SmallBizWithKids.com Small Business With Kids

Ever since “escaping from the cubicle” car repairs have plagued me. I think within the first12 months of striking out on my own, I put about $3,000 that I really couldn’t afford into my car and my wife’s car.  Luckily we’ve been OK for some time now and our cars are both paid off. However, the gremlins struck again this past weekend.

I was at soccer practice and Anke was running errands with G when her engine light came on. As luck would have it I checked my cell during a water break and saw that Anke called. Normally Anke knows better than to call during soccer, but she is my wife and is one of the few people that can interrupt me at anytime.

Anyway, she ended up waiting 2 hours for the tow truck! Yuck. To her credit she maintained her good spirits for most of it.

Today our preferred shop called and said that if it wasn’t simple, the repair could take several days because they are swamped. I’m thinking, “Oh terrific,” because we just played rotating child care for the past two weeks and now we’re a one car family!

The rotating child care thing was interesting. G’s summer preschool ended and he had a two week “vacation” between then and the start of the fall session. That meant that Anke and I had to work a flexible schedule, coordinating carefully with Grandma and Grandpa so we could both get some work done and honor important appointments. It was literally, “I got him for 3 hours, then I’ll drop him off with Grandma so they can go swimming, and then can you watch him until you go riding?”

Children really make your priorities clear, but they doesn’t mean that you aren’t hankering to move some projects forward and get stressed if you can’t. That’s what really hammered at me with the car problem.

As luck would have it, the shop just called and it’s just the ignition wires and it’ll be fixed this afternoon - for “just” $186 tops. Yipee.

Saturday we celebrated my 40th shooting Sporting Clays at the Waunakee Gun Club. I got a shooting vest as a gift which is great. I’ve only ever shot shotguns 4 times in my life and each time I like it more and more. I’m considering getting one which is not making Anke too happy.

Networking socially away from the business day and while not in business attire. Is a key activity and I find that the stranger the mix, the more casual the attire, the better the results. I think this is because people get more of a sense for one another.

The group was a good mix. An interesting mix of close personal friends and local business contacts who are becoming close friends. I mean, the business contact that came are the type I call at the end of the to BS with and to “keep me company on the ride home.”

Not that I orchestrated the group (because you never know who can make such things), but at the Gun Club we had a Northwestern Mutual Life rep; the top Schwab rep in the country (number 1 out of 1,300); the VP of Client Relations for a company that provides online tools to manage people; a home inspector; the President of a company that aligns, calibrates and certifies laser targeting systems for hospitals and clinics; the summer school administrator for the local school district; a 14 year old; a stay at home dad; and a Health Coach.

Out of 50, I got 32, good enough for 2nd place. Rich Rodriguez got 38 and two or three others each got 31. We shared two shotguns amongst the group and interestingly the gun owners had the lowest scores. Hmmm.

Gotta love kids!

This  morning Griffin decided to dress me.  He’s big into imitating Daddy.

He selected black socks. Ordinarily not a bad choice, except that I planned on spending the day working the phones in the home office.

Next came athletic compression short for my underpants. Then a very loud surf t-shirt and some old ill-fitting shorts.

I wonder if he’s fashion challenged, or if he’s just 4 years old? Or…he’s trying to tell me something!

G didn’t stop there. No, he actually insisted on dressing me.

The socks were fitted and after much tugging and straining ended up being backwards. At that point I intervened and helped with the rest of the clown suit.

Anke took a look at me and rolled her eyes and when Grandma came over at lunch time she commented on my black socks. Nice.

I love my son!

Just reading thru my latest Dan Kennedy newsletter and he had interesting commentary on an International Communications Research Study released in June. The study found that consumers prefer godd old fashioned snail mail to any other type of communication, most notably e-mail.

Here’s some highlights:

73% prefer mail for receiving new product and service announcements, promotions, offers and other information from companies they do business with.

18% prefer getting the same by email.

For confidential information such as invoices, statements, etc., the preference is 86% mail and 10% email. This hasn’t changed since 2004.

70% prefer mail for receiving information from companies they are not currently doing business with. For email, it’s below 10%.

Only 31% of consumers say they frequently discard mail identified as “commercial in nature” unopened, but 53.2% say the frequently delete such email unopened.

Consumers reasons for preferring mail: 45.3% less intrusive, don’t interrupt other activities; 40.2% more convenient, can easilty be saved and considered at choice of times; 30.2% less high-pressured, lets me arrive at a decision intelligently; 22.7% more descriptive, provides better information.

Age and demographic variances are slight - so all you so-called Internet marketers need to take notice! Email should be but once of several media in your overall marketing mix.

It’s not a coincidence that I choose my 40th birthday to begin blogging.

This concept came to me just 10 days ago when I was visiting two friends who are also small business people. Joel is an internet marketer, and Andrea (Ahn-dray) runs a lingerie business. We were sitting around their kitchen, Andrea was working on a mind map and Joel was tutoring me on setting up a blog for my wife, Anke. In the course of our conversation the domain name just popped out of my mouth and we all instantly knew it was a keeper.

So over the past 10 days I got everything rolling and here we are, on my  40th writing the inaugural post!

My goal with SmallBizWithKids.com is to provide engaging, entertaining and valuable insight, commentary and “best practices” on work, life and family. I hope that others will join in the conversation and add their comments and perspectives.

Work Life and Family are the three keystones for every small business owner. More appropriately, work life and family are the three balls that a juggler has to keep up in the air. Small business owners are jugglers by choice and by necessity. The real trick is to keep it to just three balls, and to keep them all going happily and productively.

In the future, I’ll be interviewing executives and productivity tools, reviewing and commenting on books and news and sharing some of the day to day highs lows and challenges that come from parenting, from marriage and from running a business.

I hope you enjoy your time here and like it enough to tell your friends and subscribe to my feed.

My best to you and yours,

Tim Johnson