You're listening to the life friendly business podcast. I'm your host, Erin Thomas Wong, business coach, mentor, author and founder of the cocoon VIP membership empowering women around the world to build businesses on their terms. If you want to grow and scale a business that works in harmony with your family and your life, this podcast is for you.
Welcome to the life friendly business podcast, I am so excited to welcome you to this very first episode. Through my work as a business mentor, I have daily discussions with women about the importance of building a business on your terms, carving your own path, working at your own pace, and not being influenced by other people's measures of success.
In the coming episodes, we'll be digging into the topics that matter to you, we'll be lifting the lid on the reality of running a business around family life, and shining a light on the mindset gremlins, which may well be stopping you from stepping into your zone of genius.
This podcast will be a mixture of solo episodes with me and also interviews and discussions with some special guests who will be helping me to put the world to rights and sharing their own experiences of running a life friendly business.
Today we're going to dive straight into clarify what I mean by life friendly. And I'll be offering you some questions to help you reflect on what that might mean for you. But first, for those of you who haven't met me before, I'm going to give you a very brief overview of my story.
I have recorded a separate episode which goes into more detail. So before having my first son in 2008. I worked in TV production, I was a production manager and I worked on some of the UK is best love programmes. I absolutely loved it. I thrived in that environment. It was so sociable. But it was also all consuming and meant working long hours because I was a production manager. It meant that if a crew were out on a shoot, I was the first port of call if something went wrong. So when I had my first son and I was a complete mess after his birth, I had quite a traumatic C section experience. My milk didn't come in, I really felt like I lost my sense of identity. And I thought How on earth am I going to be that person again, I felt like I had changed. And I didn't see how I would be able to continue in that career and be the mother that I wanted to be.
So I was quite fortunate in that I was able to get redundancy and I actually invested that money into a franchise of small print fingerprint jewellery. They trained me not only how to make the jewellery but also how to run the business. And it really did open up this whole new world for me over the coming years I went on to co found Ealing mums in business, which were events and networking for women in the West London area. I then went on to found pitter patter the hub for Bubs, which were venues for baby and toddler classes in London, I also launched an online shop with my mum called the kids nature shop.
So I absolutely loved all of these businesses. And then we had this massive life changing decision to make in 2015, just after Shelley and I familly months of business had been honoured in the Houses of Parliament for our work supporting small business owners, my husband got offered a job in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi. By that point, we had two children. And we really felt like we just couldn't miss this amazing opportunity to live abroad. So we took the leap, and we moved out the four of us to the Middle East. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I felt incredibly isolated and lonely. And I really, really missed the network of women in business that I had actively created around myself.
It was at that point, which was quite a low point that I decided I needed a new project to immerse myself in. And it was then that the Mumpreneur Collective formerly making my printers was born. The idea was that it was completely online. So for all these other women like me who didn't have local access to networking groups, they'd be able to come online and find their community and be with women who got it and understood the challenges that they were facing. So we decided to actually come home after a year in Abu Dhabi. It was a very difficult decision but it just wasn't right for us and we move back to the UK and move down to Bournemouth. As I mentioned, I share more about the story in the separate episode.
What was amazing was that I was able to bring the Mumpreneur Collective back with me and since then I have been scaling and growing and now I work with women through the cocoon VIP membership elements of the mumpreneur collective which is where we have all the training and the experts on hand and the sisterhood to help you build your business. I also run an evolve mastermind, which is a really small, intimate group. And we work together over six months to help build your business. And I offer one to one mentoring as well to help people devise a bespoke strategy that's going to work for them.
So I have purposely designed the mumpreneur collective to be life friendly. And I want to give you some examples of what life friendly means for me, and how that looks with my business. So I work during school hours, so my children are eight and nearly 13. And really, that looks like nine to one, because then you've got to have lunch. And I need to leave the house at 2:15 to pick up my youngest. So I would be lying, if I said to you that I didn't work after one o'clock. I mean, my my businesses are heavily based on social media. So absolutely, I need to be checking in. But the point is, is that I don't need to be tied to my desk. On a Friday, I try not to schedule in any client calls so that I can do whatever I feel like doing that might be taking the day off or going for coffee with a friend, or it might be in catching up on some admin things. But I've got that kind of buffer time scheduled in.
I also have tonnes of flexibility to be able to move things around to cater for doctor's appointments, school plays, sports days, all those kinds of things. And if one of my children is off sick, the world doesn't end, I don't need to justify that to anyone, I don't need to feel guilty. I have really healthy boundaries with my family and my clients. So I know what I need in order to thrive. And this is this is fairly new. For me, it's only been the last couple of years that I've really learned to understand myself. And now I can communicate that with other people. For example, I often go away for a night, maybe a few times a year and have a solo business retreat. And you know, I obviously discuss that with my husband. Is that okay? Will it work with the schedule, but I don't feel guilty about doing that. I absolutely love what I do. And I know so many of you feel similar to this, that we kind of get addicted to the buzz of working on our businesses. And I know that I'm quite a high energy person. And so that means that I really need to try and balance that energy out. And I know that if I'm having like a really high energy period that I will come down from that. And I need to allow that. So I really try and work intuitively in that in that way.
But also, I can be really flexible for school holidays. This is something that we were talking about recently, my husband and I but in all the time that we've had children, we've never had that awful stress of what we're going to do during the school holidays, we both need to work, can we afford holiday clubs, you know, because of the decision that we've made in how we're going to run our lives and how I'm going to run my business, we haven't had that stress. And I really massively am grateful for those decisions that we made.
So this has really been by design. And I really think that building a life friendly business is actually for the long term. It's not just when your kids are really small, when your kids are at nursery, when you've got babies, you can actually have longer days because normally, you know, you can drop them off at eight and pick them up at six, when they start school, that's when it starts getting harder because they finish it 2:30 or 3 o'clock. And they also have 65 Holiday days a year. So most employees offer 28 days holiday. So it means that perhaps you and your partner have to tag team and spend less time together as a family because you're trying to scramble together the holiday days. And that's one of the decisions that we have made in terms of me running my own business.
So if you're hoping it gets easier when the kids get to secondary school, think again, they actually lead you more in so many ways. And for me, it's always going to be important that I am there as much as possible after school, so that if they need to talk to me, they can. And I really think that these things are the driving factor for a lot of women that I work with in terms of deciding to quit the corporate world or quit, quit full time working and do something for yourself. These are the crucial years for our children. And you know, I really want to make the most of that time. But I also really want to build a thriving successful business.
So I can have both, we just need to decide what's important to us. And that's how you can create a life friendly business. I also want to say at this point to remind you that building a business is a marathon, not a sprint, I want you to enjoy the journey and slow down and smell the roses. I do love analogies there's probably going to be a lot Vaser in this podcast. But I think that often we don't take the time to actually recognise the progress that we have made. I think we're constantly scrambling feeling like we should be doing more and should is a very dangerous word. So that's what a life friendly business looks like for me. And really, it's about flexibility. Whether you have kids or not parents to care for other responsibilities. It's about running a business on your terms.
So I'd love to leave you with three questions that you can ask yourself to think about what life friendly might mean for you.
Number one, do you feel constantly overstretched and overwhelmed with how much you have to do on a daily basis? It's so important that we schedule realistically, especially when you've got limited time to work around the kids.
Number two, do you suffer from mom guilt on a regular basis? Do you feel guilty when you have to work? Do you feel guilty because you want to work? Do you feel guilty because you're not with the kids? This is one thing that I really want to help you overcome. Feeling guilty is it just sucks the pleasure out of everything. And unless you're going to take action and do something about your boundaries, it's it's a wasted emotion. So let's look at mum guilt.
Number three, Do you sometimes feel resentful towards your business, maybe even your clients because they're impinging on your family time? Or maybe because you feel like you never get any time to yourself? If you're doing that if you're feeling that, it's because you need to put boundaries in place. So what's important to you? What are your non negotiables you need to know what they are in order to build a life friendly business.
Now, if you've answered yes to all three of these, please don't worry, you're certainly not alone. I cannot tell you how many women I speak to who feel the same. They feel like they are constantly on this treadmill of trying to do more trying to please everyone around them and never having enough time to just stop and breathe. What I want you to know is that it's absolutely possible to run a business you love that makes good money. And that allows you to be the mum, the wife, the partner, the friend that you want to be. And it all starts with giving yourself grace, and being kind to yourself.
This podcast is all about building a life, any business on your terms. I want you to feel empowered to make the sometimes hard decisions you need to make in order to achieve the work life balance that you desire. I really hope you've enjoyed this first episode. Please do subscribe to be notified when the next one comes live. And in the show notes. My social links are there and I would love you to hop on and let me know how you found this episode and what live friendly means to you. See you next time.
You've been listening to the life friendly business podcast which is all about carving your own path and doing it at your own pace. But I know that's not easy to do. So to help you decide what a life friendly business looks like for you and help you to stick to the boundaries and commitments needed to create that I've created the life friendly business prescription. download this free workbook and spend 30 to 60 minutes reflecting on what life friendly means to you and the changes you may need to make in order to achieve the work life balance you desire. Once you've made these decisions, you can add them to your own printable life friendly business prescription that you can put on your wall to remind yourself that you have the power to design your very own life friendly business.
Download yours now at life friendly business.com/prescription
Transcribed by https://otter.ai