Business Owners Offer “Been There” Advice on What It Takes to Change Course:
Part 1
By Valerie Young
A highlight for many of 140 people attending last month’s Work at What You
Love workshop, was getting to hear from actual small business owners who’ve
successfully turned their interests into income. The entrepreneurs at this
year’s event were both inspiring and informative and included such diverse
occupations as an animal communicator, freelance writer, potter, and wholesale
food retailer. In this first part of a two part series you’ll be hearing some of
the hard won nuggets of advice to help you start and succeed at your own small
business.
Make Space for Success
You know the drill. You’re trying to get a new business up and running while
juggling a full-time job. That’s just what Dawn Allen was facing when she was
trying to launch her fledging
animal communication business. Except in Dawn’s case it was four part-times
jobs. So she went to an unusual source for advice – her dad. But then Dawn’s
upbringing was unique.
Most families only offer discouragement (“What do you mean you want to quit
your job? You’ve got a good job – you want to be happy to!?”). Dawn is one of
the lucky few to have been raised by not one, but two entrepreneurs. Dawn knew
from a young age that regardless of where her gifts and interests led her, that
there would always be customers out there who would be willing to pay her for
her services. She also had successful role models to guide her.
Dawn was feeling pretty discouraged about her ability to attract enough
clients to her practice full time. Her father asked how many sessions she wanted
to do a week. Dawn thought seven sounded good. Knowing how hectic his daughter’s
life was, her father asked her when she planned do these seven appointments.
The way Dawn saw it, when clients call, she’ll schedule them in. “No,” her
father said, “You need to get out your appointment book, block the time, and
they’ll fill.” Dawn followed her dad’s advice and much to her amazement, she
says, “I did, and they did!”
Partly the message here is “if you build it they will come.” But it’s also
about creating space in your life for success. In an interview with Charlie
Rose, actor Helen Hunt talked about how tempting it is when you're just starting
out to grab whatever comes your way. Yet, around this same “pre-star” time in
her career, Hunt says she began turning down been-there-done-that film roles in
“hopes that something better might come along.” The idea, says Hunt, was to
“kind of create a vacuum to make room for what hopefully, fate has in store.”
Sometimes you need to tempt fate – or at least give it a little space. Make
room for new and better opportunities by saying no to commitments that don’t
support your goals. Then have faith in your dream.
Dawn says you can call it manifesting or being prepared. Either way it
worked. You may not be a believer, but Dawn’s 1500 clients are. Dawn averages 40
clients a week, many of them horse owners. Today, her business is so successful
that she’s booked through the end of the year.
Make Time for Your Dreams
You’d love to be a writer or an event planner or motivational speaker or
learn how to invest in real estate… but where will you find the time? If you
work a full time job on top of family and other commitments, it only makes sense
that you’d feel constantly caught between a clock and a hard place. Karen
Orfitelli sure did.
Karen had one daughter in high school, another one in college, worked
full-time as a middle school teacher, and was in graduate school. Karen always
wanted to be a writer, but her life left little time for writing. It looked like
her dream was not to be.
The laundry room is an unlikely place for inspiration to hit. Yet that’s
where Karen, knee deep in towels, felt an urgent need to act on her dream of
becoming a writer. So she made a commitment to herself to write five hours a
week. So for the next six years she rose at 4:30 a.m. to write for an hour.
It’s amazing what can happen if you only carve out the time. Take Dilbert
cartoonist Scott Adams. When Adams was still toiling away in his corporate
cubicle at Pacific Bell he spend nights and weekends working on his cartoons. He
too rose early to work on his cartoons from 5:00 and 7:00 a.m. before heading
off to work. Once he had 50 sample strips in hand, he mailed them off to
different syndicates. A few weeks later United Feature Syndicate called and
offered him a contract. Today Adams’ management lampooning cartoon appears in
2,000 newspapers in 65 countries.
Like Adams, Karen’s investment paid off. Since that day in the laundry room
she’s seen more than 300 of her articles published and worked for a time as an
editor for McGraw-Hill Publishers. But being willing to put in the time was not
Karen’s only success strategy.
Develop the Art of “Wing Walking”
Few people can afford to change course over night and Karen is no exception.
Nor did she take the leap all at once. In fact, two additional dos and don’t
Karen offers people wanting to live the freelancing life are “don’t burn your
bridges and develop the art of wing walking.”
Don’t burn your bridges should be a no-brainer. Yet in their glee to quit
their job, too many people try to go out in a flame of glory – no notice, or
worse, they take the opportunity to tell their boss exactly what they can do
with their stinking job. There are times when that kind of thing does no real
harm. But logic would say that you never know who you’ll run into down the road
and sometimes your former employer can become your biggest client. I know mine
did. There may be former co-workers you’ll want to call on from time to time for
specialized advice or simply for networking purposes. For the first two years of
this newsletter a former colleague proof read my newsletter for free!
So what does it mean to develop the art of “wing walking”? If you’ve ever
been to an air show, you may have seen a high flying act where a woman in
goggles and overalls climbs outside the plane and somehow manages to walk around
the outside the plane while the pilot puts the plane through loop-the-loops and
snap rolls. The trick that keeps her from falling is that she never lets go with
one hand until she’s got a firm grip on something else.
Karen always had plan B lined up before letting go of the safety and security
of plan A. For six years she kept her day job while she built her freelance
career on the side. As her writing career starting demanding more and more of
her time, Karen asked the administrators at her school if she could cut back to
part time. Once her freelance work really took off, she let go of the teaching
wing entirely.
Not being, in her words, “a risk taker,” Karen got a job working 16 hours a
week editing a magazine for a political science professor at the University of
Connecticut. Underscoring the need to sometimes “fake it
’til you
make it,” Karen confesses that at the time that she didn’t even know what
political science was. Around that same time she took an editing job with McGraw
hill. The work was satisfying and she got to work from home, yet something was
missing. “Sometimes in the process of achieving a dream,” Karen says, “you find
the dream changes.” Karen missed teaching and working with children.
So before giving up her editing job, she lined up a position as a senior
instructor for the Institute of Children’s Literature where she provides
one-to-one editorial feedback and guidance to adult students enrolled in the
Institute’s Writing for Children and Teenagers course (to read a full review of
this course visit
ChangingCourse.com/children.htm ). “I love working with the students,” she
says, “because 99% of them are where I used to be. They wonder if they have the
talent and they don’t know where to begin.” Having developed the twin arts of
writing and wing walking one's way to a new career, fortunately Karen knows
exactly how to help.
What About You?
What’s one thing you can do today to make space in your life for success? How
can you eke out time for your dream? Can you give up one television show a week?
Get up a little earlier and put in an hour on the weekend? Use your commuting or
lunch time? What steps can you take today to either create or find that second,
more satisfying wing to grab onto? How can you build in the support, get the
training, or develop the expertise you need so when you’re ready, you too can
let go of the wing you’re on to joyfully pursue the new one full time?
About the Author
Off the beaten path career
counselor, Valerie Young, abandoned her corporate cubicle to become the Dreamer
in Residence at
ChangingCourse.com, offering free resources
to help you discover your life mission and live it. An expert on the Imposter
Syndrome, she's presented her How to Feel as Bright and Capable as Everyone
Seems to Think You Are program to over 30,000 people.
Find more articles written by
Valerie at
ChangingCourse.com/articles/ | 
live
life on purpose
