I’d been struggling to find any female voices I could relate to who were juggling business and family, so I became one. It was rocky in the beginning. I had no real plan other than to be as honest as I could about life in business with my husband and kids, and to hope that what I was doing was helping someone else along the way.
Recently I went back to the beginning and read my first blog articles. A lot’s changed since then. I now have a small but steady following, and I’ve had other business owners reach out and let me know that my experiences have helped them in the most incredible and unexpected ways.
But there was something else. Something I didn’t see until I started scrolling through the past. My writing had been helping me. It turns out that with every line I typed, I wasn’t just growing my blog, I was growing myself and my business.
This is how …
Motivation booster
Nothing feels quite as good as ticking something off your to-do list. For me, finishing a task is one of the best ways to fuel motivation, and there is no greater “tick” than that sense of achievement you get from pressing the publish button every week on your blog.
Even those weeks when I felt like everything got on top of me, if I published a blog article, I had a win.
The small things
Our life was moving so quickly that I was skimming the small stuff. But blogging retrained my brain to start looking at my day-to-day tasks in a different way. A more creative way. Because I was now writing about my business, I was stopping to take a closer look, and analysing processes that I had never thought twice about before.
Looking at the details has increased my knowledge dramatically, making me far better equipped to grow our businesses.
A new way to track and measure
Because I was documenting the small stuff, I also had a running report of what was going on in our business and how I handled it as an owner. I could not only track and measure the business, but also my knowledge, learning and business development.
New people and new experiences
Even when you’re surrounded by people, sometimes being a small business owner can get lonely. So can being the mother of small children. And I was both. But as I became more involved in writing and blogging, I started meeting new people and forming new networks and support groups. Being a part of these new networks meant not only new business opportunities but also new social opportunities with other likeminded business owners.
When I started writing about my business life all those years ago, I wanted to help people. I didn’t even consider that by doing so, I’d also be helping myself.
Excerpted from ‘Once Upon a Time in Small Business‘
by Lee McCaffrey Krupa