Party Plan - How to move from Housewife and Mother to Business Woman

Party plan as a vehicle to become a Business Woman is an option that many women contemplate at some stage in their lives.

When our youngest child has started nursery or school, we mothers find ourselves left with a dilemma: Do we return to work part time, with all its limitations, or do we start our own business? Returning to work has several serious limitations, let me list them for you:

1. Unless you are fortunate enough to have left a career that you are able to return to part time, most part time jobs are paid minimum wages. By the time you have factored in the new clothes you will need, the travelling costs and lunches etc, not to mention tax, it can mean that you are working for very little more then the privilege of calling yourself employed!
2. You need the hours to fit around your family. Your employer needs workers who can fit around customer volumes. Customer volumes are higher (be they visitors to shops, or telephone callers) when school is out. Not a great match, I think you would agree.
3. You may find, that having to compromise on your hours so that both you and your employer are happy, means that you end up paying child care, which eats even further into your pay.

Unless you are committed to returning for work for reasons other than the money, part time work really isn't a great option.

So, we mothers find ourselves looking at working from home, for ourselves. We look at becoming a business woman using party plan as a platform from which to launch ourselves. On the face of it, this seems great. We are our own boss, we work the hours we choose, we can, to an extent, dictate our own pay. Perfect! So why do so very many women fail at this? What information is it that we are lacking that causes us to fall?

I believe that the reason that most women fail in this type of business is because they are too caught up in the "how", with not enough attention paid to the "why". The how is the lovely products we get to play with (cosmetics, kitchen items, lovely candles etc). The why is the financial details behind the business.

"EEK!" I hear you cry! "I just want to sell a few cosmetics and not worry about anything other than how much I sell at each party!".

The difference between those women who succeed beyond their wildest dreams with party plan and those who potter along and subsequently discover that they actually LOST money when they take what they spent overall from what they earned, is that the former had a plan. Several plans in fact - a marketing one, a sales one and a business (including financial one). I can guarantee you that for every successful party planner, there is a woman who carefully drew a map of where she was and where she wanted to be. That map is called a business plan.

Most women have no idea at all how to formulate a business plan. You can download them from the internet, but it can be very confusing about which information goes where. A great way to get a fantastic business plan is to employ a business coach (like me) but we can work out to be quite expensive. Most party planners however, don't have lots of money to spend - they want to make money, not spend it! Fortunately, there are now inexpensive online coaching packages available. These packages can be designed with specific users in mind.

So always remember

 If you fail to plan, you plan to fail