life help: Please help. - Help.com

Wow! Sounds desperate. What kind of business does she have?

You say she is in hock up to her eyeballs. She needs to get some financial planning and figure out which bills she bills she needs to pay first.

wow… im sure theres someone out there who is trained to deal with that kida stuff

Ok.. first up.. let’s see if you can help her manage her time better. She needs to streamline her day. Talk to her about how many hours she spends for the business, how many hours for housework, how many for the kids, how many for herself.

Help her to draw up some reasonable boundaries here. That phone ringing non stop. Set up an answering service and make her use it. Customers phoning out of normal hours or during lunch break will just have to wait. They do for every other service out there and if she makes a situation where they are “available all hours” all she does is reduce the business credibility. Real businesses have business hours. Tell her to boost her business image by behaving like a business!

Her husband does not need to be on the cell every five minutes. She is going to have to learn not to accept all his calls. One way to avoid them is to dedicate the first hour of the business day to making sure he is set up and knows what he is doing. After that, he can only call after lunch. Nothing is so urgent he needs her all day! The last hour of the business day they sit down and talk about issues that cropped up and plan for the next day.

It would be good if you could suggest some way of making a dedicated office space. Whilst the office is in the living room, there is no work/home life division. Maybe a separate room or even a dedicated under stairs area that can be screened off at 6pm.

She needs to understand that working all hours is not cost effective. It runs up medical bills, it means she is most likely spending more on dry cleaning and ready meals because she is too busy to launder and cook… and the additional business it generates is just not worth the while. It’s a business fact: if she learns to say “we’re fully booked this week, i’m sorry” she will have a queue of customers waiting to use the service. Why? because if a business is “fully booked” it must be good!!

Maybe trying to get her to see the business sense of cutting down and streamlining will help to at least improve one area of her life.

oh well, that’s odd. She’ll definitely needs a maid or an assistant. Just take it slow and rest once in a while.

I think I get it. It is going to be hard to find a person to step into her shoes to fill in even a small part of what she does because all of the info is all in her head. This is a major problem when the position is only one deep. Perhaps she can talk to her bank and see if she can get a small loan and try to use someone from Kelly services to answer the phone or hire a maid for a short while. I am assuming that she is so overwhelmed that she can’t think. SCORE might be able to help. I know there are Landscaping associations and she could talk to someone there who will know what she is going through.

One other point I would make is that sometimes working out of the home becomes a bad idea when there are too many distractions going on around you. Perhaps it is time to move the business to an office and hire a babysitter. Don’t give up. Maybe she can post her thoughts here at night when its quiet and she can think. I want to help.