By Amy Nielsen

We are now halfway through the courses at the career school I attend. This week’s lecture addressed the business of our business. Exactly how to do what we are learning how to do.

We did lots of role play and skits. We got a ton of documents to read over and decide if they pertain to our specific version of this program. We had lectures from former students about what they are doing now and how this program fits within their business. The variations were somewhat stunning. The field is wide open. Creative thinking is taking some graduates down very interesting paths. The take away was to make sure you are taking concrete steps toward your business goals every week from now until graduation so you can hit the ground running on day one.

I am working on building a business that focuses on health and wellness from a very personal perspective. By understanding your personal diet and how it works inside you, you can understand how to change it to support you better.

My goal is to help people eat better within their financial means and more importantly, within their personal, daily, culinary capacity. By helping your body function better, you will have more energy and more focus to spread your wings and do all the things you hope to.

If this means I take you supermarket shopping to help you make better choices, I’m happy to do that. If that means you need a buddy to go to that first couple of classes in that subject you have always wanted learn about but were too shy to attend alone, I’ll go with you. That’s a whole lot of stuff to stuff into one business plan.

This all got me to thinking more specifically about how I want to structure my business and how I want to get the information out there. I have a three-tiered structure of clients I want to create. I want to do some local community service work, some greater regional military specific classes, and then I want to have a group of nationwide personal clients.

I started to look through my desk pile as the lecture droned on and happed upon the business card of the director of our local county WIC office. She and I hit it off when I went in to apply for a job I was hopelessly overqualified for. I knew I was, but I wanted the local community service work. We have run into each other on and off over the summer around the county and she has often times asked me to keep in touch. I keep meaning to give her a call to see what’s new on a more formal basis. I think I will make that the action step towards community service this week. I will call her to set up an appointment.

Many of my military spouse friends run market level, marketing companies promoting various home and body health and wellness products. One of my dear friends posted an excellent article about a topic that fits very well within my planned teaching subjects. It started off as a long conversation about why I am not interested in being an MLM Ambassador, but instead, how we can build a partnership with my classes and her business. I contacted several other of my MLM friends and am starting to build a library of colleagues and references. These are concrete steps toward building a team of military spouses I can help support and have reciprocal clients with.

In working through my very early morning today, I happened to be at Shop Rite. Our supermarket has the familiar shop from home option where you can enter your shopping list online, pay for it and then pick it up, already bagged and ready to go. Working with some serious out of the box, pre-caffeine thinking, I thought, hmmmm, I could learn a whole lot about how people shop if I shop for them. So I think I will apply to be a personal shopper for the winter. It’ll pay for the holiday presents and get me very good research. That is a concrete action step toward seeing if what I want to offer is needed by my personal clients.

In a twist of the universe we have friends staying with us right now. One is a chef. I am also a chef. Playing in a home kitchen making home food for families with another chef, especially this one, is giving me great joy and stretching my creativity. It also make me wonder if there is a part of this business that I can squeak a bit of kitchen action into as well. Not that I want to get back into the kitchen daily to cook on the line, but perhaps we can find a relationship where I could bring a couple of clients to learn some cooking techniques and help them have confidence in their own home kitchens.

Having the time and space to talk shop and business of a long lost career is fun, and it adds creative juices to the current plan. So my concrete plan this week will be to make sure I get over to one of the places we talked about to check out the local chef talent.

I feel like the sluice gate has been opened and the canoe race is about to begin. Some rapids are at the start, but much peaceful, lazy paddling in the company of good friends is expected too. The next six months of school, building my business, and watching it actually happen is only slightly terrifying but exceptionally exhilarating at the same time. Concrete steps each week will make it happen.