Many successful female business owners are the CEO of more than just their company. Working to make a business stable and prosperous while also juggling a myriad of other responsibilities is a challenging task not entirely unique to women entrepreneurs, but highly skewed toward them. Doing so takes the drive, determination, and balance. Here are some tips on how to run a successful business and a household at the same time.
Leave the business at the office (and the home life at home)
It’s easier said than done, and you won’t always be able to execute this flawlessly, but you should strive to make a clear distinction between your work and home life. As a business owner, it’s easy to believe that you’re “always on call,” but to successfully fulfill your other responsibilities (family, friends, yourself), you must draw a line and not just use your home as a secondary office. As Entrepreneur Magazine points out, your clients and employees will stick to your boundaries if you stick to them.
On the flip side, you should work when you plan to work. Never shut out essential responsibilities like children and your spouse, but make it clear that work means work, and only emergencies should take you away from that.
Technology is your friend.
We all hear about the problem with being overconnected, but as long as you use it to help — not distract — technology is the best friend of a female entrepreneur running a business and a household. The only exception to the rule about keeping home and work separate is when you can use technology to get a leg up on one without harming the integrity of the other. Think about telecommuting from home.
It’s also vital that you maintain an active and well-working online presence for your business. This means a fully functioning and stable business website and various social media accounts. Your business needs a storefront that’s up and operating even when you can’t be there in the thick of it, so a tool like a free invoice app will be an incredible help to both you and your clients. If you’re not using a free app, you can expect to pay up to $20 a month for invoicing software. In this day and age, an online presence is your storefront.
If it’s been a while since you’ve updated your resume, you can use technology to help bring it up to speed. These days, there are many resources online that can assist you in developing a resume that showcases your professional accomplishments to potential clients. So, when you’re ready for an update, use some online sample templates that can make creating an eye-catching professional resume an absolute breeze.
Know that your home responsibilities are not a weakness
You’re not made weaker by having to manage a household; in fact, it’s just the contrary. Your experience running a le household can only serve to help you successfully manage your business. As Business News Daily says, managing multiple schedules, school activities, sports, and other recreation, and knowing how to balance the interpersonal relationships of a household better prepares you for your job as CEO of a company. Use it to your advantage.
There are, of course, ways to take some of those responsibilities off your shoulders. For instance, hiring a lawn service can make maintaining your yard a lot easier. According to Thumbtack, you can expect to pay anywhere from $40 to $50 for weekly mowing and weed eating. Also, regular home cleaning might help ease the burden of your busy schedule. Keep in mind, however, that the average cost of maid service in Dallas runs between $114 and $216 per visit; you can choose weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly in most cases.
Take time for yourself (and thus rely on others)
If you don’t feel comfortable delegating — either at home or at your business — you’re going to find yourself quickly overwhelmed. While it may seem impossible to let go of some amount of control (especially at your company), that’s just what you must do to have a chance to strike the right work/home balance.
You delegate so that you can have some time to focus on yourself — the person who often gets lost among an enormous amount of responsibilities. Taking care of yourself is not only important because you deserve to be healthy and happy, but the bottom line is that you cannot run a prosperous business or a successful household — let alone both at the same time — if you’re not healthy.
Many women find themselves in the tricky situation of trying to balance a household and their own business, and many feel like they must make considerable sacrifices to one to support the other. While you must get used to making some tough choices, there’s no reason you can’t be entirely successful at both.
