One thing is evident when you do the work to research your niche, your industry, and your audience so that you can build your life-affirming business: there are things that you need to change. That’s even more true when you get real about who you are, what skills you have or lack, and are honest about your deficiencies. There is always going to be something that you need to change so that you can succeed.
As you work through developing your life-affirming business plan, an exercise that will help you move forward is to note where you are right now and where you want to go. Don’t just draw a line from point A to point B, though. Instead, you need to take the time to write down the steps involved in getting to point B.
For example, let’s say you’re a married mom of three children under nine years old. You have a 2-year-old, a five-year-old, and an 8-year-old. Your husband works away from home 60 hours a week, including travel time. You work outside the home 50 hours a week, including travel time.
You usually are home on weekends, but your spouse works odd hours sometimes on weekends, nights and is not reliable to help out with the kids or anything else around the house very often. You are trying to build a reselling business on Amazon FBA, Poshmark.com, eBay.com, and other platforms. Your first goal is to replace your $38,000 yearly income so that you can stop going to that job.
There is nothing wrong with the above scenario. If you look at it realistically, you can see clearly that you will need to create a plan uniquely designed for you, the time you have available, your budget, your goals, and other considerations to find time to build your business the way you want it to be.
You note that you have every intention to work for two hours a night taking pictures and making listings after you get the kids to bed by 8:30 PM weeknights and 10 PM on weekends. You also want to work four hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, shopping for and sourcing new products. But you find yourself not doing any of it. You get home, do your household chores, spend time with the kids, put them to bed, and veg on the couch until you pass out, or you find things to do that aren’t your business like laundry, dishes, mopping, and so forth.
Meanwhile, your business goes nowhere. What do you need to change?
In this case, you need to change your mindset. There is no reason you have to cook home-cooked meals or clean the house yourself. Enlist the children’s help and assign chores to your husband when he’s home. If you can, consider hiring someone to come in and help.
Try getting up two hours earlier and doing the listings and pictures before you’re tired from the day. That way, you get it done while you’re alert before you’ve given all you have at work. Change to only sourcing once a week on Saturday morning for as long as it takes you to spend your budget up to 5 hours, then on Sunday spend four hours organizing for pictures and listing during the week.
Even if you don’t get it all done during the time constraints you’ve set, you will get it done over time. Remember, there are no rules about how much you need to do each day other than meeting your goals. If it’s too hard to meet, reset your goals to be more realistic.
As you see, the main point of all this is to figure out where you are, where you want to be, and then working with what you have and your personality to design a path to get you to your destination. In this case, it’s going to start with listing goals, and then once you meet those, you can focus on your income goals.