How do you manage work during the school holidays?

Let me start by saying I don't have a good answer for this question! One of the main ideas of running your own business is to have the flexibility of being around for the children. In some industries it may be possible to not take on any work over the holidays and therefore resolve the problem. Inevitably that means doing extra work before and after the holidays.

Some families manage to continue their childcare arrangements during the holidays by keeping children in nursery or by enlisting the help of grandparents. This is a good solution if it means that you can get a few hours work done here and there.

In my case I have one child at school, one in pre-school 3 mornings a week and an 18 month old who is always at home. So during the school holidays all 3 children are at home. I have not yet managed to find an ideal way to manage both my business and childcare so we just make the best of it. Luckily my business (selling maternity and baby clothes online) means that I don't have a set amount of work each day. I need to dispatch parcels on a daily basis but that can take anywhere from 20 mins to 1 hour to pack plus a couple of visits to the post office. If that is all I do then we can easily manage days out and have tons of fun together. There are plenty of other tasks that I need to be getting on with (preparing the end of year accounts, ordering stock, preparing stock to send to Amazon's warehouse, doing my VAT return...) and so I just have to figure out how and when to do those.

Some of the smaller jobs I just get on with whilst the children are playing together or even (bad mummy warning!) watching TV. I plan to get loads done in the evenings but most of the time I'm just too tired by the end of the day. Some jobs such as preparing parcels and stock my older children like to 'help' with so I let them assist with the bits they can do.

In conclusion, you probably just have to muddle through - much like the rest of the year! My feeling is that is still well worth the hassle though.

Taking the plunge: time for expansion?

My advice so far in this blog and to anyone who asks is that you should do as much as you can without spending any money. I have steered clear of upfront investment and favoured organic growth. But now my business has come to a stage where I feel that an injection of capital could really push it forward.

At what point do you take that step? If there is a clear project which needs investment then the answer might be more straightforward. In my business I sell maternity and baby products online so there is no pressing need for investment. Except that my stock sells out and I feel that I could gain additional sales and grow the business if I had more to invest.

What I have done is to write my business plan for the next 3 months (I now keep it as an online document so it can keep being updated and I have diary reminders for when the next plan is due) and am outlining what exactly could be purchased so that I know what size of investment would be healthy for the business. I will also need to keep a close eye on what the cost of borrowing is, to make sure it won't push up the price I charge to customers, and of course I need to be sure that I can meet the monthly repayments. The theory is that the rise in income should more than cover the repayments so some projections for turnover need to be included.

Once I have this information I can apply for a loan for a reasonably short time (1-2 years) and I'll know exactly how the money will be spent. My fear in doing this is that I'll be saddled with debt repayments without seeing the requisite increase in turnover. But, I should at least be able to recover the cost price of my stock, so it should be a worry-free strategy!

Maternity top with the background removed

The real background - putting the stair gate to good use!