Building a business after bedtime
I always knew I wanted to have my own business one day; I think I’m one of those people who are destined to be their own boss. That could be because I don’t enjoy taking orders from other people and I very much like to sit in the captains seat, or it could be because I’m really ambitious… I would like to think it’s the latter but I’m also grounded enough to know that all signs point toward the other. Either way, the drive for this has always been in my bones.
I’ve spent a large part of my 31 years hopping from job to job and city to city (or country to country), because I get bored very easily and I thrive on learning, discovering and being out of my comfort zone.
In 2024 Mitch and I had a baby boy, Adler. Simply put- my favourite chapter thus far.
I have been lucky enough to have my best friend join me on this motherhood journey; her baby is 3 months younger than Adler. While I was on Maternity Leave I helped to plan some games for her baby shower. Thinking back to my own baby shower (that she threw), I wanted to make the games different as we have a large group of mutual friends that attended both celebrations. Absolutely unreal how hard it was to firstly find baby shower games in NZ, and secondly find different games to the ones I had at my shower. The only packs of games I could find were on a very well known website, and they were either the same as mine, very American, or a bit too generic for my liking.
And this is when ready steady baby started brewing in my thoughts.
Many months passed while I developed the business idea in my head and the games ideas on paper, mainly while I was sitting in the lazy boy feeding Adler and being nap trapped. Am I too tired to think straight at this point? Yes. Am I trying to think up literally anything that could possibly save me from having to go back to my pre Maternity Leave job? Also yes.
I spent months and months and M O N T H S scouring the internet for products to stock and manufacturers to bring my ideas to fruition, ordering samples and trialing them, and then ordering and finally receiving end product. If you’ve never done this before you truly won’t understand how incredibly time consuming the process is. As Adler grew and started to become more alert, I stopped using my laptop and phone when he was awake so I could engage with him in every minute of his short wake windows. This is still something I am very strict on; I only ‘work’ when he is not in my presence (and the washing is done, the house is clean, and I’ve wasted at least half the time I have available browsing social media or watching Netflix).
Unfortunately (soz to my boss if you’re reading this), all good things come to an end and in April I had to kiss Mat Leave goodbye and pick up where I left off at my 9-5. Although my job isn’t really 9-5, it’s very much an all day, all in type of gig. I’m making the job sound less than ideal, but the truth is I actually quite liked it, until I had a baby. I’m a Territory Manager, so my job see’s me travelling out of Hamilton everyday, something I had no problem with when I didn’t have a cute little bug at the centre of my universe. Anyway, that’s a whole other can of fish… wait, worms? Kettle of fish? I could google that, but I’m too busy doing other stuff.
Speaking of the other stuff… if you’ve ever built your own business you’ll know what I’m talking about. There’s just always something to do. Never has there been a day so far when I’ve thought ‘shit I’ve got everything up to date’. I’m deep enough into this now to know that if that thought ever slipped into my mind, I would know that I’ve 110% forgotten to do something, probably something really important. I’m the absolute queen of reading emails and messages and replying to them in my head, but failing to do it IRL. This makes having a full time job that is centred around communication and being the only contact for my own business, really tricky.
So I’m a busy mum juggling a full time job and a small business, and I’ve decided to start a blog. Do I thrive on chaos? I think I do.
Extremely grateful for the constant support I receive in the background.
We can do anything we put our minds to.
Stay tuned x