Saturday 18 August 2007

Schools are back!

60 days have passed since my last post, in that time we have had our fantastic holiday in Fuertaventura and returned to the madness that is being a self employed mother of 2 who sells school uniforms.

The madness is now over, our schools are back so I am back to being a mother and a house keeper (when I say house keeper I mean I will now after 6 weeks clean my house). I am more motivated than I have been for a while, I have done well, worked hard continously morning, noon and night over the summer months and I am proud of my achievements, each year I take another step and each time the step gets bigger. My delinquents have been spending time at their granny's, my mother-in-law, over the past few weeks and with that comes guilt, I should be there for them, to look after them whenever they are not at school, but this is a long term vision and the plan is next year I will have a shop assistant who can man the unit, I intent not to continue doing most of the embroidery myself and have my suppliers do this for me.

Just incase you are reading this for the first time, let me reintroduce my business;

NHP Embroidery Services. I supply and embroider school wear and corporate workwear, I have an industrial unit, 8 minutes from my home, as you read on you will understand how important minutes are to me, I open my unit Mon/Tues 10-2, Thurs-Sat 10-5 in the summer and drop the Saturday in the winter. I sell on ebay www.stores.ebay.co.uk/nhp-embroidery-services and hope to have my own website up and running ready for next summer http://www.nhpservices.co.uk/ I am a planner and not much of a doer, if that makes sense, each year I make plans and each year I plod along. However, this is the year, only because I am now into my fourth year of business and I have to start making decent money out of it or it no longer becomes viable and then what would I do, work for someone else! I think not.

I am now frantic again, I promised most people who did not get all of their uniforms for Thursday that I would have them done this weekend as I planned to work Saturday and Sunday to clear the backlog, but my husband is now working tomorrow and I am going to stay at home and look after my own children and hopefully do some housework blah, blah, blah. But of course I've got more to do than I first realised and flattered thought I am, I keep getting phone calls from friends and family to see if I managed the rush etc. etc. as they haven't seen or heard from me all summer. I become a recluse in the summer, well a recluse in the unit. For each minute they talk to me, that's a minute taken from my precious embroidery minutes as the machine makes too much noise to keep it on when people are talking on the phone.

Having stopped for tea and my rolls at 2.20pm I am taking stock, perhaps another late night at the machine..............

3 comments:

Sparx said...

Welcome back from holiday! I hope business is good, I'm impressed by your achievements. I'm now working from home and balancing it all out - it's tough and I can't imagine how you do it with more than one child!

She's like the wind said...

Sparx - thank you for stopping by, business over the summer was great. The kids are 7 and 10 so they are at school all day. Don't know if I could manage if I worked from home and the kids were about. I also have great babysitters!

Graham Bedwell said...

We have our own embriodery business and school shop and I also work full time as a supervisor for a furniture manufacture. Plus we've got 2 kids of our own. - I know what you mean, it never ends.