I love living in Southern California

Tonight my mom called a spur of the moment family gathering at Hometown Buffet. Yes, she fell for their kids eat for .99$ commercial they have been running. My immediate response was, "No way in heck I am going!" Every time I go to a buffet (which is not very often) I see those disgusting germ commercials play over and over in my head as I grab a set of tongs and get some food. You know the ones where they zoom in on the germ worms. But I did not want to miss a family event so I reluctantly went.

As I drove down to the restaurant I was taken back at how beautiful it is here. We live in the best place! Our mountains and valleys are so amazing. From where we live, every time we drive anywhere we come "down" from this small town and on a clear day can see all the way out to the Pacific Ocean. It is so beautiful. My in-laws are coming to visit tomorrow and just had a huge snow storm pass through Utah (where we use to live) and I am so grateful I live in this warm, happy climate. I am curious to see as they drive in what they think of our fire ravaged town. It is hard to get the full effect over video.

I am trying to get to a point. Lesson #3 is (and these do not come in order of priority): Have a balanced family life. My most important job is being a mother and a wife to this awesome family I have been given. When work is taking up to much time our family is way out of whack! The result is I work hard, long hours and only get half as much done. It is challenging to have to work and live in the same environment. Some days it is so hard to separate the two very different jobs I have. For me the balance comes when I am being patient with my 4 sweet kids, my house is somewhat under control and I have been keeping up on my spiritual quest to become a better person. Then I am the most productive of all.

Lesson #4 is; surround your self with successful optimistic people. I have always had a strong desire to own my own business. I am constantly coming up with new ideas. For instance today as I worked, my little girl danced a zillion times to the music video on 12 Dancing Princesses. I thought to myself how great would it be if I could buy a video that was a dance class for toddlers. Then she could get her dance class in, I could work and we could do all this from the comfort of our own home. Or after the SoCal fires came through I wanted so badly to thank the firefighters for all they did! So I thought why not start a website thankyoufirefighters.com where you can send your favorite firefighters cookies, flowers, or whatever firefighters like with your personal message. Anyway, back to lesson #4 I could go on and on. When we lived in Heber, UT 80% of our friends were successful business owners. It is amazing. Everyone in Heber owns some type of business. It is so inspiring to see people like that and that is where I got the guts to start. One of my best friends from Heber owns a restaurant called "The Hub" on Main Street in Heber. She took that business and made it very successful, very quickly. There is something about being surrounded by people who are that driven. It gives me the confidence to keep going and work that hard. All our friends in Heber have very different businesses that are growing and thriving but they all share a similar work ethic.

Tonight as I sat filling my body with sodium rich, germ infested, I do not even want to know fat content food it was nice to sit and talk to my brother who owns his own network cabling business. We share ideas back and forth helping each other along the way. He knows how it is, become inspired!

Swiss Days

So Swiss Days is an annual event that celebrates the Swiss Heritage of three towns across the USA. Berne, ID, Midway, UT, and Santa Clara, UT. For some reason these celebrations bring really cool vendors to their events. You just don't believe it until you have been there. This year my friends and I flew in for the Swiss Days Celebrations in Midway, UT. One of my friends is a long time crafter who has been to tons of different shows. I kept telling her you just don't understand until you have been there. We got there and she was so overwhelmed. There are so many quality vendors who are pushing creativity to the max. Amazing products at killer prices. I will try and post some of our purchases from this past year. Midway is a tiny little town nestled on the back side of the Wasatch mountain range. The town people sure do know how to put on a good craft show! The food is amazing and the kid area is so much fun for the little kiddies. If you can get to one of these celebrations it is well worth the trip.

Swissdays.com originally started out as a directory of vendors who attend these events. It has evolved into an online marketplace where my vendors manage their products with one central checkout.

Lesson #1

Find a great hosting company! I can not impart how much time this will save you. Yes you could find a hoster that cost $5.00 a year but you will be getting HORRIBlE customer service. I started off with Start Logic. Don't make the same mistake I made! They are horrible!! The customer service is beyond bad. I wasted so many many hours on the phone to them trying to fix things they screwed up on my site. Then, they transferred my site to a different server without my knowledge and I lost ALL my data.

Lesson #2
Back up your business data. I know it sounds stupid. Yes, at the beginning I didn't know this. I didn't know I needed to back my email up. Luckily for me, I was in the process of installing a new site anyway, but I did lose a ton of valuable emails that to this day I lament! I finally wised up and got an external hard drive that I back to frequently.

But back to Lesson #1… I finally found hardhathosting.com and they are AWESOME!! They actually answer their phone. They are always very willing to help you through things. And they have all their servers right their, with them. Which I know is important, but I don’t have a good explanation why. My life has been so much less stressful since I switched over. Avoid Startlogic.com at all cost!!!!

I wonder if I can make it through a post and get all my thoughts down before I am interrupted by one of my cute kiddies. So EBay was short lived and now I mostly use it for advertising my site. Next, I started a digital scrapbooking company with one of my dear friends and one of her friends from high school. It was a great idea but I do not recommend starting a business with close friends. It is complicated. After working my guts out and finally getting the site up and running I had baby number 4. It just ended up being to hard to continue designing with a baby so I got out. On one hand I was so relieved to be out of a partnership. But on the other hand, I was sick about the time, money and heart I had put into it. http://www.digitalscrapbooking.net/ is still in business though and if you like to scrapbook on the computer they have some great products.

That led me to where I am now. I have taken so many of the valuable lessons learned and brought them to http://www.swissdays.com/. Hopefully in the blogs to come I can share some of the lessons and experiences I have had building my business while raising 4 small children and loving 1 amazing man.

Starting your own business as a SAHM

Life as a stay at home mom (SAHM) can be crazy at times. Add in starting your own business and you are looking at utter chaos. There are days I wish my fairy God mother would come and magically turn my house into an organized castle that runs itself. But I haven't heard any bippitties or boppitties or at that any boos either, so it's up to me. How do you keep up with the daily tasks of keeping a household of 6 running properly and start your own business too? I wish I had the answer to that and as soon as I find one, I will post it here! lol.

Swissdays.com isn't my first business I have started. My first offical jant that made me a small business owner was an online store on eBay. I pretty much tried everything. I made baby headbands, baby bracelets, and more recently placemat purses. Before the handmade items I do admit, I tried buying a pallet of "returned" electronics... I don't recommend this. It was a total waste of time and money. Everything on the pallet was complete junk!! Then as if that wasn't enough, I tried buying a "lot of leftover clothes from the previous season". Yeah...I don't recomend this either.