5 Systems that Help Work-from-Home Moms Manage Their Life and Business

Every work from home mom knows the challenges of wearing the mom hat and business woman hat.
And let’s not forget the wife and daughter hat (if you’re married and your parents are still around).  I always found it challenging to manage all these things until I was in a position to create systems that helped me balance my time.
Now truth be told you can get work done without these. There are tricks to managing home and business that I teach, especially to moms who are unable to “purchase” help.
But these systems become more important as your business grows.
For most moms who start their business at home, whether it’s a network marketing business, an editing business, a social media management business or a baking business we often do one thing wrong!
We never build our business like a big business.
We look upon our business as a hobby and don’t put systems in place to help us manage both home and business properly as the business grows.
One of my coaches once told me that the first thing you need to do as your business starts to grow is hire an assistant. Remember that as a work-from-home-mom managing your life is just as important as your business, because you decided to go into business so that you can have a better life.
So if business is really going great then these are a few things (five to be exact) that you NEED to invest in as quickly as possible.
 

Hire an Assistant

This could be a virtual assistant or an in house office assistant.
But this person has be able to do quite a few things off the bat.

• Managing your calendar
• Client meetings
• Organizing Children activities,
• PTA meetings,

Their job is to manage your life and your affairs.
If possible they can also do administrative tasks, like;

• Uploading content to your blog or website
• Scheduling social media
• Responding to customer questions
• Processing customer orders.

Sometimes you will find that it’s better to hire an agency to do your social media, or an IT person to handle all your website management including content. But for most work-from-home moms you may want to just start with an Assistant who can handle all these things.
Know what your monthly budget it for this type of service and utilize either your local recruitment agencies, or sites like www.freelancer.com or www.upwork.com
Always ask for references or sample work if necessary. Remember you’re hiring someone to work in your organization. This is important.

Hire a Baby Sitter

In order to get more “day time” work hours you want to hire a baby sitter.
Don’t just hire a baby sitter for when you’re going out with your husband or girlfriends. Your babysitter needs to be someone you have on a regular basis.
So if you know you want to do product development work or book writing and you need 3 hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday then hire them knowing this is going to be a long term agreement.
Because you work from home you’re not loosing your peace about sending out your babies to a child care service that you either don’t trust or think is over priced. Contrary to popular belief utilizing a babysitter who comes to your home works out cheaper than day care and you have them for a dedicated time frame at the times you want.
It also helps you with your time management. If you know the babysitter is at your home from 10 am to 1 pm then you make sure you have things organized so that you’re ready get to work immediately as they ring the door bell!
We already know that working from home is more productive than working from an office. Even when I was working full-time for a company honestly speaking I only worked 4 hours a day. You factor in the non-essential meetings that go on for hours, people coming to chat with you about last night’s show that you didn’t watch (because you’re building a business at night), or the numerous coffee breaks to stay up because the color on wall just sucks and then of course the bathroom breaks because of all the coffee you’re drinking!
So needless to say when you’re working from home building your business and you have little ones a babysitter is a game changer!
 

Hire a House Cleaner

One of the biggest time savers for some mothers is hiring a housekeeper or maid.
You can even hire a maid service to come on a weekly or fortnightly basis depending on the number of children, age and size of your home.
We all want to live in a clean environment but we rarely have the 7 hours it may take to clean the house from top to bottom. We all know that we can’t work in a dirty environment. Clean house leads to clean thoughts. And especially when your office is at home you need the house to be clean and tidy.
Hiring a housekeeper ensures that you don’t have to take 7 hours a week to clean.
Again this should be set up in such a way that it isn’t a one off service. If you’re hiring a maid service then work out a good price as they will be coming once a week. If you’re hiring an individual housekeeper make sure you’ve established your terms of agreement, references etc.
When our second child was born, my gift from my mother was a housekeeper one day a week, every other week! You can’t imagine the difference this made during the first 3 months. It was such a good arrangement we decided to keep her.

Send your household laundry out to be cleaned.

Another time sucker is laundry. One day I actually calculated how time I spend doing house laundry for my family. added to that was time that was lost because of just being trained from doing laundry!
I calculated that on weekly basis, even with me spreading out the loads during the week I still wasted close 14 hours a week doing laundry.
Now a system in place that will give me that time back is a LIFE SAVING SYSTEM. Not much more can be said here.
So investigate in your area where you can get your laundry done by someone else (and I don’t mean just your dry cleaning) I mean everything; clothes, sheets, towels, comforters! You will never regret this investment.
The truth is yes this is an investment, and sometimes investments can be a little hefty, but the reality is nothing is better than having someone come and pick up dirty clothes and return them clean and all I have to do is pack away!
Plus I HATE doing laundry!

Invest in CRM Software

The last system that you should have in place is establishing a proper Customer Relationship Management tool. Now I know when you are CRM you’re thinking Microsoft. But I mean something far easier and WAY cheaper!
Using tools like www.17Hats.com is simple, reliable and in the cloud!
It’s not hard to start managing your customers through a system like this so it’s a good idea to invest. When you know everything about your customer, services they’ve purchased previously, the spending patterns, your last conversations; you’re able to deliver a far superior customer service experience and it has all the appearances of a BIG BUSINESS.
So for the mom who isn’t able to invest in these just yet then you’re not ready. You can learn some of my other techniques for a creating a big business without spending too much.
Now even though my business coach suggested to me the first thing to ever invest in besides your business coach is to hire is an assistant and I couldn’t agree more.
As a mom in business however the first thing you should hire when you have the resources is a babysitter. This is especially true for mothers with young children.
Once you’re able to think without having to run to pick up a baby you’ll then be able to figure out what you want your assistant to do! (catch my drift)
Hope this post has served you today.
Learn more about how you can build your business online from home.