Her Magazine is New Zealand’s only women’s business lifestyle magazine! Her Magazine highlights the achievements of successful and rising New Zealand businesswomen. Her Magazine encourages a healthy work/life balance.
Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/59614
MASTER CLASS happy endings HAPPY ENDINGS In the fourth and final article in a series for Her Magazine, Katherine Armon learns that if a business can make it through a January in New Zealand they have a fighting chance WE CRAWLED TOWARDS CHRISTMAS completely exhausted after the excitement of the launch and the work involved in The Polkadots concert. It was great just to sit back for a few days with my girls and relax … I really needed it! We re-opened at the beginning of January to a slow start. The number of visitors to the website were down and no one was buying. Even the social media pages were quiet. I have always thought that if a business can make it through a January in New Zealand they have a good chance of making it full stop! It feels like the whole country shuts down for a month. It did give me the chance, though, to take stock of where we were headed and what we wanted to achieve in the coming year. We took the time to put our advertising plans into place, take on staff and really be ready to face this coming year. We are about to embark on our marketing campaign, which is all very exciting. I didn't want to start advertising proper until we were up and running with merchants booked into the year and the website running smoothly. We start in April with the first of our radio campaigns, and hopefully our database will go from strength to strength. Advertising to a certain extent is so cost prohibitive and up till now we have relied on word of mouth and our social media pages growing. To take our business to the next level we are now at the point where advertising is key. The break also gave me the time I needed to make some changes at home. Sitting at a desk for the last five months has just about finished me off as far as piling on those extra kilos, and exercise well I had forgotten what that was. It was also time to establish some home and work boundaries. I find myself waking up at 5.00 a.m. with the kids, and by 5.30 a.m. I have started work. One of the problems of setting up your work at home is you can't get away from it. I realised I needed to address these issues and invest in my own health and wellbeing. I think it's easy to miss the big picture that our health is directly related to how successful we can be in our work life. For example, I know that six weeks on from my decision to join weight watchers and increase my exercise I am far more able to cope with work-r elated stress. I find my head is clearer and I have a lot more energy. I decided to make my quest for good health public in the hope that this would help me keep on track. I introduced A lookback at the KidzGrab journey May – sat in my car doodling my idea on a Post-it® note. June – We start working on the idea and commission our web builders Platform Digital. We work on the logo, colours and feel of the website as well as writing text and taking photographs for it. July – We start approaching companies up and down New Zealand to secure deals on our site for the first month of trading. We do a massive mail drop countrywide advertising for possible merchants. August – Launch of all our social media sites and a start to our campaign of getting people excited about our new company. We book our place at the Auckland Parent & Child show. September – Launch delays set us back four weeks in total. At this point we work hard on our social media to keep people's interest with such a huge delay to contend with. Out of all the months, September was by far the most stressful! 56 | www.hermagazine.co.nz