Women’s Masterclass – Your Work Life Balance

At the Business Link London Workshop on Thursday, 16th July, Hannah McNamara talked to us about work/life balance for women who have their own business. She was the First Speaker.

Our highlights:
Main reasons to open a business are to earn more money, to spend more time with family and to not have a boss…
According to her, you spend happy days when you work for yourself!

The differences between your own business and a corporate job is: your full time job will be Monday to Friday and will be normally be over after your normal hours of business. Your own business will take lot of time to start up, develop and generate money. It may not allow much time off, because you have to take care of delivering, administration and dealing with other businesses by yourself.

Your company image:
Furthermore, your company’s image is very important, so you should network during events. However if you are at a networking event you are exchanging that work time for business development time (technically!) so things can be touch if you are on your own as YOU are the business. Which means the business STOPS when you’re in a meeting, sick or in holidays and so forth.

As far as sales and marketing are concerned, you have to focus on people who want to buy your products/services and after you should continue building a relationship with them, they will feel important and it will be a crucial point for your business. You will need a website, it’s also necessary to save your database, to encourage contracts (clients/affiliates/employee/freelance) and to know how to use your software. The most important thing is to have a good legal framework as far as terms and conditions are concerned. Make sure you have the correct contract for each employee or joint venture and relevant insurance.

Then we did a workshop with the whole group in sets of five people. The task was to determine what activities could be out-sourced by smaller businesses. We concluded that it is possible to outsource such tasks as accountancy, marketing, e-mail responses, website managing, graphic design, etc…
It’s necessary to delegate some parts of your business because other people will have skills you don’t have and they can also become a partner in your business. They can also cover your business while you’re in meeting, you have big contract, during your holidays by using freelancers. Finally, when you decide to out-source you must create a contract with a non-disclosure agreement and without a conflict of interest. Some people say you should’nt work in the same field. In our company – we DO work with people in our field as we believe collaboration rather than competition is also healthy. We also have Joint Venture Agreements in place to ensure clarity of responsibilities and finances.
You can use these steps to delegate i.e: it is a good idea to write a detailed brief (on phone or face to face) and record a training video. This is because you may only use freelancers a few times during the year and you don’t want to duplicate your work over and over.

Some people who have a business, decide to work at home to take care of their children at the same time. Often they are called Virtual Offices and they use Virtual Offices themselves. It is suggested that you refrain from giving a home address and you should also separate home and business work and calls with a time line for you and for them. During the day you can hire a PA to manage to recall your contacts, to respond to your e-mails. With a Virtual Office you can rent a meeting room and get post sent to give the appearance of an office for a much better value than hiring one full time!

Business networking is a marketing method where business opportunities are created through social networking. According to Hannah McNamara, networking is the best way to meet people who are interested in your business and who want to buy from you. It’s an activity which takes lot of time but it’s interesting because you go to some events and sometimes it’s a real opportunity. Networking can work for you because it creates opportunities to talk about your company at an event. They are mainly used to meet new contacts and you should be prepared to present your pitch – or elevator pitch (30 seconds) and to questions we can ask you.
To reach this goal, it’s necessary to be curious and polite, to talk and to include everybody. But you don’t have to be egocentric and sell too much because more people don’t like that approach! We all know them don’t we?! Some advice for you, if you go to an event where you don’t know anyone, you can forget your main goal, ask someone to introduce you in a group or to talk to somebody who looks lost.

Finally, when you meet a personn who is interested in your business, you drop them an e-mail and/or call them after afew days (in the first instance send out an e-mail to let them know you will be calling them in a few days) to arrange a meeting or future contact. To sign the contract with them, you should ask them questions, to help them first and to learn about they’re need.

My Comment:
I think it was an exciting seminar because she gave us advice about networking and how to open a new business. She was really dynamic and funny and her exercises allowed us to meet some people and to do it without feeling stressed.
Justine Bataille on behalf of Amanda