Darina Loakman.com

This was one of the questions asked by a member over in www.irishbusinesswomen.com recently. When you are a work at home mum, generally working on your own this can be a serious issue.

Here’s the response I gave to the question.

“There are some good suggestions from the others and here is my 2cents.

Amanda said something that I think is the key to it.

If I’m on holiday I always have plenty of time to organise myself so that the business can cope with me not being there.

When you work from home on your own it’s really important that you plan for this in advance (don’t be silly Darina how am I going to know when I’ll be sick !) well obvioiusly you won’t which means it’s even more important to have contingency plans in the event of.

That’s why even though you may work on your own most of the time, I feel it’s important that you don’t actually do everything all the time on your own! that you build up some kind of a team around you who knows the urgent things that need to be done in the event of your abscence. When I say team this can be anyone from your spouse/partner/best friend or child if they’re old enough ! to a virtual assistant. It doesn’t have to be someone you use all the time, particularly if this is not within your budget, but there needs to be someone else besides you who can take over (not the whole business, just the bits to keep it ticking) if you are incapacitated. ”

I’m going to add to that response here by saying that if you learn to outsource correctly then something like this won’t be as big an issue. I’m not the expert on outsourcing by any means I’m too much of a control freak !! however through determination and necessity I’ve learned a lot about the advantages and how to delegate over the last couple of years.

If you’d like to find out more about outsourcing, rather than me spout on about it I’m going to give you a link to an audio and pdf transcript put together by Alice Seba all about how to outsource succesfully. It covers such things as