I’ve started working with a life coach. I’ve started to notice since having my daughter that my concentration span is minimal and that I have become rather scatty.

Before having my daughter I was the organisational queen, Monica from friends wasn’t a patch on me, my OCD cleaning and my role as a Personal Assistant to a Head of Service within local government meant I was the ultra PA – I organised everything, even my knicker draw was laid out in a particular way and I’d organise husband’s draws too!

So when the offer came of working with a life coach in return for using me as a case study came along I jumped at the chance!

The first of my six fortnightly session was spent talking about where I thought I was going wrong. For me my organisational skills had disappeared. It took this person to show me what I already knew but also what I’d been missing.

My first task was to get diaries for different aspects of my life – family life/work life/business life  (I have my own business as well as having a 30 hour a week job). I was to give a set time to my own business in order to focus more clearly on each client, I was to put family appointments and diaries in order, I was to write a to do list everyday.

Now not all of this has worked but I’ve come to a happy inbetween to start with.

1) a family diary that has all birthdays/flat related items/important dates in

2) a rota for cleaning so that as a family we don’t waste a day tidying up at the weekend

3) A colour coded diary – so each area of my life has a colour and with my to do list I organise each day

Now – this has started to help, I feel I have more control and am starting to relax from the panicky state I got in if I didn’t do everything all at once. If something doesn’t get done it goes as a priority on the next day. I’m hoping to get to the stage where I’m not wading against a tide but am in fact focussed and more methodical. To be honest I’m starting to find it clearer now. Not so foggy and I can see the sunshine of my business blooming within this first two weeks.

The one I now need to plan out is my set times for business. This proves hard when I work with other people like me – mums who need to chat after the kids have gone to bed. Between 8 and 9pm is always the best time.

I’d love to hear suggestions on how you time manage and what tips you have!

How does this bird help me make money?

I had a hot chocolate today with someone whose opinion I value dearly. Whose guidance and support I seek as often as I dare, as she’s an uber busy lady. She’s just taken to an iphone after being attached to her blackberry for work for a number of years and doesn’t ‘get’ the twitter thing. So I got her a little book for Christmas with what’s what and how it works. As she doesn’t follow many people, she’s just seeing me on her screen, so I felt very conscious of that tonight as I was whittering away.

She asked me how I make money from twitter? So I thought I would share it with you as well, because it’s kind of simple but still hard work… The short answer is that it brings me clients. Literally.

.

I saw someone tweet the other day that they were thinking of hiring someone for PR and Marketing so I messaged them to say “Hello, I’m here and busy, but depending on what you want I may be interested”. We skyped. I explained what I have to offer, and what questions to ask of other people, to try to gauge how to compare everyone they would speak to. They came back yesterday and asked me to do 6 months with them.

Someone else follows me on twitter and can see that I’m in the NHS, New Baby, Family and Parenting market. She called me out of the blue, I was on my way out and she asked me if I’d like to look at working for her with a new product she’s got coming out. I said “yes, of course” and I’m meeting her next week, with our respective non disclosure agreements to hand, to work out a way forward together.

So twitter is great. It sends people to the Weston Communications website, and people call and email me to ask me to work with them. Simple. Eh? Not quite. I put a lot of work into being engaging and not sycophantic with people. Lots of people do the latter and it irritates me. I don’t do link swaps or anything like that, so I know that the people and businesses which follow me are genuinely interested in me. And vice versa.

Twitter – my online life, and my real life have been so great to me. I’ve never actually written a pitch, or presented a business pitch to anyone. It’s all been word of mouth. Whether on line or offline and I’m actually seeing that as a strength now, because there’s no better introduction than a recommendation eh?

Would it be ever so wrong to say that one of the things that motivates me is earning money? Lots of it? I suppose it depends what “lots of it” means to you, the reader. Would it be £100, £1,000 or £100,000 ?? I don’t even know what lots of it means to me, that’s something I need to think about…

“When people say money doesn’t make you happy”, I kind of get it. Because when I was single, and had plenty of money, I was sad that I’d not met someone to share my experiences with. Now that I have met the person who I want to share my experiences with for the rest of my life and we have two lovely, healthy, generally happy boys, I don’t have disposable income like I used to.

The reason why I don’t like that phrase is that I feel it’s implying that you have to not have money to be happy. I disagree. I don’t think it has to be a choice: earning lots of money OR being a good person, earning lots of money OR seeing your children, earning lots of money OR being a charitable/ethical/morally guided person.

I want to earn lots of money for lots of reasons. Here’s some that come to my mind as I’m writing:

1. To give us regular luxury holidays with nice swimming pools, lovely food and more milkshake than the boys could ever hope for?
2. To enable us to have a cleaner so that we don’t bicker over who does what at home, and so we can spend time together at night watching tv or playing scrabble without worrying about who will clean the toilets.
3. To go away for the night or out for dinner with my husband and not worry about the cost of it.
4. To be able to make donations to projects that I think will really make a difference in the world.
5. To give my parents the retirement they deserve to have.
6. To be able to treat me and my friends to attending a soft play session every so often, for all of our children AND have coffee and a cake there without people having to fret or feel guilty about spending money on it. One bite of cake and one slurp of coffee is better than none, surely?
7. To pay for one of my oldest friend’s cancer treatment that’s extending her life at the moment, so she doesn’t need to worry in case the trial ends and her drugs disappear with it. So her miracle baby daughter gets to have her for long enough to make her own memories of her, of her own.
8. So that next time we have an 11 week old baby who is poorly in hospital and we’re not near home, my DH can book a travel lodge and not sleep in the car, because he doesn’t want to “waste money on something he will only use for 6 hours”.

And now I’m crying. Because I really want to earn enough money to do be in a position to make 7 and 8 happen. So what motivates me? Making lots of money, lots and lots of it, to be able to do these things, safe in the knowledge that I’m a good enough person to use it to support others, as well as my own immediate family.

I don’t want to be ashamed of it any more. I want to earn money. Lots of it.

Shall I get off my soap box now? What do you want to earn money for? What do you want to do with it? Does that motivate you?
Would be lovely if I wasn’t left feeling like I’m out on a limb here! Here’s hoping you make some comments on this one…

I think that this is just for the USA, judging by the $ signs in the info, but apparently, now BabiesRUs and ToysRUs are doing a credit card. There’s just 10% off the first order, as the incentive. I am all for marketing and branding anything and everything but this just, well, it is too much. Even for me. I don’t see how it enhances their brands – it makes them things that you have when you can’t really afford them upfront, surely?

For those who are already parents, we learn all to quickly that our tiddlers don’t even use their toys for very long, so your best buys are usually found at NCT Nearly New Sales / Preschool sales / Car boots. It’s certainly not intended for people who are above Nearly New Sales, as they wouldn’t be seen dead with something that looks like this in their purse, would they?

Fancy this in your purse?*

What do you think of this? It is too much, to have a credit card to encourage you to spend on your baby when you don’t have the money for it? Is it just me, being anti credit cards? What do you think of this?

*Image of credit card courtesy of http://www.creditcardchaser.com/babies-r-us-credit-card/

Baby birth payments?

This is another one of those articles where I can see both sides of the coin. Parents to be in places outside of the UK are experiencing the seas of change financially. Women in Spain are reported to be keen to deliver their babies before midnight on 31 Dec 2010, to receive the last of the government’s €2,500 (£2,128) “baby cheques”. Apparently, they are seeing increasing numbers of women coming in reporting spotting and other early labour indicators. The payments were brought in, in 2007, to provide an incentive for  people to have more babies to improve the nation’s birth rate. But now that they payments are about to stop, it’s causing some women to want to bring their birth days forwards…

“What we’re seeing in the public sector is that women who are due to give birth in the first fortnight of January are coming in and saying they are spotting blood or that their waters have broken,” a midwife in a Seville hospital told El País newspaper. ”They don’t dare say so openly but we know they want to bring the due date forward. We examine them and send them home.”

Sounds like sensible stuff to me. But the article then went on with the Guardian quoting José Ángel Espinosa, Associate Head of Gynaecology at the Quirón hospital in Madrid, as saying that he would induce women early. “If they’ve reached 38 weeks and they ask us to do it, we will,” he said. But the doctor warned that he would not induce anyone who was not ready. “It’s my watch on the 31st,” he said. “And I’m not going to let anyone put one over on me.”

Surely a woman’s body usually tells her when she’s ready to give birth? I thought we always had the debate about how pregnancy is actually usually more like a 42 week experience and that we should not be inducing women before then? To induce women at 38 weeks, purely so they get a cheque, feels like a big step to be taking. Having said that, I can see why women are so keen on it – a cheque for £2K would come in hand in those first few months as parents.

What do you think of this? Is it ok to induce someone early so they get a cheque for £2k?

Today, we’ve had someone who has messed us about with a £545 advert finally leave us in the lurch at 10pm at night, for the Ipswich New Baby Guide. I’m annoyed about the money, but also, about the time and effort we’ve spent in helping them to date. Their artwork had low res images in it, it was sent in after the deadline and was the wrong size. We provided gentle nudges re the deadline, told them their images weren’t of print quality and told them they’d not measured their advert correctly for the space they had bought.  We could have just printed the advert anyway, but it didn’t feel to be the right thing to do, so we helped them to make the most of the space they had booked.

That would all be fine, so long as they pay. We’ve been commenting in the office for a while, that they seemed like “one of those businesses” and lo and behold, they’ve now come up with a reason to not pay for the advert – because their normal practise is to pay on receipt of something and, to have 30 days to pay it in. (They’ve had their invoice for 2 months already….)

We should have ditched them when they first started messing us about nearly a month ago. But we persevered because we wanted the sale and it was something that parents would really like to know about and access. They would have done so well out of the Guide, and made thousands! We know this, because their type of business does well in our other Guides…

Do you charge up front for your services or products? Do you use your intuition in your business?
Is it usually right? Do you think it’s a sound way to do business? Would be grateful for your thoughts…

Really? Big corporate organisation? Size matters does it? There’s nothing I hate more than businesses assuming that because we are relatively small compared to them, we aren’t powerful.

Images courtesy of www.beahottie.co.uk

Do you think not for profit organisations which work with mums, babies and families prefer something that’s unique, saves them money and helps them meet their insurance requirements or, something that’s a nice to have on site but doesn’t help with any insurance requirements and causes run ins with the biggest worldwide brand in our field?

Any Heads of Midwifery fancy a catch up shortly? Would love to get your thoughts on this one. <waits for the phone to ring>   I don’t like arguing with anyone really. but it’s irked me. This suggestion that we do isn’t powerful, when Heads of Midwifery rate and love us, and so do the local businesses and parenting communities we work with…”  grrrrrrrr.

Time for a brew me thinks…