Balancing the work-life scales

• Stuart Ridley
• 8 February 2010
• Page 1 of 3 : single page

Case File #23

Name: Kear and Willa Whitewolf
Company: AussieChi
Website: aussiechi.com.au 

Kear and Willa Whitewolf are developing a business plan around Kear's expertise in Shaolin Lohan Qigong. Kear is a full-time public servant during the week and has been training a small, dedicated group on weekends for the last decade. He eventually wants to make qigong his life work.

His wife, Willa, says, "Although Kear is a very charismatic teacher, like most qigoing teachers he is modest - he's not a self promoter, and he's definitely anti any kind of pushy marketing."

She explains that the family is working through a plan that will allow Kear to put his energy full-time into his passion for qigong. They are building a website, with the aim of selling instruction videos and courses for beginners online.

"Kear has a month off work to inject 100% of his energy into this project and will return to work four days a week until the online business succeeds," she says. "We have a modest budget and timeframes, in among the challenges of raising six kids."

The Panel

• Sam Shetty, Netregistry. Expertise: Online business
• Ali Minbashia, ActionCOACH. Expertise: Business coaching
• Louise Kelly, Heartsandminds. Expertise: Marketing
• Stuart Ridley, Moderator
  

Challenge 1: How do we turn our idea into a viable business?

Stuart: Research we've done for Nett shows that most new businesses take a year or two to start turning a profit after their initial investment. So, I agree that you keep your full-time job, Kear, while you build up an e-commerce business.

Sam: We register around 10,000 domain names every month and many of our customers first came to us when they registered a domain name for a business idea. These start-up customers tell us they have a full-time job and they have a concept that they think would click - but they don't want to go into it until they've seen some activity. So they register a domain and launch a website. There are a lot of factors to a website's success, including being visible on search engines. It takes time.

Challenge 2: How do we stay motivated as we gradually build the business?

Stuart: Lots of great companies began as projects done on weekends and after hours - the ones that grow tend not to do it overnight. The business owners carefully plan each stage, so they know when the dream business will realistically bring in more money than their existing job. I understand you've changed plans a few times.

Willa: We started the project two years ago when we identified that due to Kear's full-time work commitments, we needed to find an efficient way to advertise his teaching to beginners. We thought it would be best to create some qigong instructional videos and other information for beginners.

Kear: We decided on videos because I was at the point where, although we get new students in regularly, if I take them on, I need to put so much time into the beginners that I can't keep my older students! So we planned the videos to help people get a taste for qigong first.

Willa: We organised the equipment, including buying a computer and video camera, and we developed concepts for the videos. We've filmed two instructional videos so far. We also decided we could look at selling video online. We had many questions about what we had in mind, though at that point we wanted to achieve it in four weeks. That part of the project was done in among the normal daily routine of getting four kids off to school and activities each day, plus having two little children at home all day. It's been hard to stay motivated.

Ali: Getting motivated is quite a challenge! It's important to be able to see the steps, otherwise it can be daunting to get started. So, I suggest starting with the end in mind. Figure out what your ideal business looks like, including size, location, team numbers, profit expectations. Start to understand what the steps will be from where you are now until that point. If you don't know certain steps then that's what you need to research when you are at that stage.

Challenge 3: How do we get a better work-life balance?

Willa: In hindsight, I would have spent more time getting my head around the plan and the timeframe. That would include research time leading up to the project (website, video/sound technology) so we would have had fewer tricky surprises. And we would have had clearer ideas of the roles required of each of us. I would have enlisted the help of a counsellor before we started so we had support throughout the process, and I could have asked my father to support the household for a month while we worked so I could put my entire focus on the project. We have found out since that many of our friends would have been very happy to provide playdates for our littlies nearly every day, which is good to know for future projects. And, come to think of it, a weekly cleaner is probably also a good investment! Juggling family and building a business is tricky!

Ali: The best way to manage better is to understand what you are doing with your time versus what you should be doing with your time. Follow these steps:

• Figure out where your strengths are and attempt to outsource things you do not do well or enjoy (for example, your own bookkeeping);
• Understand what you are doing with your time by keeping a diary for a few weeks - it will also help you to know where you are wasting time; and
• Create an ideal diary for the week - including both business and personal matters. Make sure this includes time for learning because that's really important! Put some time in to reading a book on sales, leadership and even time management.
  

Do your best to follow this diary and recognise that at times outside factors will take over. It's all about being consistent as much as possible.

Challenge 4: We have a basic website but we're not happy with it.

Willa: After reading Nett and looking at what Netregistry offers, we thought that one of the $100 per month packages would suit us. When we first spoke to someone at NR, the example we gave for the kind of site we wanted was for a weight loss and fitness marketing guru - we thought that'd work for us. But on that first day we spoke with NR, the daily blog we presented as our example had muscular girls in bikinis on it! I'd been viewing that site over two years and had never seen anything like that before. The NR person felt our example site was a ‘cheap get-rich-quick' scheme. We fell out at that point, I didn't feel he understood me.