The story of starting my company, Wild Rose Virtual Assistance, continued. Have you ever been going down one road, only to have life throw you in another direction?
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And…the story continues. In my last post, The Adventure Begins, I talked about the inspiration and down and dirty formation of my company. The continuation of that story begins here.
After getting all my licensing, formation documents, and legal aspects of just owning a business done I was…PROUD! Holy cow! I own a business, my business. I don’t know if I have every been just so genuinely proud of myself for an accomplishment. I did it and I was thrilled.
Of course, then reality must sink in. I was sitting in my make-shift little niche in my living room (that was just a computer on a shelf of a bookcase with a chair in front of it), and I thought well now what?
Before I answer that, let me explain a few things. It was such a crazy whirlwind getting my company legalized that there wasn’t a lot of forethought in those few weeks that it took me to form my business. I was lucky when I decided to do this that I had an amazing computer and enough, well, junk to muster up a semblance of an “office” (yes that’s in quotes because I use the term office very loosely in this case). My office was the bottom shelf of a built-in book case in my living room. When I “went” to work every morning, I would turn my recliner around to face the shelf and THAT was my office chair. I also had a little side table from Hobby Lobby that I would put next to my chair and that was my “desk” exactly one 8”x11 1/2” piece of paper could fit on it with one Red Bull. Glamorous, it was not! But it worked for a while.
So… reality check. I got past my frenzy stage of formation, and I realized, ok now I need to REALLY go to work. And by that, I mean I realized that now I need to make some money. I don’t know why this never crossed my mind…but I finally figured out “Oh yea, if I am going to make money doing this…I’m going to need some clients,” this is my (insert face-palm emoji here!) moment. I felt the wind going out of my sails a little bit. This was also about the time that I sat down and made a To Do List for myself. I had 3 categories:
- Business
- Clients
- Willful Procrastination
Here’s why. In the business category I added everything I wouldn’t be “making money” when I spent time on, for example Bookkeeping. In the client category I anticipated putting the tasks that I would need to accomplish that day or week for each client, but to be honest the first thing on my to do list under the “client” category was “Get Clients.” Also, anything under the client category would be billable hours, or things that I WOULD make money when I spent time on them. Then there is the “Willful Procrastination” category, I don’t know about you guys, but this one is by far my favorite category. To me this category is basically anything that CAN wait until next week, or next month. Giving my self this category was my way of giving myself permission to quit working at the end of the day. If I can move a task to the Willful Procrastination category, it means it’s not so pressing that I need to lose sleep over it.
One of the hardest things I have faced so far on this adventure has been the type of person I am. And by that I mean, I am the type of person that wants my desk clear at the end of the day. Completely clear. If there is one thing on it I just want to finish it. But here are the problems with that:
- There is ALWAYS one more thing, you are never DONE with your company work as an owner.
- My office is in my living room, I don’t “leave and go home” from work at the end of the day.
I gave myself the Willful Procrastination category on my To Do list as permission to “go home” at the end of my work day. As a rule of thumb, if I can move it to that category, then I don’t NEED to get it done that day. If I did not do this I would quite possibly go crazy from never having a break from work. Not to mention I would probably be single (since my boyfriend also deserves some of my attention). Making my To Do list for the first time, not only did I realize how much goes into the day-to-day operations of running (and working for) a small company, this is also when I began to understand the frustrating, but rewarding art of making choices and decisions.
Making choices or decisions are a part of every day life. You decide what to wear in the morning, which coffee to get, what to pack for lunch, which road to take to work. In business it is much the same. You have to decide which website to host your website, what branding company to use for your logo, heck, the name of your company. Sometimes the most frustrating part of making choices, is when we have too many options. It is not that one choice is better than the next one, it’s just different and could produce different outcomes. Most of our lives consist of choices that do not necessarily have right or wrong outcomes.
I was astounded to find that most of the tasks on my to do list were not black and white, there were many ways I could accomplish them and many decisions I had to make in order to get them done. I began thinking of these everyday choices and decisions as “90 Degree Turns.” When a decision came up that I had to choose something for, I pictured it as taking either a right turn or a left turn, the end result could end up being the same, or it could start a whole new off-shoot to the road map of my business. And ultimately a map is what I picture now when faced with choices (in fact I bought this vintage roadmap of Seattle to remind me). I could take a right turn and end up just going around the block, or I could take a left turn and end up in Colorado. Either way, it wasn’t right or wrong, it was just two different roads. Learning how to make decisions, and allowing myself the grace of acknowledging it wasn’t right or wrong, has been one of the kindest things I have done for myself through this whole adventure.
So, one of the first things on my To Do list under the “Business” category was to create an office. When we put up our Christmas Tree this year we put our dining room table in storage, so the tree could be front and center. Which allowed me to actually see the dining room in all of it’s glory, all of its spacious glory.
After Christmas, the tree went bye-bye, and I moved my NEW office in. I will tell you what, the desks I got were awesome and I have never been so excited to go to work!.
