us, she has to look after the kids when they are sick It’s not that she has a terrible husband, it is more that society has set us up like this.

So even though we are chipping away at the patriarchy the reality is we, the moms, still have to do most of the donkey work.

It’s important to set goals and set up a business that takes this into account.

One thing Abbie wanted to focus on was to get more online income set up so that being paid for her time (teaching classes) wouldn’t be such a burden. If her kids are sick she needs to cancel or reschedule her class.

What she came up with were online summits, niche specific for English learners and teachers. And although she was new to all this, she figured it out and made it work. She could fit it around her family and once she had the systems set up, it was a matter of rinse and repeat.

This gives her more flexibility, letting her plan her work week around the family schedule.

Like anything new, there was quite a bit of trial and error to make it happen, especially when it came to figuring out which would be the best tech for her needs.

But by breaking the goal down into baby steps and tackling one little step at a time, she figured it all out and got it all set up. Giving her a solid foundation to work on this year.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what your business is, what does matter is how you set it up for your future. Planning it to fit with the lifestyle that you want.

If you need more help with this, you can contact me here and we can hop on a call and have a chat to see how I can help you the best. If you are interested in joining SPARK Mastermind, check it out here.

How to build a business around your family