Time and Productivity Hacks for Milspouse Entrepreneurs
by Julie Waters, PHR

The National Military Spouse Network is the preeminent networking, mentoring and professional development organization committed to the education, empowerment and advancement of military spouses which means that our professional development offerings extend beyond the traditional workplace to include entrepreneurship. In honor of National Small Business Week, some of NMSN's members and experts got together on our May #NMSNcareers tweetchat to discuss our best tips and resources for milspouse business owners.  

For solopreneurs and small business owners, time is money.  There are some great apps out there to help save both time and money and many are free or available for a low cost. 

• Check out Calendly.com for help with staying on top of your schedule. It integrates with your other calendars, can work across different time zones and you can set it with buffers between meetings so you can regroup and prepare. 
• For marketing materials and graphic design help try picmonkey.com or canva.com.  They come with tutorials on how to design your materials, edit photos, and samples of different types of documents. 
• Looking for conference call capability? Lots of platforms out there, we use freeconferencecalling.com. Business and brainstorming can be done on these calls, not to mention messaging, FaceTime, and Skype, so don't limit yourself geographically.
• MileIQ is great for those who travel frequently for their business. They make tax filing so easy!
• The Expensify app is great for tracking your expenses while on the go, and it integrates with QuickBooks.
• If you need to convert documents from one format to another, Zamzar is a great tool.

Apps are a great start for enhancing productivity, but it became quickly apparent that no business owner succeeds on their own. The brainstorming and crowd sourcing of ideas can be a great benefit to your business and a HUGE motivator. Find your tribe and stay in touch with them. The tweetchats and calls we do at NMSN keep us on task with accountability partners, plus generate great ideas that can be incorporated into an action. It is easy to complete a task when you are excited about it. Sharing your goals with others will help you stay motivated.

If you are looking to connect with people in person, check out any co-working spaces that may have popped up around your city. In addition to a nice place to work away from home or your regular coffee shop, you'll find like-minded people there and plug into additional community resources. Get out there and meet some other small business owners!

Aside from apps and other resources, we have some solid advice for keeping your business running smoothly and staying legal. Consider delegating the tasks that you're bad at or hate doing. NMSN uses a Virtual Assistant to help maintain schedules, correspondence and editorial calendars. She is fantastic and an integral part of our team. If you're looking to grow your team, start with our Homefront Business Listings for military spouse freelancers or look at FIVERR and Upwork to get help with projects.

When you're ready to bring on additional remembers, make sure you have a clear cut plan for bringing them up to speed on the way you do business. Melissa St. Clair, our Virtual Assistant (@paperchasebiz) says to start off with an Operations Manual. This will help you maintain your policies and procedures, particularly important for maintaining a business through something like a move, and makes it easier to keep your client relationships on track. Melissa also says to streamline your systems and automate wherever possible to avoid duplication.

Now, let's chat about the "less fun", but necessary stuff, your Human Resources concerns.

• If you have staff, are they contractors or employees? Do you know the difference? It may depend on how you train them, how you record hours, and the equipment on which they do their work.
• If they are contractors and you give them a 1099, have them get you the W-9 information at the beginning of the job, then you don't have to worry about it later.
• If you do decide on regular W-2 employees a payroll company can help you stay compliant with statutory benefits like taxes, workers comp and unemployment. If you want to offer them extra benefits like health insurance, find a broker that can help you. You don't pay the broker, they get a cut from the insurance companies.

These are just some points to get you started. You can find small business HR resources in your city by checking out SHRM.com both locally and nationally to find the services available to you.

For more on how our members and experts deal with some of the usual entrepreneurial tough spots, check out the Q&A piece of NMSN's May 4, 2017 tweetchat at #NMSNCareers. There is a ton of great information there. You can follow along at #NMSNCareers each month while we tackle another milspouse career topic. 

Thanks to all the people that contributed to this awesome list. Totally checking out some of these apps!

Julie graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in English and earned an MS in Human Resources from Troy University. She is also a certified Professional in Human Resources (PHR). Over the last twelve years, Julie has held various Human Resources positions since getting her start at FHC Health Systems in Norfolk, Virginia, to include serving as the Director of Human Resources at the Military Officers Association of America in Alexandria, Virginia. Julie currently resides in Spokane, Washington where she is the Human Resources and Operations Manager at a law firm. She was lucky enough to choose a career that easily transfers between employers as each military assignment introduced her to a new city and even a new part of the country. Julie holds a special interest in career building for military spouses as she feels it is important to have something personal outside of the military lifestyle.

 

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