So I am finally entering the transition stage that I have been long awaiting. For twelve years I have been working from my home office, but there have been times that I have taken on work with one or more clients that has required me to be on-site at their office.
I have recently finished working with my last on-site client and am now back home in my office five days a week. This is a great change for many reasons, and I am looking forward to settling into my new routine!
When you work from more than one location, it can be difficult to focus on your task list. It takes great organization and often requires putting in extra hours to keep on track because of all the stopping and starting.
I have a very full client roster these days (yay for my clients!) and so juggling time away from my office during business hours was sometimes very difficult to manage. I found myself working very early in the morning and very late at night, often, just to keep the workflow going smoothly.
I am very happy to be back home full-time, and focused on scheduling my time any way that suits me.
As I look around my office, I know there will be change ahead of me. I have a great email system but I know I will tweak it. I have a great filing system but I know I will change it. I have other things that I have no systems for. I know I will develop those. For those of you who know me, that’s an exciting phase for me! I love systems!
In my business, there will be even bigger change. I look forward to blogging regularly and tending to my social networks, and even getting a newsletter started. I am revising my service offerings and focusing on my ideal client. I am building a team of people that will help me take care of my clients’ needs and help me grow my business too.
It’s going to be great, and I am happy to jump in with both feet!
As a solopreneur, one of the most important things that you can do in your business (and for your business!), is to grow with it. Although you might go into business for yourself with a very static view of which services you will provide, you need to be aware that the old adage ‘a change is as good as rest’ is really true. You can breathe new life into your everyday work by keeping an eye out for change and growth opportunities!
I have been a solopreneur for many years, but over the years I have grown from providing financial services to providing Internet marketing and social media services. I am certain that I could never have predicted that I would be working with shopping carts and social media when I started my business so many years ago as a food & beverage consultant, but I grew with my business when I saw change approaching, and I would never look back.
How did I grow? I learned everything I could about what I was doing at the time, and then I kept an eye up ahead in the road to see what else was coming my way.
I have said I am in perpetual learning mode, and that is true. When I worked in finance, I studied accounting and business and took workshops in Excel and databases. I needed to know that I was always using the most current methods in my daily work.
It just so happened that I needed to take over some projects from a colleague that were closely related to my financial work. They were documents and training manuals. So I grew in the direction of words, and away from numbers.
I began to focus mainly on document work, and I took writing courses and learned about back-of-the-book indexing. I refreshed my education in the principles of grammar and sentence structure. I expanded into proofreading website copy and then realized that HTML was really not as difficult as everyone said it was. So I took a course in HTML.
That has been one of the smartest moves I ever made in my career. I do not do web design, but being able to set up sales pages and do website updates is a really big business for a Virtual Assistant. I have continued to grow with Internet marketing and now social media.
Perpetual learning is a great way to keep growing with your business. By recognizing the changing needs of your business, you can bring a fresh, new perspective to your clients. Give them what they need, maybe even before they realize they need it!
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