Laura

LDS Keys to Prosperity

I’ve learned a lot about prosperity in the last few years. As
Latter-Day Saints, we have a number of tools at our disposal, which we
can use to achieve a more prosperous state. Here are some of the
things I’ve learned to do that help:

1. Pay Tithing. This really is number one. You cannot expect the Lord
to bless you if you are not willing to give back the minimum that you
owe Him for His generosity. Tithing is the key to “enough”. It gets us
through those times when we think we’ll never be able to survive
financially.
2. Pay a generous fast offering. Fast offerings have special blessings
regarding our spirituality attached, but also prosperity. We are
promised that we can gain material wealth, if we desire it to do good.
Pay a generous fast offering, and you are demonstrating to the Lord
your good faith effort to use what He blesses you with in good ways. A
generous fast offering helps us have an abundance.
3. Attend the Temple. In a talk given to us by the Temple President of
the Denver Temple, we were told that prosperity is one of the
blessings that comes from Temple Attendance. We tested it. I noticed
that I have more willpower to resist temptations when I attend the
temple regularly – think there might be a connection? It sure reduces
impulse spending! It also increases inspiration to help us earn and
spend more wisely.
4. Read the Book of Mormon. Nowhere does it promise us prosperity from
reading it, BUT… The power of discernment is a blessing that is
attached to study of the Book of Mormon. Believe me, this is a REAL
blessing. I have felt it. And discernment helps you spot
contradictions in business dealings, marketing training, and business
opportunity ads – in other words, it helps you to not gamble, and to
avoid scams. That goes a LONG way in increasing our prosperity!
5. Prayer is an obvious one. I cannot count the number of times that
prayer has helped us through a difficult business decision, or when
prayer has provided the answer to solving a client problem that I
simply could not solve on my own. The Lord understands technical
issues, He knows the answers when we do not. Amazing what prayer can
give us!
6. Service. Again, we can gain prosperity when we want to use it for
good. We have to demonstrate that desire in action BEFORE we get the
blessing.
7. Serve the Lord in your business. Make sure that what you are doing is something that helps people to have a better life, by encouraging strong families, kindness, service, hard work, integrity, or other good principles. What you do should make a difference in the world, for the better. I have found that when this goal is realized, I get WAY more help in succeeding.

These are just a few principles that I have noticed and have tracked
that are tied directly to prosperity. We should be starving. We are
not. We have no predictable income, yet our kids are fed, our bills
are paid, and we are actually less troubled by financial issues than
we were a year ago.

There are tests. Hard ones. Sometimes it feels like there simply is no
way to compensate for the disaster that just occurred. But miracles
follow faith – sometimes the faith that gets us the miracle is the
faith to pay our tithing anyway, or to go to the temple even though we
think we cannot afford to, or to be generous to others when we think
we do not have the time.

Laura
Mom to Eight
Firelight Business Enterprises, Inc
http://www.firelightwebstudio.com
http://www.westernhillsinstitute.com

The American Dream

Imagine this:

You get up in the morning, shower, and have a leisurely breakfast with your family. Your kids settle down to school work (or head off to school), and you and your spouse go to work – in your home office. You each have your own tasks to accomplish, and frequently share information across the room. Sometimes your spouse pauses to flirt with you.

Lunch means stopping long enough to fix whatever you want to eat, and enjoying it with your spouse or your entire family (if you are fortunate enough to homeschool). Then it is back to work until just before dinnertime. The kids help with the family business with age appropriate tasks in the afternoon, and are given payment for their help.
Everyone pitches in to fix dinner, and then to cleanup afterward. The kids settle down to read or watch a movie, and you and your spouse go for an evening walk around town. You stop occasionally to greet neighbors who are outside in the dimming light. It gets dark when you are still several blocks from home, but you don’t worry about your safety. It is just nice being with the love of your life.

Ever had a day like that? Small town America, self-employment, working in harmony with your spouse, working in a family business where the whole family works together, being able to walk around town and know who your neighbors are, and feeling safe walking after dark.

This is my life. Every day is not idyllic.. far from it. We have to drive an hour to get anywhere, the kids squabble and have to be taught not to, just like any kids. But I live a life that most people think they dream of. They do not see the other side of it – the sacrifices we make to keep this life. The house we live in that isn’t all that great, the older cars we drive so we can afford to live where the distances eat cars and spit out the pieces, or the times we bite our tongues to keep the peace in our home.

There is no pool, there is no expensive car. There are no vacations to exotic places – the Platte River or the Guernsey Wagon Ruts are as exotic as it gets. But we don’t need those things to be happy. The real happiness comes from our relationships in our family.

Life is good. And getting better.

Life’s Little Distractions

I can’t hardly tell you what I’ve accomplished this week. It seems like one of those weeks where I’ve been running around trying to catch up, but never seem to get anything DONE!

Had to be out all day Monday, spent Tuesday catching up on those mundane little things that leave you no evidence of anything accomplished. Wednesday I started a file upload, but due to our flaky internet, it did not finish – Kevin was sick that day, so he didn’t get anything much done either. My daughter sliced her thumb open and required 5 stitches and a tetanus shot (so we got the other kids updated on their immunizations while we were at it). Thursday the same daughter had to see the cardiologist, which took half the day, the other half of which was spent trying to finish the download, which involved finding another FTP client. Today, the day is rapidly being eaten up with piddly little things that seem to have no bearing on the work that is behind!

We have days like this. Sometimes we have WEEKS like this. Where the work on the list just sits there, the income that is needed doesn’t come, and we feel like our business is just stalled. And it seems that family needs come into the picture – not as an irritation, but just as a factor that doesn’t seem to make us feel any better.

When someone gets sick,  or when things come up that take us way from work, it is hard to get back on track sometimes. And the family stuff that gets in the way is something we rarely give ourselves credit for having accomplished. Maybe because it doesn’t PAY us!

In between this all though, I did get some things done that aren’t going to help much immediately, but which will pay off long term – I created three MicroBusiness Tree in the Rock sculptures (http://westernhillsinstitute.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=47)
and posted them for sale on our Institute site. I updated several course listings, and completed the instructional writing for 5 booklets. And I created a booklet brochure for the Institute, which we can use to mail out to various businesses. There were various conversations with clients, and completion of a header and several site assessments, as well as no less than FOUR “What do I do?” inquiries (the ones where people want to know how to find a good business for themselves).

All things considered, I had a busy week, and a productive one. But most of this stuff won’t pay me right now – most of it is that kind of stuff that you have to do if you want the business to grow, but which you don’t see results from right away.

Part of the reason I am writing this is to outline what I’ve done in a way that helps ME realize all that I’ve accomplished. Sometimes we don’t realize how much it is until we try to describe it.

So the next time you feel frustrated at not being able to get anything done, write down what you DID do. It just might astonish you!

MicroBusiness Success Strategies

Tiny startups often use frugal tactics to be able to afford to get off the ground. Many of those tactics though, have a nasty backlash – they make you look unprofessional.

Good MicroBusiness Success Strategies are things that save you money, but which either have no backlash, or which have a disadvantage turned into an advantage.

Here is an example:

Many frugal businesses reuse boxes because it saves them money over having to buy packing boxes. Sure, many people can use USPS Priority Mail boxes of one kind or another, but they just don’t work for everyone. So they reuse boxes – and not all boxes do well being reused. Some just look tacky.

Create a label. Put your logo on it, and over that, put “This Box Proudly Recycled By”. You just turned a disadvantage into an advantage. Same tacky looking box, but now, it makes you look responsible and successful instead of making you look too cheap to afford a good box.

This is a perfect example of a good MicroBusiness Success Strategy. Another is posting a message on your site “We use PayPal to keep our prices low, and to protect your sensitive financial information.”

Don’t have a lot of customers? Then you are a “friendly business who knows their customers by name”.

How can you turn YOUR frugal tactics into MicroBusiness Success Strategies?

And it Grows Again

I love having him home full time. It really is cool. We are learning to work together in ways we have not before, and our business is showing potentials that it did not have previously.

But to realize those potentials, I’ll have to eventually sacrifice having my husband around as much. I can structure our business to a certain extent to allow for it, but not completely – at least, not without limiting things too much.

Balance has a different meaning. Balancing different things than I had ever considered having to balance. It is funny, I always thought I’d like to have Kevin home, but had never really seriously considered it. I mean, it was such an impracticality and such an impossibility. Now that it is a reality though, I am selfish about it. I like it. I want it to continue.

But to realize awesome potentials, we have to decide what is truly important. And it isn’t always a matter of black and white. Sometimes it is more a matter of finding out how to adapt things so that you can find creative options for hanging onto the best parts of one thing while achieving an acceptable level of something else.

I am speaking in obscurities, but when our next venture launches, it will make more sense.

I figured it had to quit sometime…

Since the first of the year, business has been booming. Beats me why, it isn’t like we are doing a lot that is terribly different than what we’ve always done. But suddenly, stuff that never worked before is working, and patterns that have held true for 6 years are no longer predictable.

My website websites – the ones that I use to promote my services – have NEVER pre-sold a client. They’ve been a great support to active selling on our part, but that is it. That is changing, and we are now getting calls from people who know what they want, and from whom, they just want to know the details of what it will take.

Work we did years ago is suddenly paying off, in big ways. A site we built on commission is paying way better than we could have ever anticipated. There is no way we should be able to get by right now financially, and yet we are. And without stressing over it either.

Opportunities are coming out of the woodwork also – chances to teach web development courses, new contract opportunities that stretch us in new directions, JV opportunities that have the potential to pay very well, and more things that we could not have expected or planned for. But the funny thing is, we ARE prepared. Some of these are things I have been wanting for years, but did not quite know how to go about getting. And now, with no effort on my part, they are dropping in my lap.

We started radio ads this week. This has been a long term goal. We did the math ahead of time, and knew that with radio ads, they build power over time, so it could take 3-4 months to know whether they were really effective or not. We budgeted a certain amount of money for three months. Then we calculated how much work we’d have to get as a direct result of the ads, in order to justify continuing.

The ads started running on Thursday, on a VERY limited schedule (all we could afford). We got a call Friday, from someone who had heard the ad ONCE. He is fairly certain of what he wants, and it should not be difficult to close on the contract. This is statistically unusual. I mean, with our kind of service business, you don’t just start to advertise and have people come flooding in. We expected that it would take a few weeks before we got a call at all. And we only need two small, or one large contract to justify the entire three months of advertising.

I started thinking about the local competition though. Many are home offices (not a problem, so are we!). A few run ads that have a little “oh, and we do web design too” sort of tag line on the end of an ad for other services. There is not a lot of radio advertising being done for web design. And our ads are distinctly different.

They target a particular market. They say what we specialize in. They are friendly and informative. The other local ads mostly aren’t. They just basically say “we do web design”, and that’s it!

Our first ad stated that we specialized in small business and startups. Our next ad will have a slightly different focus, and we’ll keep the original one running too. We didn’t even put a phone number in the ad, we just gave our URL. Next time we might add a phone number, I’m not sure yet. And I’ll record the first two, then Kevin will record a couple, so that we have male and female voices doing the ads.

So here we are, buried in work. Part of the reason we are buried is because we are in a growth phase, and we are adjusting to a higher level of output, while we still have two people who are learning essential skills – they are not at their peak level of productivity yet, and in fact, are nowhere close. But we are getting more efficient by the day. We are also streamlining and systemizing repetitive tasks, so that we are able to do more in less time. Very important since we don’t charge by the hour, but by the job.

An in the midst of that, we are stepping up our advertising. But that is what you have to do if you want the work to be there when you need it. Some of the work that is coming in now is work that we started trying to get last summer. And if we don’t advertise now, the work we are doing is likely to dry up, and leave us with nothing in two or three months.

We gotta be doing something right. Sometimes I’m not sure quite what it is that we are doing right, or why it worked now, particularly, but it is an exhilarating wave to ride!

The Second Week is the Worst

I’ve known for a long time that when you are making changes, that the second week is the hardest – right toward the end of it, things get very difficult to maintain. Everyone starts resisting to the fullest. What I never expect, is how much I, myself, contribute to that.

Kevin has been home for just two weeks. And yesterday was pretty hard. We were crabbing at each other instead of working together, and it was pretty terrible. It was not until late in the day that I realized why. We are both making some huge adjustments, and this is just the time frame in which those adjustments are the hardest.

I think during the day yesterday I was ready to just throw in the towel and figure it wasn’t ever going to work if it was going to be like this. And according to everything I know about human behavior, that is precisely what most people think at the end of two weeks of attempting new changes!

Once it finally dawned on me that this was just part of a process, and that we needed to redouble and get through it, I figured I can last another week – end of the third week is when things usually start to finally come together into a new functioning pattern if you persevere. So I am going to watch and see how it all comes out then.

Because having a spouse come home to work the family business together is no small set of changes. It is HUGE, and it means that we have to insure that our relationship develops on new fronts, and that we develop new skills.

Kevin is still in the “it’s your business” mode, instead of the “it’s MY business” mindset, but hopefully that will change over the next couple weeks too.

It will be a busy week though – we have a kitchen remodel to finish in a client rental, some more work to finish in our own rental, a business fair to attend, and a lot of client and personal web work to do. There just is not enough of me to do it all, and Kevin and David cannot help with some of what needs to be done. I’m sure we will muddle through though.

A Radical Change

Well, yesterday was an interesting day. We finally got the funds together to do some really cool things – High speed internet is coming in on Thursday, a laser printer has been ordered along with Quickbooks Pro (to manage the corporate finances), and we started the paperwork yesterday to incorporate. It should be done by next week, if not sooner.

Just hours after all this, I learned that Kevin had been laid off. He went to work that day, and got blown out of the water by that. So he filed today for unemployment.

I find the timing of this all very interesting. I believe the Lord is in control, and I can see that we were actually well prepared for this. We have been talking for several weeks about Kevin coming home full time to work as my office, finance manager, customer service rep, and technical assistant. But this is not quite how we thought it would come about!

My first instinct was to pull back – I mean, those things that I put in motion were about $1200 – we can live on that for two weeks or more. But then, I really started thinking about our needs. We NEED the printer if we are to produce the promotional materials we need to promote our business (we have a new service line that requires mailers, but not enough to justify professional printing). We NEED the high speed internet, or I cannot develop the two service lines that I feel have the best potential for ongoing income. And for complex financial reasons, we need the incorporation if Kevin is also going to work from home – besides which, that Inc on the end of the business name really does help inspire more confidence than the name without it. It will also force us to be better business managers.

So now Kevin is having to make the transition to working at home. And it is different than he imagined. He has to be self-directed. Sure, I give him a lot of his assignments, but as far as managing the office and finances, he has to do it without me telling him how or when. He has to learn to do payroll, and he has to decide to keep up with it (he will, he is very well suited to this job). He cannot have any down time because there is nothing to do – when you are self employed, you do not wait for someone to tell you, every minute has to be spent doing something that benefits the business. If you do not have tasks that earn money right now, you do things that get you more money later. If you have a sense of ownership in your business, you do these things. If you do not, you just slack and never make it. It is a change for him, but it is a cool one.

The next few months are going to undoubtedly be hard as we all learn a new way of working together. But for me, this is the realization of a long hoped for dream, though I’d have preferred to choose my timing! I sort of feel like I am flying without a net.

But the bills are caught up, we have contracts progressing, and we have a property management contract that we can work on when there is no paying work from anywhere else, so I think it will be hard, but we’ll weather the storm. And I can really see the potential of our business coming into realization.

Word of Mouth “Advertising”, isn’t Advertising

Advertising and marketing are things you do to help your business grow. You plan them, execute the plan, then adjust according to results.

Word of Mouth, is not advertising, nor is it marketing. It is not something you do, and it is not something you control. It is something other people do for you – and they do it ONLY after you have done something to earn it.

Word of Mouth is VERY powerful. It is a key feature in building momentum in a business. But it isn’t a means of starting a business, and it isn’t something that happens spontaneously. It must be earned.

How do you earn it?

  • By intelligent marketing and promotion. By the messages your marketing materials send. If they are friendly and if people can identify with them, they’ll remember you, and they’ll mention you when someone has a need, as in, “You might try (insert business name)”. Smart marketing generates buzz, and gets people to remember you as a possible answer to their need. This helps you, but it is not where the REAL power of word of mouth is.
  • By good business practices. If they like the product, and they like the service, and you actually do what you say you will, then they’ll recommend someone else. These recommendations are based on personal experience and satisfaction. They are not just suggesting you MIGHT be the answer, they are saying you WERE their answer. That is REALLY powerful. But it does not come until you have proven yourself. And that only happens over time, so it won’t help a startup much. Somewhere about a year into things though, Word of Mouth will start to have some noticeable affect on your business if you promoted well, and if you operate your business reliably.

You can create an environment in which Word of Mouth can grow, but you cannot CREATE Word of Mouth as a marketing tactic. If you are launching a business, it will be of no value whatsoever to you until you have devised an effective promotional strategy, and carried it out for some time, and until you have a customer track record that stands behind your claims.

So start working on some effective strategies to get your business name and face out there. Get a table at events, write articles and post them for article marketing, get backlinks for your site, hand out business cards, do networking to get to know people, both online and off.

There are plenty of things that work. If you need free marketing methods (remember, they take time to do, and they are often slow to work, but they also usually have long term results), then go to http://www.effectivefreemarketing.com/ .

Promote your business. Then enjoy the feeling when it begins to work.

Smart Growth

I’ve always had simple business goals. I wanted to keep my family first, keep my business small, and NOT to have to handle the paperwork associated with employees. I wanted my business to stay flexible, so that I had some freedom over what I chose to do, and that was always more important to me than making lots of money. Financially, my goal was that my business justify the time I put in on it, and that it benefit our family. It certainly has done that, though many people would wonder why I was not driven to make more.

Last summer, my goals changed. I prayerfully thought about what I could accomplish, and how I could take the dreams of my heart, and by compromising some things, create something that would provide a greater realization of other dreams. Specifically, if I earned more, I’d be able to do more good. To do that though, I would have to compromise some of my preferences. It took a careful reassessment of what I COULD compromise, and what I could not.

I’d have to hire employees.

My family would STILL have to be my priority. That meant I’d have to delegate many tasks I prefer to do myself, to keep MY job flexible.

I’d have to move from technician, to trainer and administrator.

I’d have to market in a way I had never done before, and become comfortable in situations I had previously tried to avoid.

We’d have to incorporate. Somewhere I never wanted to go, but financially, it made the most sense (no, and LLC would NOT do for our particular situation).

I had to change my concept of what I was capable of achieving. That was a big step. I’ve always lived in a small town, and done small things. Suddenly I was faced with stepping outside that comfort zone and considering competing with people who were thinking big.

I had to seriously rethink my pricing, productivity, and target market. I also had to think about ways to set up systems to make our services more efficient.

For it to work, I had to determine which of my personal preferences I could give up, and which ones I could not. And I had to think and plan for potentials that I was not at all certain we could ever realize.

Did I want to franchise? No. So how would I expand my efforts if I did not want to do that?
Did I want to hire employees? Not really, but I could make that change – after all, I also liked the idea of providing employment in a depressed area.

Did I want an office outside the house? Absolutely not. But I’d have to have one… so I thought about how I could do that and still feel like I could keep in touch with my home throughout the day – we happen to own a property just across the alley, and that provided the answer. I can still work from home, set up the office on the other property, and interlink the phone systems between the offices.

I also looked hard at my strengths and weaknesses. I am a good designer – not extraordinary, nothing amazing, but functionally good. But that was something I could delegate (did, in fact, to my son). I could delegate marketing tasks (if I could find someone willing to actually DO them!), and I could delegate financial tasks – but ONLY to someone I really trusted (that ended up being my husband). I could delegate some writing tasks, but not all, and I could delegate many technical tasks, but not unless I had someone qualified, or someone whom I had trained (due to financial issues, that one is still a ways out). I could NOT delegate client negotiations. I am simply the best person for that. And I could not delegate project oversight – the buck stops with me. I also refuse to delegate childcare, except sometimes having the older kids watch the younger ones. I am simply NOT willing to give up motherhood to someone else. I’d have to supervise, and administrate on a flexible schedule, and delegate things that were not flexible, so that I could keep motherhood as my priority. I’d have to make sure my business offerings always made that possible (one reason we phased out computer repair services – not flexible enough).

I have a friend now who is looking at some of the same issues. Do I want to grow, HOW do I want to grow, and what can I give up to make that happen, and what do I, personally, have to retain, to keep my personal goals as they need to be?

It has truly been a learning process. We began the effort to seriously grow, about 6 months ago. I had to combine that effort with training my husband and son in their duties, so it has been slow. But this month I realized one of my goals – people are now starting to call ME, instead of us having to chase down every contract. Growth is still slow, but it is happening, and the income trend is steadily rising. Some projects we put into place 6 months ago are also now just starting to pay off, in a significant way, and that is pretty cool.

Everything I choose to do with my business has to fit my long term goals. If it does not fit, I adapt it, or I let it go. I’ve had many opportunities for growth come during the last 6 months, and most of them I passed on. Because growth is only good if it is the kind of growth that you can cope with. What I am ending up with, is a unique and needed service, that fits my lifestyle well, and that works for my clients and employees too.

And I am definitely still learning about growth!

The Mystery May be Solved

I think I have finally figured out what has caused my personal health problems, and what it is that Alex had prior to his cancer diagnosis. It appears that it was Crohn’s Disease. Only since we have no medical insurance, it is not going to be possible to get an official diagnosis.

It is certain that I have colitis, and that I also have upper GI problems, which pretty conclusively points to Crohn’s, especially when you figure in the family connections (a sister has it, and so does my mother – and Crohn’s is familial). Figuring out what to do about it though is tough, since going to the doctor right now simply is not possible. So I am working on figuring out what foods trigger it on my own. NOT easy!

The final piece of the puzzle was learning that 6-MP and Methotrexate are often used to treat it. Alex began gaining weight within two months of starting chemo, and those two drugs were part of his treatment for most of the 3 years he was on chemo. In fact, he started building muscle mass again on chemo, and was healthier on it than he ever was off it! So at least now, we know WHAT to watch for as his body readjusts to not being on the chemo.

It is harder for the rest of us though – my oldest son is now having colon pain and other symptoms consistent with Crohn’s, as is my oldest daughter. They are both in situations where it is tough for them to get treatment. And I am having to test foods one at a time. At this point, it appears that even Ensure is a trigger, since it makes me feel sick and horrid.

One of the difficulties in diagnosing Crohn’s is that it can be “silent” for many years, with secondary symptoms being the only thing you see – fatigue, muscle weakness and pain, difficulty controlling blood sugar, headaches, heart arrythmias, arthritis, chemical sensitivities, miscarriage, and other things brought on by nutritional deficiencies. It can promote either weight loss, or persistent obesity (because your metabolism slows down). It can look like a lot of other things at first. Pain may be a symptom that shows up very late in the course of the disease, especially for young children

I’ve been to doctor after doctor, due to muscle weakness and exercise intolerance (we are talking PAIN when I exercise, and I am not a wimp… I’ve been through induced childbirth eight times, I know pain!). All of the common tests came back negative, and they ended up scratching their heads, and I ended up feeling discouraged. There is no easy solution to this, but at least I know what it IS now.

It is certain to change my life. But I learned with Alex that once you adjust to the new “normal”, things become very manageable even with catastrophic illness. I may not like some of the things that it will change, but I’ll learn to deal with it because it beats pain and constant fatigue.

It is Really Happening For Medicine Bow… I think…

“I’m thinking about starting a business…” is something I hear every day, even in this tiny town. Well, maybe not every day, because there just aren’t that many people here, but often enough that it is no longer something I get excited about. If it meant anything, I WOULD be excited about it!

Starting a new business is ALWAYS something to get excited about! But here, thinking about it means just that. They are thinking about it. Pretty soon, they’ll stop thinking about it. Most of us are that way.

Lately though, I’ve been hearing something different. “I’m waiting for my lawyer to get back to me on this issue so I can start my business…”, “When I finish training, we’ll be starting our business, on (date)…”, or “Construction has started so this business can open soon, and regular progress is being made…”

It ain’t a done deal, but it is quite different. These people are WORKING on it! They are actually doing something more than THINKING!

Don’t get me wrong. Thinking is good. Every good thing starts with an idea, and proper thought and planning can make a dream a reality when lack of them means disaster. But if you want it to actually HAPPEN, you have to roll up your sleeves and get to work! These people are doing that. And when they start doing that, I begin to have faith that they’ll accomplish it, because I know that while I don’t accomplish 100% of everything I work on, I at least produce something positive through the effort.

There is an aire of excitement here. I don’t know if I am the only one who feels it, but it is very real to me. Something is happening. It is small, and slow, but gathering speed. And I like that.

I like to see people step out and try. I love to help them get the groundwork laid, and to know where to go to learn how to do it in a way that will work for them. Having cool stuff go on around me, in my own town (FINALLY!), is very heady.

The only thing I wish is that it would slow down a little. Because I am on the receiving end of work from at least three business projects that are developing here right now. And everybody is in a hurry, and there is just me to do the work!

But overall, I’d rather be too busy to breathe in the middle of exciting changes than to be stagnating along with everyone around me!

I finally believe that things are happening here, because I can finally see other people making an effort to make things happen.

There is a difference between thinking about it and actuall doing it. Even if you are not ready to launch yet, if others can see that you are working, they are more likely to believe it will happen.

I can’t wait to see how it all turns out!

Grow a Garden!

Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.

Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.

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