Last week, we spoke about the new wave of people aged over 50 who are starting a business.
We met Margaret Manning. At aged 60, Margaret started her business, Sixty and Me, which is an online community for women.
Today, we’ll continue to talk about starting a business, but this week we’ll focus exclusively on women entrepreneurs.
Kimberly Ann Jimenez is not typical of people we met at Switched ON Living, but she does have a crucial message for us – we can’t sacrifice our health to build our businesses.
Arguably, wellbeing is even more important for women entrepreneurs than for men simply because so many businesswomen have multiple roles to play as mothers, carers, and too often, family housekeepers.
As Kimberley describes in this video, the image of Adrianna Huffington bleeding and knocked out on the floor says it all about women entrepreneurs who have two or more full-time jobs, one at work and the other at home.
The other point
about Kimberley is that she speaks with authority. She’s a small business owner
who started from scratch, and while her presentation style is maybe a little
too exuberant for a non-US audience, still what she says has the absolute ring
of authenticity.
Kimberley tells us she’s been in business for seven years, which makes her experience and opinions about running a small business highly relevant. Within that seven years, we can guarantee there’s been plenty of early starts, late finishes, mistakes, setbacks and stuff-ups.
And just quietly, here’s another reason why it’s a good idea to add Kimberley to our YouTube ‘favourites’ list. She runs a marketing business and has tons of great material posted on social media.
Marketing is one of those business areas where the only limitation is our imagination, and if a successful practitioner helps us by posting lots of useful content, then we should applaud her kindness.
As far as Kimberley’s list of actions to accelerate the growth of our business, we can see that the emphasis is squarely on wellbeing and control; control of our time and control of our finances.
Kimberley’s eight
boss habits are:
- health – think of our health as a risk strategy we need to manage
- sleep – think JoLo
- plan – as they say, what doesn’t get planned doesn’t get finished
- rest – distinct from sleep, to rest is to unplug and renergise, while we’re still awake!
- read every day – what do Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have in common …
- take control of our money – money is too hard earned to be careless or frivolous
- run our life like a boss – if our personal life is chaotic, inevitably it will impact on our business
- implement a morning and evening routines – a daily routine is how we transition in and out of our business, and still have time for ourselves and loved ones.
Running a business is a marathon and sustainability is non-negotiable. Even though we may have started our business later in life, we have decades to enjoy our successes.
Burnout and a lack of control is a loss in every sense.
