Spring to Action Ltd

Keeping up Your Motivation

Having an idea to start a business is an exciting, thrilling time, when the possibilities of working for yourself start to take shape. You may dream of the ability to make your own decisions, control your workload, make more money or spend more time with your family.

As time passes and you work on your business losing motivation can be a common issue. How do you keep focused on the business when you're worried about where the next job will come from or distracted by other issues?

Goals and ambitions are key here.  Take time to think about your aspirations - where do you want to be in 2 years time? Making a decent income, paying off your debts, on holiday somewhere exotic, paying for your children to enjoy themselves?

You also need to break this down into smaller, achieveable goals, perhaps on a weekly basis. Write them down and post them somewhere obvious, like a noticeboard or in your diary.  How many people do you need to contact this week? How much money do you need to earn? What else do you need to do? Lists are so important, but be as creative as you can be about how you represent this information.

And my final tip? Congratulate yourself when you achieve something. Learn from your mistakes, chalk them up to experience and find the opportunity even where you feel there isn't any.

What are your tips for staying focused on your goals?  Leave us a comment and share your thoughts.

Business Tips from the East Midlands Women's Business Conference

Spring to Action Ltd were lucky enough to attend the Women in Business conference in Derby's Pride Park.  Over 200 women running businesses, both large and small, gathered to hear top tips, network and celebrate the success of our East Midlands businesswomen.

Guest speakers included Rachel Elnaugh, of Red Letter Days / Dragons Deb fame. As well as being a guest speaker, she treated audiences to her marketing tips. We were very pleasantly suprised by Rachel who was far from her appearance on TV - she came across as friendly, likeable and approachable. Some of her many tips included identifying your personal goals and ensuring these align to your business ones.  It also enables you to bring clarity to your marketing to ensure customers undestand your businesses USP.

Susan Hallam continued to impress with her tip IT tips. She runs a range of business workshops across the region and we'd highly receommdned you go along, espeically useful for those os us struggling to keep up with all the technological innovations. But to para phrase - a website isn't enough, it needs to be interactive and needs to be promoted. Don't worry about being tip of the search engine ranking (on page 1 is good enough) and certainly don't pay to be put there.  Instead, use innovations like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Use sites that allow you to place an online advert for free but never buy links. And a top tip from me - never use a @hotmail or similar address if you want your business to be taken seriously - for the cost of buying your own sitename and abit of hosting it really is worth it.

What did we really take away with us from the conference? Probably the need to conitnue to be ambitious, to be like sponge and soak up every ounce of knowledge from the experts we work with, whether accountants, trainers or designers so we can be the experts on our business.

Most of all, though, is to love what we do - regeneration and enterprise are our true passions and we need to continue to focus on these and ensure that passion shines through.

Kash

Glimmers of cultural changes amidst an economic downturn?

A quick look at today's news and you'd be forgiven for being downhearted.  Apparently the UK has come to a standstill because we had a blanket of snow and £3 billion of business has been lost - at a time when we need as much economic output as possible.  This, on top of news that some of the best known retailers and producers are reporting massive losses in the last quarter.

But surely getting out of a economic downturn was never going to be easy? It's a long path we have to tread, learning our lessons and moving forward.  Every day I see signs that local businesses are still pressing hard and fairly optimistic about the future.  It's these seeds we need to nuture - protecting our local communities by buying locally and keeping the money in the local community to recycle over and over again.

It's not just a business shift that's happening though.  There are glimmers of a cultural shift in attitudes as people re-learn the art of make do and mend, of avoiding obvious excesses like new shiny cars, and focusing on the important things in life. It's these shoots of regeneration which will have a big impact on our happiness and wellbeing in times to come - if only we can keep hold of them.  We welcome the news that people are happier now than they were earlier on in the decade, as long as it applies across the board to the wealthier and the poorer.

I really hope we're learning our lessons from this situation - not just the big bosses of multinational banks and corporations, but individuals too.