It’s certainly not all sunshine and rainbows when you decide to become a mompreneur. Starting a business usually involves overcoming a number of hurdles and I was prepared for this. As the mother of two kids, I believed I had identified a gap in the market. I was going to start a successful online business selling baby products. What I didn’t realize is that I had some romantic notions about working from home and what it took to be a successful businesswoman.

When I realized that despite my best efforts, I wasn’t succeeding, I knew I had to take a long hard look at the way I was conducting my business. One thing I knew I was doing right was focusing on my customers. I could identify with my target market as a mother and I knew the benefits of the products I was promoting. So, where was I going wrong?

Moving to a co-working space

The first step I realized I had to take was to move my business out of my home. I found that working from home was not ideal for me. With my kids at school and my husband at work, I thought I would be very productive. The opposite was true as the boundaries between home and work were too blurred for me and I felt too isolated.

If I wanted to portray a professional image, I decided I needed to look for shared office space. As reported by offices.net, flexible and shared office space is available throughout the U.S. and I could use their tools to search for it. I found a suitable co-working space and determined to take a more professional approach to my business.

Clarity from numbers

I knew that I had to get clarity from the numbers. The idea of investing money in various tools to enable me to examine analytics was a scary prospect but it was a step I don’t regret. It immediately enabled me to see where my marketing strategies were falling short. My business was in worse shape than I had thought.

I had managed to get a good following on social media and a number of people had signed up to my newsletter but very few of them were buying. I knew I was offering quality products that really fulfilled a need but somehow, I was not managing to convince people to buy.

I realized I needed to learn more about the sales funnel and how to address prospects with the right content at different phases in the journey. Putting a solid marketing strategy in place really helped to get the ball rolling with sales.

The problem was that when I started getting more sales, another issue surfaced. Some of the business processes I had in place were deficient and some customers were not getting their orders on time.

Customer service

I knew I needed to pay more attention to customer service. Unless I was keeping my customers happy, I wouldn’t be able to keep them and I would go back to struggling to get people to buy. I realized that one way to address this was to use the right software. Investing in software to automate various business processes was really worthwhile.

I got rid of some excess products that still weren’t selling and cut everything down to the bone to simplify processes. This all did a great deal to improve the customer buying experience.

I can’t detail all the measures I took here but suffice to say that I didn’t give up hope. I managed to completely turn my business around and today it is the successful business I knew it could be when I first started out.