Last Thursday I went with about 300 other women to the 1 million women breakfast in Canberra, accompanied by Diana (my production assistant) and Lee (our MYOB mentor). By a happy coincidence, that turned out to be the day we got our first female prime minister. There was a great buzz of anticipation throughout the breakfast, although sadly we’d all …
A milestone!
It was very exciting this week to find that the income from the business has now surpassed the amount I was earning (including superannuation) as an employee. This doesn’t mean that I’m now earning more than I used to, because there are lots of expenses to come out of that amount. However, I now have most of the equipment and …
WHO style guide in PerfectIt!
Thanks to a conversation on LinkedIn, over the past few months I’ve been working with Daniel, creator of PerfectIt, and Bernadette, one of my colleagues, to customise PerfectIt to cover the World Health Organization (WHO) style guide. It’s been a laborious process – the guide includes hundreds of preferred terms, and in each case we had to work out how …
A useful plan
Back in June 2009, I started work on a business plan using a 20-page template provided by a friend. However, I didn’t finish it (hence my post last December that I didn’t have a plan, even a 1-page one). So I was pleasantly suprised last week when I opened up my half-written plan to find that: the bits I had …
A creative use for business cards
Last week I was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the need to work both on the business and in it. To reduce the stress, I took a stack of my business cards (I can’t see myself ever needing all 500 of them) and wrote one aspect of the business of the back of each card. I included everything I could think of, and ended …
Building a team
Getting sick put a big hole in my work schedule this week, and made me realise the importance of organising backup. On the plus side, I’ve been doing just that – building up a team of freelancers with a range of skills. I’m finding that this is one of the most interesting and exciting parts of running my own business, and LinkedIn has …
Working from anywhere
Last week I said that carrying the tools of my trade around with me didn’t necessarily mean that I could get myself in the frame of mind required to work while away from home. Now, I’m actually updating my blog while bussing up to Sydney in a rain storm (and have been able to edit a document, email clients and …
Busy week
Last week was extremely busy, but very satisfying, in that I completed the first draft of a document I’ve been working on for over a month. I sometimes think substantive editing is a bit like housework, in that you often get to a point where things look a terrible mess before they come good (for example, in housework, the point where you’ve …
All coached up!
Well, seeing a business coach was DEFINITELY a good idea. In our first session, we managed to thrash out the answers to three of my four questions (the only one we didn’t tackle was where I see the business going in the short and long term). We also covered various practical things that I didn’t even realise I should be doing ( ‘unknown unknowns’ …
Making a plan …
I see that back at the beginning of December I was blogging about how I had set a date to make a business plan. Well, that didn’t happen, and I still have no plan, not even a 1-page one. So, I’ve bitten the bullet and got myself a business coach. We have our first appointment tomorrow, and I’m hoping that she …