Business Tips for Work-at-Home Moms

Being a work at home mom, typically referred to as a WAHM, means that you have two full time jobs! We all know being a stay at home mom is a full time job in itself, but when you add running a full time or even a part time business to your day it may feel like you are always “on the clock” so to speak. So how does a mom stay sane and run her home and business successfully without losing her mind or sanity? It’s all about time management and efficient daily planning.

There is one tool to making your home based business and home run smoothly and that is the use of a day planner. Use your day planner to run not only your business, but your house as well. Use it for everything including meal planning, grocery shopping, doctor appointments, goal planning and your every day kid’s schedules, such as soccer games, PTA and such.

While it may be a hot new trend to use a PDA or blackberry to manage your day, I highly recommend the use a paper based day planner in conjunction with an electronic day planner or PDA. With a paper based planner you can easily jot down notes, add a to-do item on your list, clip coupons and attach to your grocery list, and see the overall picture of your day or week at a glance.

One planner that I use exclusively is the Franklin Covey planning system. It is the best planner I have ever used and I have tried many different day planners to best suit my life. Franklin Covey also has very valuable tools that teach you how to best manage your time. You can see these planners and tools online at http://www.franklincovey.com/.

I highly suggest networking with other WAHM’s to find out what works best for them. It is best to meet face to face with other WAHM’s, this gives you the chance to pitch your business to other women business owners and also it gives you a chance to get out of the house and socialize while still being productive. A good start at finding local networking groups is using a site such as http://www.meetup.com/; here you can search by topic and location to find the networking group that best fits your needs. Be sure to have some flyers and business cards on hand when you go to any networking event.

If you find it difficult to find the time to network outside the home there are many great networking boards that you can glean information from that are specifically for work at home moms. You can search web sites such as About.com, wahm.com, clubenetwork.com and womenentrepreneur.com to find message boards that will help you network with other WAHM’s. If you are a minority owned business then MBnet.com is a great starting ground.

Being a WAHM is extremely rewarding and challenging but when you have the right tools and resources it all can run smoothly!