Yin and Yang: How do you balance work and family?
I try not to work on the weekends and switch off work mode before family dinners on weeknights. I put my phone in the inchargebox every night so that it isn’t the last thing I look at at night or first thing in the morning. That has made a huge positive impact on my sleep and how the days start and end! I also recently switched off all notifications on my phone so that I’m not always on reaction mode – I go in to work mode when I’m ready. When I’m with family I’m totally with them and not distracted. For the last few years, I felt like I was always switched on and available for people 24/7 – I used to run a kids’ party business on the weekend as well as inchargebox – I have made massive changes to this over the past 2 years, leaving the party business behind late in 2019 after a solid 5 year run. So now I have the weekends back – a huge relief and I feel that life is far more balanced now.
The drive: What challenges have you overcome?
We’ve had issues with supply chain, lost product, stock arriving way later (months) than expected. We have overcome this by getting on board with a great logistics company who are wonderful communicators and make sure nothing gets lost in transit. I always put the arrival date of boxes on my website as way later than it is so I don’t have customers emailing and calling wondering where their box is!! I prefer to send it early and surprise people. We’ve had some of the colours arrive marked which was disappointing – we sold these as samples and don’t order those colours anymore. We used to have many boxes around the house, which was challenging for the family, but have since added many sheds to keep the work out of the house! We also have offsite warehouse space too now, which has made a huge positive impact!! As tech changes, we have found that we have had to change the power board to suit – it has been challenging making sure we have enough of everything to suit all of our customers’ needs. I do all the website updates so we are sure to communicate what we have to make it as clear and easy as possible for our customers to find what they need.
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
The pros are that I feel a great sense of pride in creating this business from scratch knowing that it helps people on a daily basis. I feel I can be more flexible with time that when I used to work for others. My kids sure do get a lot of lifts to school these days!! On the flipside, it is sometimes hard to switch off as the responsibility and all decision making comes back to me as the business owner.
Hopes and dreams: What next?
I’m expanding the business into the US at the moment. Inchargebox is now available over there on Amazon, which is exciting. I would love to get over to an in-person trade show there hopefully in 2023! My sister and her family live in New York and I’m desperate to go see them, so if I could combine that with a work trip, that would be fabulous!
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