Lessons Learned in Business

Helpful Ideas...

2007-07-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

I love my work. I enjoy what I'm doing and I do it well. I'm a computer instructor. There are days when I really love what I'm doing and then there are days that drive me batty. This week was a batty week but it's fine by me as I know that I am helping society by teaching skills that are fast becoming necessary to survive in the workplace.

Every workplace has frustrations and mine is no exception. Bosses who are out on vacation or who drop last minute projects or meetings on a week when you think there's a chance you can catch up with lab maintenance. Thankfully my boss who does drop things on me at the last minute will negotiate time to do these things if they are truely necessary or desired. He loves the efficent office and thrives on the fact that his employees want to take the initiative to do other dutes even when not assigned.

My point I think I'm trying to make is that no matter what your frustrations at work there are worse places you could work with ananl retentive, controlling and abusive bosses who do not appreciate the hard work and do not even notice that you are there. I'm lucky and I hope you are too in your choice of workplace.

Working in a Team Environment

2007-06-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

Currently I am a full-time student and work full time in Career Development & Computer Instruction with the dolls as a side line that I have not devoted time to very much in the last year or so. In addition to this I also have 2 kids.

Working in the fields I am currently in I am part of a team. This team has changed drastically in the last year. It has gone from being a two person Career Development Center to having 6-8 of us working together to help an ever growing client base.

A couple of the most important things that have happened are team members transitioning on and off of the team and one of the team members being promoted. One of the main team members transitioned to a new job and she did a lot of work for the team in job development and community contacts for each client that walked through the door. With her gone it has fallen to other team members to do the same things. We're managing and becoming good at what she did.

The promotion of one of our peers to a supervisory position has been a bit rough, as well, as no one really wanted to communicate. This brings me to my point about teams and team members and leadership. Communication is key. If you do not know your team mates then you do not know who can do special tasks. Our new supervisor is learning this the hard way but has finally realized that to build an effective team he needed to get to know his team as individuals.

I am starting to see the glimmer of potential that the team has if he can get to know his team members and start to use their skills to their full potential. Thankfully he's worked closely with me for nearly a year now and I've moved into a position that is starting to use my skills and develop my new skills I'm gaining as a student. He's also been actively seeking information from me to manage the team better which is a good thing as he learns quickly and applies things quickly.

The team is developing well..... now if only he'd stop trying to have full team meetings and just stick with individual meetings and be happy when we can manage to get together as a larger group. Once he does this the team will move forward and become great.

I think one of the most important things he's learned is that there has to be communication and trust for a team to truly function well. One of the best things we could have done is to setup Google Notebooks to house notes about what we do and things we've learned. I think it has the potential to bring the team closer together or at least give us a resource to go to if we need to know something.

I am back to looking forward to working again as the latest transition is finally coming to an end... of course there is something new right around the corner but the rough team transitions are nearly done... for a while.

Good Idea....

2005-08-02T21:41:00.000-07:00

If you're anything like me you can come up with great ideas at odd times and once you get rolling with the idea you start to forget details as you get more and more excited about it (well it happens to me so I'm guessing it happens to others!)

A good solution is a secretary taking notes for you but as small business owners who can actually afford that? Next best thing a tape recorder. They come in all shapes and sizes and can record everything from a reminder to do something like an entry in your bookkeeping to the latest brilliant idea you want to try for your business to thoughts for where to take your business and how to expand it. Iit can also capture a group brainstorming session where you get to the point of bouncing ideas so fast you know you can't write them down fast enough!

Other ideas for it can include talking to it while you develop a new product. How you do something if you have to write instructions or think you'll forget in 6 months how you did something and need to repeat it.

Another idea is while working on your website, have someone go through page by page and comment on the page with their ideas along with while coming up with ideas for new pages you can create lists for keywords, page title possibilities and other behind the scenes type info you'll need when you actually start the page.

Once you're done with a brainstorming session you can then rewind and play the tape and either write or type up your idea lists in some semblance of order and get all the little things you might otherwise have forgotten. I tend to organize things in Power Point with one main idea per page and details listed below for each subject.

Hope this inspires and helps someone!

PDF Creation

2005-07-12T21:12:00.000-07:00

Recently a great many people I know have been working on creating things to sell in the form of tutorials and e-books in digital format. Quite a few have used Word and are trying to use just a .doc format for selling this idea of theirs…. I’ve e-mailed several and walked several through converting things to PDF format. Adobe Acrobat is NOT the only way to create PDF files. There are services that will convert just about any file you can think of. There are also programs that do this as well. Some are paid others are freeware.

For Word or other MS Office products (yes you can convert Power Point and Excel to PDF!) I use PDF995. This is freeware with no spyware and no ads attached or added to your files. The free version does pop up an ad for upgrading to the paid version but it’s not all that big of a deal nothing attaches itself to your file that you create. How it works is you go to www.pdf995.com and download the files they provide. Follow their installation instructions and the next time you’re in Word and need a PDF you go to file and print and switch to a postscript printer driver (the program knows which one you need and comes with it). It’ll print to file and you save the PDF. You can put anything you want in the document…. photos, links, text, colors, fonts etc. And WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)! The nice thing about this little add on is that it works with Word 98 or greater…. Even up to 2003 (according to the site…. I run 2000 so do not have first hand knowledge of this).

Other programs I’ve run into with PDF converters are Corel Draw 11 and Open Office (open source version of MS Office). I use Corel to convert all my patterns, books, lines & kits for sale and it works just fine.

Poke around online you’d be surprised at how many free programs there are available for converting various file formats to PDF.

Sue Darby~Owner
www.suestinycostumes.com

New Lessons

2005-05-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

My latest lessons have more to do with balancing a family and a business than anything. I have 2 small children and in just a couple days one of the two will be out of school for the summer. What to do with her? Well there's a backyard full of bugs and 'flowers' to pick along with her bicycle but she gets bored with that quickly. So I bring her up into my loft and turn her loose with paper towels and scotch tape and a doll. What does she do? She emulates mom and starts designing patterns for her dolls.

I think by the end of the summer I'll have to open up a new section of my site for her designs. I'll still have to do a lot of the finishing work on the patterns along with the sewing but I have a feeling that we'll have a lot of fun this summer. I also have a feeling that with my daughter learning to read and spell she'll pick up on web design and web languages fairly quick... after not too long she'll be maintaing that new section not me!

After her brother is out of school in less than a month this activity will be limited to during his nap time but should still be fun. When he's out of school as well it'll be off to the park most days... it's the reason we all have bikes!

Lesson learned... include children in your business and teach them about what you make or do... it's amazing how quick they'll pick up on things.

Lessons Learned in My Business

2004-12-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

This is the first of my lessons learned articles. I’ll talk about what I do and how I plan on changing how I work in hopes that it’ll help someone else.

I draft doll clothes, maintain my own websites and am the CEO and well… chief, cook and bottle washer for the business.

What does this mean? It means that I do all my own marketing, product development on top of dealing with customers and financials.

My purpose is to give you some insight on how to deal with one issue at a time. For starters:

Starting the business: start by talking to a local Small Business Development Center to get a business plan for your business going. If the SBDC doesn’t have someone who can help you with a hobby based – not a hobby business but based on the hobby industry type business seek help online with various groups and forums for your interest. In my case it started out with miniatures. I was a college student with a major in Fashion Design. When you think of Fashion you usually thing of people clothes for me I had an interest in dressing dolls. My mother has a business that is based on dressing dolls and I was interested in helping expand my knowledge in the field. I was at the time taking a Small Business class and was assigned to write up a business plan for a business for myself. That was where Sue’s Tiny Costumes was originally born. At the time I was working on developing a website for my mother and instead got sidetracked into developing one for my designs. I was learning HTML on my own so the going was slow but my results were good for a beginner. I look back on that original site design and laugh now but for the time and my skill I was very happy with what I had.

I later moved out after graduating college and ended up married to my loving and supportive (not to mention smart hubby). When our daughter was born I decided to stay home and after a couple months was bored so I started looking around online for a miniatures group or forum. I found Small Stuff Digest in 2000 and joined up. This group is a very supportive group who encouraged me to “go for my dreams” which was starting up Sue’s Tiny Costumes and turning it into a full time business. I still haven’t achieved the full time to this day but it’s working on at least a part time job status for now.

I researched and tested and played dolls for several months and then wrote my first self-published book “Pattern Drafting for Miniatures” ©2002 From there I wrote “Pattern Making for Dolls” in between caring for 2 children and developing patterns for dozens of dolls.

I learned the value of a good business plan when I applied to have state funding for a business license. I wrote the plan and revised it daily for a month solid until I knew it inside out and backwards. I GOT THE FUNDING! Sue’s Tiny Costumes became reality.

In future installments I’ll go into detail on business plans, marketing and how to deal with various things including time management with children and a dozen appointments a week while on various state programs that don’t let you concentrate on a fledgling business!