Women’s Masterclass: Your Work/Life Balance

First Speaker was Hannah McNamara:

At the time of Business Link on Thursday, 16th July, Hannah McNamara talked us about work/life balance for women who have their own business. Main reasons to open a business are to earn more money, to spend more time with family, to not have a boss...
According to them, you spend happy days when you work for yourself.

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

Furthermore, your company’s image is very important, you should network during events, but while you while you’re doing this you are not taking care of your work priorities and that’s also a big problem when you’re in a meeting, sick or in holidays.

As far as sales and marketing concern, 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 be legal as far as terms and conditions concern, with contract for each employees and a relevant insurance.

Then we did a workshop by group of five people, we determined some activities which can be out-sourced, we concluded there were 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 freelance. Finally, when you decide to out-source you must create a contract with non-disclosure agreement and without a conflict of interest (you should’nt work in the same field). You should use these steps to delegate i.e: because you will use during the year freelance few time and you don’t want to duplicate your work, you should write a detailed brief (on phone or face to face) and reccord a training video.

Some people who have a business, decides to work at home to take care of their children at the same time, often they are called Virtual Office and they use Virtual Office themselves but an important things to do is not to give home address and also you should separate home and business work and calls with a time line for you and for them. During the day you can commit a PA to manage to recall your contacts, to respond to your e-mails. With a Virtual Office you can rent a meeting room.

Business networking is a marketing method where business opportunities are created through social network. According to Hannah McNamara, networking is the best way to meet people who are interesting by 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 sometime 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 your pitch 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. Some advices if you go to an event where you don’t know anyone, you can forget your main goal, ask to someone to introduce you in a group or to talk to somebody who look lost.

Finally, when you met a personn who is interested by your business, you dropped them an e-mail and/or called them after few days (in the first send out e-mail you should let them know you will be calling in few days) to arrange a meeting. 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 advices about networking and how to open a business. She was really dynamic and funny and her exercises allow us to meet some people and to calm our anxienty.

Justine Bataille