Is Anybody Ready For This Year To Be Over?
I have to tell you all - as a small women-owned business, this was the hardest year I’ve had in 11 years. But, it takes a year like this to remind me how lucky I’ve actually been.
As a supportive business to real estate agents, I know times have been tough all over the city. Between the high interest rates, the “mansion tax” and pretty much the entire entertainment industry being shut down for months, I had to change the way I was doing business.
Being an eternal optimist has served me well in the past, but I also have to be realistic. The question I ended up asking myself halfway through the year was, “What can I do differently?” Because what I had been doing wasn’t working.
Usually when business is slow, I will say, “Ok I’m going back to basics”. It’s an old sales term I learned when selling cars in the 90’s (why did I ever to that?). But it was the best sales training I ever had about what to do and what not to do.
The first thing I did was call all of my kick ass female mentors and start asking questions. The message that I got back from each of them was, “You need to change your basics, this is a different time.”
But, what does changing your basics mean? The only thing I could come up with was to be open to everything - don’t necessarily say yes to everything, but be open to new ideas.
I truly believe that, because I shifted the way I was looking at my business, what ended up happening was that I took whatever jobs were put in front of me, and got creative on how to make them happen.
The end result was that I’ve done the best work this year than I have ever done in my career. When I say the best work, I mean the most meaningful. It felt so good, and it came from a place of, “I just want to work.”
The first 8 months of the year was just diving into networking - joining clubs, socializing, chatting up Clients and listening to what other business owners were doing and being inspired by them. This was not a time for cocooning, which was my first instinct, and ain’t nobody gettin no jobs when they sittin home being sad. (I did try that also - turns it out doesn’t work.)
Just as I started to get busy in Sept and October, I had to interrupt my momentum to help my mom during a pretty serious health issue. All of this to say, even as busy as things finally got, there’s nothing more important than family.
With mom on the mend, looking back at this year, I just wanted to share how I dealt with the good, the bad, and the super ugly. We’re all a work in progress, but reaching out and sharing your trials with your network, checking in with your friends and family and waking up every morning and doing it all over again is the only way you’ll survive. But I am SO ready for this year to be over.
