Six weeks (7 actually this year) of school holidays and a business to run. Let's just say the two don't always hold hands nicely.
If you've found this blog because you're also trying to run something (a business, a household, a small collection of children who each want a different snack at a different time) over the summer holidays, welcome. You're among friends. Chaotic, some weeks. Occasionally functional. That's the whole vibe here.
I'm Kate. I run Paper Goods, which started as "I really like nice notebooks and wrapping paper" and has since become an actual business with actual orders and actual deadlines, which was not entirely the plan but here we are. I've also got three kids (21, 9 and 7, so I've done the newborn stage, I've done the toddler stage, and now I'm doing the stage where two of them argue about whose turn it is on the gym bars while the eldest is off living his own life at uni but still needs his mum - obviously). And on top of all that I work as an Operations & Marketing Strategist (Pinterest specifically) for a handful of long-term clients, because apparently one job wasn't quite enough (lol).
So summer holidays. Here's how it actually goes in this house, no filter.
Mornings are a negotiation. Not with the kids, with myself, over how much I can realistically get done before someone needs feeding, refereeing, or driving somewhere. I've stopped pretending I'll get a full working day in. Some days it's two solid hours before 9am and then the laptop doesn't open again until everyone's in bed. Other days it's snatched twenty minutes here and there between activities, answering emails one-handed while someone practises their handstands nearby. Neither is wrong. Both are just what the day gave me.
I'm not going to tell you the answer is a colour-coded schedule or waking up at 5am to "protect your peak hours" (if you want to do that, genuinely, go for it, no judgement, but it's not happening here). What actually helps is lower expectations and higher flexibility. I plan the essentials for the week (orders that need packing, the one client call I can't move) and I leave everything else loose enough to bend around whatever the day throws at me. A rained-off trip to the park. A meltdown over the wrong colour cup. The classic "I'm bored" ten minutes after we got back from somewhere specifically designed to stop them being bored.
The shop doesn't stop for any of this, obviously. Orders still come in, people still want their cards and their notebooks, and I still want to give them a good experience even when I'm doing it from a garden chair with a water pistol aimed vaguely in my direction. So a few things that keep it ticking over without me losing the plot entirely:
Batching. I pack orders in one sitting rather than dipping in and out all day, because starting and stopping a task fifteen times is somehow more tiring than doing it once, properly, with a cup of tea that's actually still warm by the end.
Saying the quiet part out loud to customers. If dispatch is going to be a day slower over the holidays, I say so on the site rather than pretending nothing's changed. People are unbelievably understanding about this, it turns out, when you're just honest about it instead of trying to look like you've got six arms.
Letting the kids "help." This is generous use of the word help. But there's something nice about my 7 year old sitting with me while I write postcards or my 9 year old "quality checking" the gift wrap (mostly by admiring it). It's not efficient. It is, genuinely, one of my favourite parts of running this from home.
If you're a small business owner reading this while also being a parent over the summer, here's the only actual advice I've got: the version of you that runs a tight, efficient, five-star-reviewed business during term time is not the same version you'll be for these six weeks, and that's fine. Fewer hours, softer edges, still moving forward. That's enough.
We'll be popping up at a couple of markets this month too (Peddler Market and Victoria's Family Fun Day, if you fancy saying hello in person), which feels like the right way to spend a summer weekend, honestly, out among people instead of hunched over a laptop.
More soon. Probably written with one eye on a paddling pool.
Kate x
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