Starting a Baby Boutique & Clothing Line

Mistakes I made starting my own business

June 4th, 2009

Hello everyone!! How is everyone? I’m hanging in there. Hanging. Everything is one step forward, two steps back. I had a conversation with one of the entrepreneurs that I met through  this blog and that I admire very much, Jamie Lentzer at Jamie’s Painting & Design. I had stopped in at her blog and read that she had just not been up for blogging lately. I wrote “me too! me too!”.

She connected with me and we gabbed about how really, sometimes it’s just all too much and something has to fall by the wayside.

I’ve been all over the place like a yo-yo so why would I have anything to write? Um, gee Amber, because that is why you started this blog. See, somewhere I got caught up in the trap I said I wouldn’t - stopped sharing the aches and pains lest it should make my business look less successful. But that’s ridiculous. I know from every job I’ve had that mistakes happen everywhere on a daily basis. It’s the mistakes we learn from, and it’s my learning experiences that I wanted to share in the first place.

So, I thought I’d like to share a couple of BIG mistakes I’ve made (there are a lot, but in the interest of keeping myself upbeat this morning, I’m not going to share them all at once).

• Not following up with enough PR after the celebrity events we did. It is true that it is what you make it. We didn’t send out any press releases after the first one. We sent out one press release after the second one, and it was picked up immediately. But then my computer literally crashed that night and I used that as an excuse not to send out more.

  This goes for all the follow-ups I’ve failed to do, or follow-through. There just hasn’t been enough PR over the last couple of years (and I’m a writer for pete’s sake!).

• Not having enough of a plan. I thought I did, I did (most) of a business plan way back in the beginning. But then I let myself wander way far away from that plan without re-visiting it. This has lead to my running-around-like-a-chicken-with-my-head-cutoff syndrome. It’s so bad that I’m starting from scratch with a business plan as if we are just launching. Because I finally realize if I don’t figure out quick at least exactly WHERE I want to go, I’ll keep running in circles - which leads to a spiral, most likely in the downward direction.

So many of the mistakes made over the last couple of years are wrapped in that second bullet point. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “what if we try this…” without following up and researching the change in direction, but just jumping in instead. I attribute a lot of that to impatience on my part, I want to see results a lot sooner than is realistic for a mom running a business at the same time she is raising two kids.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized