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planning

Business Wisdom from 1982 – Take Time

By Heather Cameron 16 Comments

Take Time

It is the time of year for seasonal preparations and business planning for the coming year. So it seemed timely that while I was looking through my mother’s cookbooks for family favorites, I stumbled upon this lovely list.

Take Time for 10 Things (author unknown)

  1. Take time to Work —It is the price of success.
  2. Take time to Think—It is the source of power.
  3. Take time to Play—It is the secret of youth.
  4. Take time to Read—It is the foundation of knowledge.
  5. Take time to Worship—It is the highway of reverence and washes the dust of earth from your eyes.
  6. Take time to Help and Enjoy Friends—It is the source of happiness.
  7. Take time to Love—It is the one sacrament of life.
  8. Take time to Dream—It hitches the soul to the stars.
  9. Take time to Laugh—It is the singing that helps with life’s loads.
  10. Take time to Plan—It is the secret of being able to have time to take time for the first 9 things.
My mother’s loved cookbook

This list is over 35 years old and still applies today. Planning time for all of these things will make a huge difference in your business and personal life. The only one I’d adjust would be to change Worship to taking time to be Spiritual, to honour everyone’s beliefs.

Which of the 10 things do you naturally take time to do? Which ones do you need to remember to include in your weekly plans? What difference will it make if you take time for all 10? Please share in the comments below or come share them in the Ready for More! Women Business Owner Circle.

Filed Under: Business Basics, Mindset Tagged With: planning, take time

Planning Your Awesome Month – RFM023

By Heather Cameron Leave a Comment

Planning Your Awesome Month

Welcome to a new month! Today is a great day for planning your Awesome Month. In this week’s weekly tip episode I outline a simple process that I follow at the beginning of each month to set myself up for success.

Do you spend time at the beginning of each month planning for success? Do you review your last month and set your goals for the new month?

Listen to this week’s Ready for More! Podcast weekly tip and learn a simple 2 step process that you can do each month to plan your Awesome Month.

Click here if you’d like more information about Your Day Accelerator Plan Program

Highlights: Planning Your Awesome Month

Step One – Review the Last Month:

  • What did your achieve?
  • What worked well?
  • What challenges did you face?
  • What lessons did you learn?
  • What are you most grateful for?
  • What do you want to do differently?
  • What are your numbers?
    • Revenue
    • Expenses
    • Social media numbers
    • Others

Step Two- Set Your Goals for the Month:

  • What is your top goal for the month?
  • What are your top 3 to 5 goals you want to achieve?
  • What are your target for the month?
    • Revenue (and break it down to what you need to sell to make it.)
    • Social media numbers
    • Others

If you like what you hear please come and join the Ready For More! Women Business Owners Circle, we are a group of 40+ women entrepreneurs helping each other reach for our More!

Let’s connect:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/igniteyourmarket/

Join the Ready For More! Women Business Owners Circle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronheather/

Links:

Would you like tips to increase your productivity? Click here to access your free gift: Take Control of Your Day and Unleash Your Potential

Are you being “Shoulded” to death, download your free ShouldBuster: https://www.igniteyourmarket.com/shouldbuster/

Learn more about Heather: https://www.igniteyourmarket.com/heathercameron/

Filed Under: Ready For More! Podcast Tagged With: #readyformore, planning

Facebook Live: 5 Strategies to Stay Focused and Enjoy Your Summer

By Heather Cameron Leave a Comment

Are you looking for business building tips and ideas?

I’m live every Tuesday at noon (EST) on the Ignite Your Market Facebook Business Page.

Join me live or watch for the replays on my blog – The Spark.

Each week I’ll be sharing tips and ideas to help you:

  • Identify your market and opportunities.
  • Increase your productivity.
  • Connect with your client and prospects.
  • Ignite your markets and your businesses

Facebook Live: 5 Strategies to Stay Focused and Enjoy Your Summer

Summer is here! Here in Eastern Canada, it hot! Record-breaking hot! We’ve just celebrated Canada Day and summertime activities are in full swing – pool parties, BBQ, family activities, fun trips, vacations and just relaxing in the shade.

I don’t know about you but I get summer brain when it is this hot and I find it hard to focus. How are we as entrepreneurs supposed to maintain productivity with heat and so much other stuff going on?

With a few changes, you can make summertime a productive time for your business and still enjoy all it has to offer.

1: Let Yourself Relax!

Give yourself permission to enjoy summer. We all need downtime to relax, recharge and enjoy our loved ones. Decide how you will relax, do you want to take a vacation for a week or two with your family, or do you prefer to plan for long weekends? I personally like to plan for long weekends throughout the summer months, making each one seem like a mini-vacation.

2: Unplug!

Plan to unplug, turn off your devices and enjoy. It is so important to fully disengage from your business and allow your mind to rest. Unplug, relax and enjoy. You’ll come back to your business with fresh eyes and renewed energy.

If the thought of unplugging is overwhelming try it for small periods at a time and work up to a day and then a weekend. You’ll be amazed at how being unplug will actually help your business.

3: Shift Your Schedule

Consider changing your work schedule to take advantage of the wonderful weather. Perhaps you want to get outside during the cooler hours in the morning and work later in the afternoon.  Or you liked to work longer days for 4 days and create 3 day weekends. You have the freedom, as an entrepreneur, to shift your schedule so that you can enjoy the summer months and all the activities.

4: Focus on your Must Do List

We all have long to-do lists but do you have a must-do-list? Think about tasks as must-do to grow my business and serve my community and would be nice to do. These are the big tasks and projects that really matter, that you want to focus on.  Be really critical as you create your list, you’ll be surprised how short your must-do-list can be.

5: Batch Your Work and Create Online and Offline Work Times

Take a good look at what you want to accomplish and batch your work together and schedule it. For example, batching social media post and scheduling then can be a real time saver. What other things can you batch to save time?

Take advantage of the weather and change up where you work. Consider batching your work between online work and offline work. This will allow you to be productive in a variety of locations. Offline activities can include brainstorm, planning, and creating new things. Online work often includes emails, social media and research.

Getting offline allows you to free up space to think differently about your business, to focus on the big picture and assess your day to day work.

With some extra planning for the summer, you can maintain or even increase productivity while enjoying the summer months! As a bonus, you might form new habits that help you with your business in any season.

How do you stay focused and enjoy your summer?

Filed Under: Planning, Productivity Tagged With: planning, productivity, summertime

Ignite Your Market Challenge: Enjoy Your Summer and Stay Focused

By Heather Cameron Leave a Comment

The Ignite Your Market Weekly Challenge’s goal is to create simple but powerful actions that you can do each week that will help you:

  • Identify your market and opportunities.
  • Connect with your client and prospects.
  • Ignite your markets and your businesses

This Week’s Ignite Your Market Challenge: Enjoy Your Summer and Stay Focused

Summer is here! Here in Eastern Canada, it hot! Record-breaking hot! We’ve just celebrated Canada Day and summertime activities are in full swing – pool parties, BBQ, family activities, fun trips, vacations and just relaxing in the shade.

I don’t know about you but I get summer brain when it is this hot and I find it hard to focus. How are we as entrepreneurs supposed to maintain productivity with heat and so much other stuff going on?

The answer is to make your plan to enjoy summer. With a few changes, you can make summertime a productive time for your business and still enjoy all it has to offer.

With some extra planning for the summer, you can maintain or even increase productivity while enjoying the summer months! As a bonus, you might form new habits that help you with your business in any season.

This week’s Ignite Your Market Challenge is to start to Enjoy Your Summer and Stay Focused.

Do you want some strategies to help? Watch my Facebook Live Replay: 5 Strategies to Stay Focused and Enjoy Your Summer.

Join me tomorrow on my Tuesday Facebook Live where I’ll be walking through 5 Strategies to Stay Focused and Enjoy Your Summer!

How do you enjoy summer?

Filed Under: Ignite Your Market Challenge, Planning Tagged With: business planning, planning, summertime

Selling the Farm – 7 Valuable Business Lessons You Need to Know

By Heather Cameron Leave a Comment

That’s what I’ve been doing on and off for the last 10 months – selling my parents farm. It’s finally sold after an intense 3 month of craziness. I won’t lie; at times this seemed like an impossible task for many reasons.

Selling a farm is much more than selling a home. It is selling a home and business together, with some very unique complications and considerations. My parents were born in the late 20’s and are a product of the depression/war generation. What does that mean? They kept everything and it was important to honor what they owned while also emptying everything out.

It seemed IMPOSSIBLE, but we did it! Why? Because we HAD to!

Here are 7 things I’ve learned when you HAVE to get something done that seems impossible:

  • You WILL get it done! – I often hear business owners WANT to do something, but time ticks by and it still isn’t done. Why? Because it is a WANT and not a HAVE TO. I’ve learned that if you turned your “wants” into true “have to’s” then you’ll figure out how to get there. You’ll prioritize, find help, and put the time in to meet that deadline. You’ll start seeing success in your business in ways that you don’t when you are only working towards “WANTS”.
  • We each have our own set of areas we shine in! – I didn’t sell the farm alone. My brothers and I naturally divided the work into areas that suited us best. I focused on the house and all their belongings; my brothers focused on the barns and farm equipment. You need to know where you shine when it comes to meeting your goals. You also need to know where you don’t shine and come up with a plan on how to manage those areas.
  • If you HAVE to get something done, you’ll HIRE what you need. – We had an unmovable deadline, a closing date. We had no choice. We worked hard, but we couldn’t get it all done ourselves, there was just too much to do. We had to hire help to get everything done. If you set a firm deadline to achieve a goal in your business, don’t move the deadline if you can’t make it on your own. Instead, figure out how you’re going to meet that deadline and what help you need to get there.
  • Keep records organized! – This is an obvious one, but so important! You are running a business and at some point, you are going tofrog-files be selling or closing that business and the tax man will want to know everything. My mother was a bookkeeper and my father was a serial entrepreneur until he was 84 (and he still would be today if he could physically do it). They kept every record which is great; however, it wasn’t necessarily organized for the lifetime of the business. I have boxes and boxes of papers that I still need to sift through to find the important items for taxes. Selling a farm is much more complicated than selling just a home or a business; it is both. This task would have been much easier if my parents had kept records knowing that someday they would have to sell it.
  • There will be some WINs and some LOSSES, but overall the outcome can be great. – We had an auction to sell off their household items they no longer need or wanted and to sell off the farm equipment. Here’s what happened – some items went for almost nothing, other items went for more than what my parents paid for them initially. It would have been easy to get upset about the low selling items and not see that overall things balanced. In a day, we were able to sell 95% of what needed to go and it was removed that day. That was the biggest win of all! We didn’t have to figure out how to deal with 64 years worth of items and things went to people who really wanted them instead of landfill. My point for business owners is that sometimes things won’t work out as you wanted and other things will exceed your expectations. You have to accept the losses, move on and focus on the WINs.
  • What was valuable 10 years ago may not be today. – Furniture just isn’t worth what it used to be. The new generation wants Ikea, not solid wood. Ten years ago a solid oak table would have been a popular item, today it won’t sell. What does that mean for a business? You need to regularly look at what you are offering and make sure it is aligned with what the market currently wants.
  • Closure and letting go is the key to success! – Selling my parents’ home and all of what they had accumulated over their lives was difficult. I’m fortunate that my parents are still with us but their health has required them to downsize drastically. It is difficult to let go. Truth be told, I probably kept more things than I can find places for (I’m still unpacking items). We all had to let go of the farm, the items but not the memories. We needed to let go and close that chapter in our lives. This happens in business as well. Sometimes we go down a path that just doesn’t work out. I’ve done it. As business owners, we need to acknowledge that and let it go so that we can move on to new success.

One of the challenges for business owners trying to grow a business is to set deadlines that are firm. You should treat deadlines like a “closing date” and figure how you are going to get it done. It often can be easier in the moment to let that date slide because other things are more important or the resources to get it done are not readily available. Unfortunately, the result tends to be that you are not reaching your goals and growing your business at the rate you really want.

Does this sound familiar? What one goal/deadline do you need to make unmovable and focus all your efforts on?

Filed Under: Business Basics, Planning Tagged With: goals, planning

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