Becoming your own boss

February 7th 2011

I went to a really good event this week called “Managing Directly – Becoming your own boss” hosted by WiM and Milton Keynes & North Bucks Chamber of Commerce. It was targeted at women looking at starting a business. I’ve been running my own business full-time for 3 years now (+ another 4 yrs part-time) but I still feel I have so much to learn.

The first presentation was by Rita Spada, a business woman with over 2 decades experience in business management, now heading up the local Chamber of Commerce. Her talk was overflowing with useful advice and information, it seemed like there was at least 2 hours worth of material being condensed into 20 mins.

Business survival stage can last up to 5 years

A big take away point for me was that a 3-5 year old business is still in its infancy. Rita used a diagram called the Seven Stages of Organisational Development to talk about the stages you go through as your business grows. She explained that you will be in the Survival stage for at least the first 3 years. This made me feel much better about where we are in our business. I think we might actually be ahead of the game (for our age), when I had so often thought we’re struggling to keep up!

This isn’t the exact version Rita showed us, but a more commonly published (according to my online research) diagram known as The Seven Levels of [Organisational] Consciousness Model, originally by Richard Barrett, who based it on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

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Highs and Lows of 2009

January 11th 2010

I spent the latter part of 2009 thinking what a stinker of a year it had been. Mistakes I’d made to do with estimating the timing on some jobs meant that the summer months were an incredibly stressful time. But in thinking about writing this blog post (and reading yours) I’ve realised there were lots of good things that happened last year too. Let’s start with the positive.

The Good

ExpressionEngine: workshop, development and meetups

It’s been a big year for me and ExpressionEngine, the CMS platform which I started using in 2008 and on which I have now developed over 10 websites. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. I attended Jamie Pittock’s ExpressionEngine workshop at FOWD where I learnt a whole bunch of useful tips and had some major light bulb moments. But I was also reassured that, on the whole, I had been approaching EE development the right way.
2. We launched 5 websites developed in ExpressionEngine. Three of these were designed by us, the other 2 were development-only projects involving other designers/agencies.
3. I started the London ExpressionEngine meetup. We had our first meetup in September when there were about 9 of us. The attendance more than doubled at our 2nd meetup in November. So far it has been a really nice bunch of people – they’re friendly, easy-going and keen to share their knowledge.

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