The Top 5 Lessons I have Learned After Five Years in Business

The Top 5 Lessons I have Learned After Five Years in Business

Welcome to episode 221 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento, and I am very excited to be here to talk to you about the top five lessons that I’ve learned after five years in business. I will tell you that being in business for five years is a huge milestone. 

I did not know that I was going to make it this far, and frankly, it’s been a very difficult five years. Many people will tell you that. It’s easy that you just have to keep going, keep persevering, keep doing this, keep doing that. Stay consistent. 

You hear all of these things, especially on social media. It’s not that easy, but I wanna share with you today some of the I should say, I wanna share with you today five things that I have learned in my five years that have had I been able to stick to these things from the very beginning would have probably made my business accelerate in a much faster way and allowed me to focus and have the time that I.

To start, When I started my business, I started my business because I did not want to go back to work at nine to five or nine to seven as I was working before. And I didn’t want to miss out on the baby years of our third child, which we thought was going to be our last child. And here we are expecting baby number four, but I am so happy to be in a position.

I have my business established. I have a team. I have everything in place that will allow me to enjoy the babyhood of our fourth child and our final child, and just. Allow me to have what I envisioned five years ago when our daughter was born, and when I thought that’s what I wanted.

It’s taken five years to get there. If you’re just starting, you’re discouraged, you’re tired, you’re whatever, definitely do not give up. I will say that, just take the five things that I’m going to say. 

Now and resonate with them, ruminate on them. Think about them. Think about how you can do this in your business for each of these five different topics that I’m gonna talk about Number one is to do what works for you. It’s really important. To have a reason for starting your business, that reason should be what you build your business around.

For, I started my business so I could be there for our kids for Girl Scouts, for all of the different activities that they have at school, for chorus concerts, for musicals, for parent-teacher conferences, all the things that I couldn’t be attending when I was working five days a week, nine to seven, on a rotating schedule.

That is why I started my business. You need to sit down and think about why you started your business and make sure that whatever you’re doing in your business is working for you and not against the reason that you started your business, cuz eventually.

You have that you are going to resent your business and you’re not going to treat it as a business, you’re gonna trade it as a hobby. It’s very important to make sure that you do what works for you.

Number two is to set boundaries. Set boundaries with your clients. Set boundaries with your work hours. Set boundaries with your family. Set boundaries with your friends. Set boundaries with everything. You are a business. You are not a hobby.

And I think a lot of people when you tell them that you own your own business and you work from home, will either try to take advantage of that. Oh, can you pick my kid up from the bus stop?

Can you watch them after school? Can do all of these different things that people think just because you’re at home and you’re. They don’t necessarily understand what you do. Like literally no one in my family still after five years has any clue what I do in my business, which is fine.

They don’t need to. They don’t understand the internet or the interwebs or whatever. They might call it, but it’s really important that you set these boundaries with your neighbors, with your friends, because you need to have that time dedicated to your business. Block it out on a calendar, make sure that those boundaries are set, and if that particular pickup wouldn’t work for you, if you were working in a regular business, then it shouldn’t work for you in your business.

Now, okay, I know that may sound mean or harsh or whatever, but if you don’t set those boundaries for the people around you from the very beginning, they’re going to walk all over you and they’re going to encroach. All of your business time is extremely important.

The third thing, number three is not being afraid to break up with clients. I’ve had clients that were paying me $5,000 a month that I was just like, I cannot work for you anymore, because their demands are. Way more than that. $5,000 or whatever it is worth, your mental health is more important than any amount of money, and you must recognize those red flags from the very, very beginning.

There are many of them and some of those red flags are, they’re extreme. urgently trying to get started. Like they want you to start yesterday. They’re willing to pay you top dollar because this means that somebody else dumped them and they don’t know how to do what that other person was doing necessarily.

It sounds great at the beginning, and you’re thinking, Oh yeah, this is gonna be great. But there’s a reason that they know that they have to do that because no one else is willing to work with them. Very important.

Don’t be afraid to break up with those people that are pushing your boundaries, those clients that are giving you headaches and nightmares, and all of the things like those are not your people. You can find a better client that has just as much work for you, for the same pay, but they’re not giving you those headaches.

It’s very important to not have those headaches in your business. Especially because being a mom and a business owner, we have many other headaches in our lives just from getting the kids off to school, to packing lunches too. Doing dinner means that we don’t need that extra stress in our business. We can find a way to organically find and attract those clients that are not going to drive us nuts.

Number four. Don’t buy every single shiny course that you come across. I am, this is one of the things that I’ve struggled with over the last five years, and I have so many courses that I’ve purchased, and 90% of them I have never finished, never completed. I do have a lot that I have completed.

My advice would be to stay within your niche with those courses. Make sure that they’re going to produce income for you if you take them. I would stay away from coaching courses like group coaching and things like that. If you want to hire a coach, I would hire a coach one on one. So then that way you can get your questions answered.

You feel like you’re connected to that person. I would definitely. Do not waste money on something that you don’t know for certain that is going to bring you in revenue or increase your income.

Number five, this is the last one, and I’m glad that I finally did this, although I did it a couple of years too late, it took me a couple of years to figure out what my niche was, right? I figured it out. Early on, but also late. That Google business profile was what I wanted to focus on.

It was my niche because very few other people in the SEO industry were talking about it. It’s almost like they didn’t realize how important it was, four years ago. And it took me a whole year of trying to figure this out, trying to figure that out to get to the point where I was like, Okay, this is the only thing that I wanna focus on.

And even after that, I tried to focus on other tools and other areas, but I always came back to that and I figured out that I just needed to stick with that, only talk about that, only help people with that because that is where I started gaining my traction. Started getting clients and started seeing the results for those clients.

Whatever your instinct is, I would say stick with that. Stick with your niche and do not distract from that. Just keep building content around that. Keep building sales around that. Build your audience, build your name, and your success will come if you stick to that niche.

I know this is a short episode, but I don’t like my time being wasted, and I don’t like yours being wasted either. I hope that you have enjoyed these top five lessons, and I promise you that if you stick with these five things and create your boundaries, principles, and. Niche and all of those things that we’ve talked about in this episode that you will have success.