Laura Tomasetti plans on striking a better balance between work and family. Pierce Mattie wants to pare his client list. And Brook Jay is talking about finally hiring that office manager.
These small business owners all have new year’s resolutions aimed at making it easier, even more fun, to run their companies. And other company owners interviewed in a random sampling by The Associated Press are also hoping for a more positive tone at work.
Tomasetti, who owns a Boston-based public relations firm bearing her name, said, “I’m getting my life back” in 2005. She’s striving for more time and energy for her family, especially after giving birth to her first child this year.
“I just have to be extremely organized so my time in the office is extremely well utilized,” Tomasetti said. That way, “when I go home at night … I’m not always worrying about, ‘did I forget something?’”
Tomasetti says she might not jump immediately to answer every question or demand from every client. The work will get done, but less frenetically.
“You can’t be 125 percent compulsive,” she said.
Jayme Simoes, president of Louis Karno &Company Communications in Concord, N.H., has a similar resolution. He doesn’t want to miss seeing his 3-year-old grow up, so he’s thinking about “adding more staff, delegating more work and cutting back on our client base.”
Simoes said he’s going to be more selective about new business, and wants to be sure that new clients will be worth the time and effort his company must invest in the project.
Mattie, owner of Pierce Mattie Public Relations Inc. in New York, plans on asking similar questions – about clients the company already has. And he plans on jettisoning clients whose business isn’t worth the stress and unhappiness they cause.
Mattie said he’s aiming to have a company with “clients we really want to work with and they really appreciate our service. … The more you enjoy who you’re doing it for, the more you enjoy what you’re doing.”
So, he said, “we have a hit list for 2005.”
At All Terrain Productions Inc., an event marketing agency in Chicago, president Brook Jay said she and her partner “are determined that this is the year” they will finally hire an office manager to do the administrative chores.
Jay said her partner ends up handling FedEx shipments and ordering office supplies, and that carries a huge price for the business: “You get further away from the things that make you great in the first place.”
The partners haven’t had the time to go through the process of hiring someone, but they’re making sure that they go through the selection process carefully. They’ve sought advice on how to interview job candidates, to be sure they end up with an office manager who can help their business grow.
“Work smarter, not harder is the overall theme of 2005,” Jay said.
A wall is the focus of Kristen Wolf’s new year’s resolution. The wall of the Washington, D.C., townhouse where her public relations firm, Spitfire Strategies, is located is partially covered with notes and memos congratulating the company and individual staffers on their accomplishments.
“What I’d like to see is to close up the whole wall, have it totally filled and move on to a second wall – it really empowers me and our whole staff,” Wolf said, referring to the wall as a “brag board.”
The wall, by the way, is about 10 feet high by 10 feet wide.
Patty Briguglio’s new year’s resolution is to say “no!” Briguglio, owner of MMI Associates Inc., a marketing firm, is moving to Raleigh, N.C., from Phoenix (her company has offices in both states) and with that new start plans to do less outside work for the many civic and charitable organizations who approach her for help.
Briguglio hopes to be able to focus more on her business, and her own well-being. Her extracurricular activities have helped her company, but she wants to spread herself less thin in 2005.
“This is going to be a big year for us,” she said of MMI. “I need to put my attention there.”
Building Small Business is a weekly column on the topic by the Associated Press.
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