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I love my new business partner. She works out of Denver, I work in Alaska. She loves to do the things that I don’t - such as crunching numbers and making spreadsheets and analyzing statistics. We are so different in so many ways. If we were a married couple, I’m not sure which of us would be the wife and which one of us would be the husband, but we are clearly different enough that like in any marriage, we have to be cognizant of our relationship.

Some of the things I think we do well include

1. Praising each other. We both make sincere efforts to give kudos to one another. “That budget was great!” I say. “You really came up with some awesome ideas!” she’ll say.

2. Appreciating each other. Besides the genuine praise, I also state how much I appreciate her. I just get this incredible urge sometimes to blurt out “I really appreciate you!” and she replies “I appreciate you, too. Group hug!” And I chuckle as I imagine we do a quick virtual hug across the miles.
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When moving your home also means moving your workplace, finding a good mover and getting packed can be the least of your worries. Detroit-area blogger and work-at-home mom Melissa Summers of SuburbanBliss.net and MightyJunior.com, who has moved twice in just over a year, shared her top five moving tips for home-based entrepreneurs. (Interview conducted by Maia Nolan).

1. Plan ahead.

After two moves with two kids and two home businesses, Summers can think of some things she wishes she’d done differently.

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I’ve been thinking lately about how the ways of networking have changed drastically with social media, but have the rules changed, too?

To talk about this issue, I turned to Diane K. Danielson, CEO of www.DowntownWomensClub.com and the co-author of The Savvy Gal’s Guide to Online Networking (or What Would Jane Austen Do?).

Here’s what she had to say about networking through social media:

We’ve all been hearing that we need to be on social networks to promote our businesses.  But, how do we do this effectively?

First, you need to remember that even though you are doing this to promote your business,  when it comes to social networking, YOU are part of your company’s brand. This is because social networks thrive on authenticity and transparency.

How do you do this?

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Startup Nation, along with Microsoft, is conducting its 2nd annual-Home-Based 100 Award (HB 100) to highlight unique stories of home-based entrepreneurs. This year, there will be a showcase of women business owners with successful, innovative home-based businesses. Here are short interviews with several women entrepreneurs from last year’s contest.

Company name: preppymommy.com
Location: Berkeley Heights, NJ
URL: www.preppymommy.com
Your name: Nicole Quiroga
Your title: Owner and Lead Designer

Q: How many kids do you have and what are their ages?

A: I have 2 girls, 7 and 5.

Q: What is your business about and why did you start it?

A: My business is all about making things easier and chic-er (is that a word?!) for moms and really all women! I noticed a dearth of fashionable accessories for mom and baby, so I decided to fill a void with preppymommy.

Q: How did you become part of the Home-Based 100 Ranking (HB 100)?

A: I read about the contest on startupnation.com and saw it as a great opportunity to let people know about my company, as well as to reconnect with past clients.

Q: What are the greatest challenges for you in terms of running a Home-Based business? What are the greatest benefits?

A: There are several challenges. The greatest challenge is balancing work time with family time. This is probably a common answer from work-at-home moms. I haven’t met anyone who isn’t constantly trying to improve that balance. Hands-down the greatest benefit is the freedom to put my kids on the bus in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon! I never miss a ballet class or soccer game!

Q. What is your single most important piece of advice for another mom thinking about starting a business from their home?

A: Make sure you have a dedicated workspace and a supportive family! The rest is gravy.
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I used to fear delegating tasks to others, even trusted staff. As a Type-A, over-achieving, perfectionist type, I just couldn’t imagine anyone else would care as much about a task, much less a job or client, as I did.

I made the terrible mistake of micromanaging - and even (GASP! HORRORS!) re-doing work that I had assigned to staff. I know I was a nightmare to work for back then.

These days, I’m absolutely desperate to delegate, however, now I just find it really difficult to take the knowledge and information that is packed tightly in my overfilled brain and actually impart it to someone else in a way that makes sense.

Here are some things I’ve learned - and am still learning - about the Fine Art of Delegating.

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Over the years, I seem to always be in the position of giving business advice, whether in my columns or to colleagues running their own companies. With a handful of companies under my belt, I have a lot of “life” experience with businesses. Also, I’m a proponent of being an open book so others can learn from both my successes and failures. In the same way I’m very self-revealing about my personal life in articles and blogs, I do the same on the entrepreneurship front.

So it was a major “aha” moment for me last week when I found myself turning to someone else for advice. Someone suggested that I might want to call my local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) office to get some financial advice for my corporation. SBDC’s are a program of the SBA to provide management assistant to aspiring and current entrepreneurs.

My dealings to date with the SBDC have been as a consultant or as a speaker or instructor, never as a business owner looking for help. But with some major corporate changes in the works for my company, I suddenly found myself in a deep ocean without a life vest. And of course my local SBDC was well-stocked with life preservers, life vests and even life rafts.

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I’m in the middle of a company crisis and have decided to do a series of blog posts about how I’m solving the situation. Don’t worry - my company is actually thriving. The crisis is…more complicated, and I’m probably not yet ready to talk about it at this time.

One small component of the crisis has led me to re-evaluate my business relationship with my current bank and to suck it up and leave this bank for another one. This move has been long overdue and has only been held back by my own personal (and unfounded) fears.

The bank I’m currently with has been a nightmare from Day 1. The problems started with the new bank employee who set up our company account in January 2005 and made a slew of errors including mispelling our names multiple times which continued to haunt us over time. I ended up with a 5-page, single spaced typed document outlining every egregious error that the bank made (almost every one of them that they admitted to doing) that cost us time, money and sanity. To this day, I still have not had my call returned when I left a customer service voicemail - per their instructions - asking for a supervisor to call me back to address my complaints. That was 2 plus years ago.

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As a freelance writer and blogger, I get bombarded daily by PR folks and business people pitching me to write about them, their clients, their companies, fill-in-the-blank. I have hundreds of unread emails in my InBox, sorry to say, but am having my new personal assistant go through them and sort them based on urgency, topic and relevance to what I do.

Freelancers are juggling a million things and are always on deadline. For example, I compose at least 8 blog posts, release several podcasts, and write at least several articles EVERY WEEK.

For the record, I write specifically about:

1. Women business owners - This actually does mean women and not men (for those who pitch me male business owners all the time).

2. Women’s business issues - This means topics, themes, issues about business that have a female slant. Some examples? Women who have a baby while running their business. Women who hire their husband or boyfriend to work for their business.
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A few weeks ago, I heard the phrase “working in the clouds” for the first time. The phrase refers to the way many people are starting to use online-based applications for their work processes and tasks rather than computer-based solutions. Even without thinking very much about it, I’ve been “working in the clouds” more and more often in the last six months. But after my big computer crash and near-loss of all 10-months worth of data, I’ve been thinking a lot more about “cloud computing” ever since.

There are definitely major pros but also major cons to cloud computing, and weighing them out is often too much for my overloaded brain to handle. But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the topic and then hear from you as well so we can share best practices on this revolutionary way of work.

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A client of mine teased me the other day when she saw me pull out my calendar book to write down an entry.

“I thought you were so tech, and here you are with a paper calendar,” she said by way of explanation.

“But I have a 30Boxes calendar as well!” I retorted. “And it sends me text message reminders to my cellphone!”

I don’t know why I felt that I needed to prove my tech savvy by rattling off how wired I really am and that the paper calendar is just my first line of defense against my progressively bad memory.

I just like the tangible feeling of a paper calendar. I like the feeling of pen on paper. I like seeing what I write on a page. Our words are so digitized these days with reading and writing emails, reading our news on Web sites, connecting with others through online social networks - that for me, writing things down on paper really grounds me.

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