I’m struggling this year… when we had our kid my wife wanted to stay home with her and since we could financially afford it we made it work.
Now she’s in kindergarten and my wife has gone back to work. But with kindergarten comes PD days, a mountain of sick days and, soon, spontaneous snow storms.
I’ve always been able to iron man my way through small business, one sick day in 6 years, and for vacation and time off I can plan for that.
But I’m having a hard time with the chaos and unpredictability of kindergarten lifestyle. Anyone been through it? Anyone able to cope better?
You must log in or register to comment.
Not sure if this is an option in your case but, I have just scaled my business back. There are only so many hours in the day. I don’t anticipate scaling it back up until they are much older.
How did you scale back? I guess it’s more of a question about what you do
I have been in business for over 10 years so it varies. I used to have 25 employees at one time. I have since scaled back to 1 or 2 depending on the time of year. I basically make much less product than I did before. So revenue is way down, surprisingly profit is somewhat similar and I have much more time. I scaled back initially because of financial reasons but, now that I have a family, I don’t see myself scaling up anytime soon.
What seems to be missing from your post, is networking with other parents in the class to crowdsource some of the pick up and dropping off at school, days off etc. (Not that I’m suggesting that you send a sick kid to someone else’s house, of course.)
I’m surprised that you aren’t mentioning the housework as well. A weekly housekeeper to tidy up would probably also cut down on the chaos.
We have biweekly house keeping, added that this September. A big one is suppers though. My wife is off a bit earlier so still does the bulk of the cooking but I need to/want to get in the habit of doing more of it. Issue is being prepared to get home early ect.
A meal service like blue apron, sun basket, green chef, etc. can help a lot by cutting out the need for a lot of shopping. If you have the budget for it, you can probably also find a local personal chef. We had one for a while that came to our house on a set schedule (once a month in our case) and made/froze a TON of meals for us. She did the cooking in our personal kitchen, so she didn’t need a commercial kitchen and everything that goes along with that. We would agree on a menu, she’d shop for everything and cook and portion it all out. It wasn’t nearly as expensive as I thought it would be.
We do larger meals in a slow cooker, like chili or pulled Mexican chicken once a week. That way we have the base of a meal already completed that lasts for a couple or three meals. A slow cooker and a rice cooker are such time savers. :)
It saves so much time. :)
It can really depend on your business, the hours it is open, whether you have employees, etc. Sometimes we do just put up a sign that we’re closed for the day because school is closed, or closed for an hour because of an appointment. But we’re retail, so there aren’t customer appointments to work around.
I mean, kind of the entire reason I have a business is so I have flexibility. I’ve hired people in order to get that. Do you have help? What kind of business?
I hired an office administrator, and she keeps the place running along with my two managers. She helps plan the production schedule and pickups/deliveries, can order most of our critical supplies, etc. I still get texts when I’m not physically at the business, but it’s usually so I can order some obscure thing and it takes 5 minutes. When my admin isn’t here I work the normal business hours, but when she is here (not sick or on vacation) I only work like 16ish hours a week.
Edited to add that I have a second grader, so I know what you’re dealing with…
I have one employee, trying to add another but don’t have my shit together for it (need to go after funding). She’s great, but I’m still pushing most of the business