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Sep 15 2018

5 things to consider before pairing up with an Accountability Partner

 

I think we can all agree that accountability is a HUGE tool in our success tool bag, and, as we go into the last quarter of the year, it’s one I want you to take out and use NOW.

None of us are strangers to the idea of peer pressure. As children, we tended to think of it as something to avoid. I’m going to ask you to put that concept aside and imagine for a moment:

What could would it mean for you and your business to feel a little positive pressure from someone in the same boots as you? A woman who gets it and pushes you from a place of love, respect and a genuine desire to see you succeed?

That’s the power of an Accountability Partner.

However, I don’t want you not to pick just anyone. This should be an extremely selective process. Treat it as if you were choosing a daycare provider for your child. This is your business baby after all.

Here are some things I encourage my clients to consider:

  1. Your prospective partner must be motivated.This goes above and beyond what they are telling you in your discussions with them about a partnership. Are they someone you know to be intentional and focused in their day-to-day lives? When you check their social media accounts, are they consistently representing themselves as a business owner? These are just a few of the ways you as an outsider can tell if they are seriously working their business.
  2. Where are they in their business?I like to surround myself with people who are, for the most part, a few steps ahead of me. That way I am fortunate to have people who have already been through the stage I am currently at. If they aren’t a few steps ahead in their business, then they should at least possess a skill set that is complimentary to yours. Where do you struggle? Are they strong it that area?
  3. Are they invested in you and the Accountability Partner process?This is probably the most important question to answer because, if the answer is no, then you’re wasting your time. You partner needs to be willing to make time for you in their schedule. If they are giving you all kinds of reasons why they can’t schedule your sessions on this date or that, move on. They should be a good listener and have a genuine interest in getting to know you in a meaningful way. If they aren’t willing to put in the work to get to know you, how are they going to know when to push you and when you hold back?
  4. They need to have a concrete understanding of how your business runs and generates revenue.The truth is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ business model. Some are very intricate. Some industries are much different than others. Your partner needs to understand, and preferably have some experience in, your business model to be able to successfully help you during your time together.
  5. You must be able to trust your partner.Like Fight Club, what happens in your sessions needs to stay in your sessions. If you can’t trust your partner, you won’t be able to open up and the process will inevitably fall flat.

BONUS: You need to care about not letting them down. If you’re not worried about this, then they either aren’t the right fit for you or you’re not ready for the process. Either way, this partnership won’t end well.

 

Curious if there are personality types to avoid? There absolutely are. Check out this post.

Samantha King is a busy mompreneur and homeschooler with two young children and a couple of businesses at home. When Samantha’s daughter was diagnosed with autism, she had to learn how to keep her priorities aligned within her family, while operating her business at the same time. She is excited to share her knowledge to empower entrepreneurs by giving them the tools they need to do something they love while building sustainable, profitable businesses.  

Contact Samantha:

Tel: 416-885-6841

Email: samantha@fempirebuilders.com

Facebook: @FempireBuilders

Twitter: @FempireBuilders

Instagram: @Fempire_Builders

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Samantha King · Tagged: accountability, business, motivation, partner, Samantha King

Aug 15 2018

3 actions to take today to make the last quarter your best quarter yet

At the beginning of the year, we spend time dreaming, planning and goal setting for the coming year. If you’ve worked with me, you know that involves mapping out each of those goals and what it’s going to take for you to achieve them. You also know that we follow that up with assigning deadlines spread throughout the year in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly increments.

It may sound like a lot of work at the outset, but it’s instrumental to the overall health of your business. It ensures that you always have a complete roadmap to refer back to and keep you on track as you go along your way balancing these goals with the demands in all the other areas of your life.

But even with all the planning and road mapping in the world, we all know that life can still creep up. New opportunities can present themselves that, while beneficial at the time, take you a smidge off course from your goals for this year. Detours may need to be called as an unexpected roadblock jumps into your path. These things happen!

And, knowing that these things happen, I encourage all of my clients to book a check-in with themselves and their business at the end of each quarter. By getting these sessions into your calendar in January, you are making a commitment to your business to check-in on your progress and make sure that the goals you’ve set happen.

So what do you do in this session? As we go into the last quarter of the year, here are the three steps I want you to take:

Check-in and assess where you are

The big question to answer here is: Where are you in relation to your plans for the year? How far have you come, or strayed, from the goals you set out to achieve in January?

  • Sales are the lifeline of our business: Are you at least 75% of the way towards your revenue targets? If you aren’t, do you have some solid sales initiatives in place to get you there? Are there any natural busy sales season for your industry that you are planning on capitalizing on this quarter? Without sales, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby, which is why this is a MUST area to check-in on during your session.
  • Spending time planning and taking on goals that will level up your business is critical to its growth and ongoing success: Where do you stand on these goals? Was this the year you were going to create an online course? How is that coming along? Maybe you wanted to implement systems to help you streamline the administrative side of your business. By this point in time, you should be executing the system you’ve designed, and thinking about what kinks need to be worked out in order to finalize.

 

Evaluate your efforts so far

This step is all about answering the questions: What have you been spending your time doing? What’s worked? What has fallen flat? What do you need to do more of or stop doing?

  • You can network every day of the week: Are you networking in places and at events where your ideal client are? If you are, then you should have a healthy sales pipeline that is full of prospective customers, right?
  • Before people will buy from you, you have to effectively market your business so they know about you:  Are you marketing yourself where your ideal clients are? Is your sales copy speaking their language? Have you chosen graphics that are visually attractive to them?
  • The fortune is in the follow-up: How are you following up with your prospective customers? After you meet them, what is your next move? How are you moving the conversation along to the ‘Ask for the Sale’ point?

 

Plan for the rest of the year

Once you know where you’ve been, it’s time to make some hard choices. What do you have to do to get you to your goals for the year? Some of the answers may push you outside of your comfort zone, and maybe that’s why you’ve been reluctant to ask these questions. But the hard truth: is that by not asking, it’s likely you’ve been holding both you and your business back.

Take the answers to these questions and start outlining what your next steps need to be. Break those tasks down, map out the steps to complete them, and assign deadlines in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly increments.

And, most importantly, do these two things: Put a system in place that works for you to consistently TRACK YOUR EFFORTS, and book time in your calendar to FREQUENTLY CHECK-IN on your progress.REMEMBER: You can’t change what you don’t know about or lose sight of. That’s why we track.


Samantha King is a busy mompreneur and homeschooler with two young children and a couple of businesses at home. When Samantha’s daughter was diagnosed with autism, she had to learn how to keep her priorities aligned within her family, while operating her business at the same time. She is excited to share her knowledge to empower entrepreneurs by giving them the tools they need to do something they love while building sustainable, profitable businesses.  

Contact Samantha:

Tel: 416-885-6841

Email: samantha@fempirebuilders.com

Facebook: @FempireBuilders

Twitter: @FempireBuilders

Instagram: @Fempire_Builders

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Samantha King · Tagged: end of year, evaluate your business, goals, last quarter, Samantha King

Jun 15 2018

What to do about Interruptions from Interrupters so you can reclaim your time

As an Accountability Coach, I probably deal with time management and prioritizing the most. The biggest time sucker I see ALL. THE. TIME. is Interruptions from Interrupters. So what can you do about it? Here’s what I recommend to my clients and 3 tips to help you implement it. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to walk you through my day-to-day life as your example.

Identify your biggest interruptors and begin managing their expectations

For me, my biggest interrupters are my family. I love those guys, but when you work from home and you homeschool your children, you spend a lot of time together. As a result, it can be hard for them to recognize when I am trying to work and need some uninterrupted time to get stuff done.

I’ve been on a journey of personal development, and, as part of my learnings, I resolved to make some changes in my approach to trying to reach the Holy Grail we call work/life balance. So naturally, I dug into my own bag of tips and tricks that I would give my clients to begin to figure out what these changes would look like in my own day-to-day balancing act.

 

Set clear Work, Play and Me Time hours

My typical day looks like this:

  • 8-12:30-1pm: Homeschool lessons, activities and explorations 1-2pm: My children have independent play and I get some quick work tasks done
  • 2-4pm: Max, my three-year-old, goes for a nap, which is when Mama/Me Time starts
  • 5:30-6 to 9-9:30pm: Dad is in charge while Mama has uninterrupted work time

 

This has really been working for us. Why?

I will get to why I dedicate the entire morning to our homeschool work in a minute.

Let me jump down to independent time for now. I always have emails to respond to, social media channels to connect on, etc. that I only need a couple of minutes of uninterrupted time to get through. I take on these kinds of tasks during this time frame to manage my own expectations for when independent play may not happen as independently as it’s supposed to be…and we all know that happens.

As I have been going through my journey of self-discovery, I have realized that I need time to regroup in the afternoon and fill my own bucket from being ‘ON’ all morning with my autistic kiddos. When Max naps is the perfect time in our house because usually Penny, my seven-year-old, is needing her own time to recharge as well.  I have also been able to give myself permission, through this journey, to honour myself and that I am a night owl; making my prime work time the evening.

This all comes together through practice and explicit modelling with my children and spouse. Everyone knows the routine and expectations are; what it should look, sound and feel like.

Fill the buckets before you need to get down to work

 

Now let’s talk about why I choose to dedicate the entire morning to our homeschool work. Scheduling my morning this way kills two birds with one stone for us. They are learning. They are getting to spend completely uninterrupted time with Mama, which means that they are having their buckets filled up so to speak. When I am not as available throughout the rest of the day, they don’t feel like they are getting the short end of the stick.

Let your clients and followers know what to expect from their relationship with you at the outset

 

For this last one, I’m going to go outside of my house and talk specifically about it from a scheduling aspect.

Let’s start with my clients. They know that I can only schedule in-person meetings on certain days and have dedicated call times as well. If at the outset, they can’t meet with me during those times/days, then I will let them know that we likely aren’t a good match in the long run. If once we are working together, they need to reschedule a meeting or call, they may have to wait until the following week’s call time. Now, I am pretty flexible for the most part (you’ll find most autistic parents are, I bet). However, having that clearly laid out from the beginning avoids bad tastes all around on the one time I have to enforce it.

Similarly, my follower’s know what’s going on in our community each day. Our Facebook group members know when they can promote themselves and what we’re talking about each day. They know when a new blog post comes out. Viewers know when Fempire LIVE is on each week so they can tune in. They know all this because I  have clear, straightforward communication with them and am consistent in my action.

 

As a rule you’ll find that people feel more at ease and comfortable when things are predictable, which is why both of these approaches have worked so well for me and my business. When the expectations are clear and the enforcement of them are consistent, not only will everyone know what they can ask and expect from you, you’ll also feel more confident when you have to put your boundaries walls up to get things done.

 

Samantha King is a busy mompreneur and homeschooler with two young children and a couple of businesses at home. When Samantha’s daughter was diagnosed with autism, she had to learn how to keep her priorities aligned within her family, while operating her business at the same time. She is excited to share her knowledge to empower entrepreneurs by giving them the tools they need to do something they love while building sustainable, profitable businesses.  

Contact Samantha:

Tel: 416-885-6841

Email: samantha@fempirebuilders.com

Facebook: @FempireBuilders

Twitter: @FempireBuilders

Instagram: @Fempire_Builders

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Samantha King · Tagged: interrupters, interruptors, prioritizing, Samantha King

Nov 26 2014

Do you Mastermind? Should you be?

Samantha King

I constantly see images and hear things from other successful business owners about Masterminding, and why I should be doing it.  In fact, this morning I was listening to Michael Stelzner’s podcast, and he and his guest, Jeff Korhan, were talking about the importance of small business owners taking the time to co-operate and collaborate with other small business owners.

When you’re a one man show 90% of the time like me (okay…maybe you have a virtual team member or two), it’s hard to really strategize and set goals because…well…there’s only you.  Gone are the days when you can meet up with your team of co-workers to sit down and hash ideas out…I bet your office doesn’t look like this anymore:

And, so many other things come up, right? You just don’t have time, right? And when it’s just you, it’s easier to not hold yourself as accountable as you do when you know there will be someone else checking up on you.  Sound familiar? I know it does for me.

But the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I see that this is something I need to make time to do.  Why? Here’s 3 reasons:

  1. I plan and think through things best when I talk through them….to do that I need more than myself.
  2. ACCOUNTABILITY!! I think we all make things a priority when there is someone else in the mix…we just don’t want to let them down.
  3. Fresh ideas…plain and simple.  A fresh set of eyes could be exactly what you need to get out of a rut, bring together a great new campaign/product, or solve a customer problem you’ve been having.

As you can see, the process of collaboration has some very obvious, simple benefits (for me anyway), and I’ll be making it a big part of my business planning and strategizing in 2015.

(Now I’ve just got to find places to meet fellow masterminders…any tips?)

So….do you Mastermind? Why? Why not? If you do, what benefits have you seen? Let us know in the comments!

Samantha King has a passion for working with female entrepreneurs to build the business of their dreams.  Specializing in Branding, Marketing, & Event Planning, she uses her experience in event and marketing co-ordination to work with small business owners on the conceptualization, coordination and execution of their marketing and event projects.  She works with her clients to understand their brand, current marketing strategy, and (most importantly) their dream to help them complete the marketing tasks on their to-do lists that they know they need to do, but don’t have the time to do…and don’t have the budget to hire a full-time inside person to do.
You can reach Samantha directly via email at: iamsamanthaking@gmail.com or connect with her on LinkedIn at: ca.linkedin.com/in/samanthajking

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Written by Dwania Peele · Categorized: Samantha King · Tagged: accountability, branding, business development, business owners, Business Woman, Canadian Small Business Women, collaborate, entrepreneur, Event Planning, goal setting, ideas, Jeff Korhan, marketing, mastermind, masterminding, Michael Stelzner, podcast, priority, product, Samantha King, small business, small business development, small business owners, strategize, successful business owners

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