2011 was the Year of the Baby. On August 12, 2011 Kia, Brahm, and Bahar happily welcomed Micah Arian into their lives.
He’s been a complete joy and has brought much cuteness and fun into our lives.
For those of you who know our story (pdf), you know that the purpose of becoming business owners was so we could start a family and have freedom to spend as much time with our children as possible and not use daycare.
So, even though our business keeps us incredibly busy, we had to be very intentional about cutting back our work load and our hours (while somehow maintaining our income).
Thanks to all the marketing systems that we set up since 2009, we’ve been able to re-focus our work, cut back our hours and our workload, all the while increasing our income.
Yep. It’s possible.
Here’s how we did it:
- We cut down our office hours by one hour per day.
- We closed on Saturday, and changed Fridays to by appointment only.
- We implemented minimum purchase requirements in order to invest our time more wisely and ensure maximum efficiency on the time we spend on tasks.
- We reduced our services and products to offering only products and services which we excel at.
- When Micah was born, we further reduced our office hours by one hour per day so that we could spend our mornings with our new son. (And I was nursing and needed to be home more).
We did all this with minimum negative impact to our business, yet myriad positive impacts to our customers and our personal and family lives. We are happy, rested, fulfilled, and our customers r
eap the rewards of having happy, rested, and fulfilled printers/designers doing excellent work on their important projects. This last benefit alone has truly exceeded our expectations in how much happier our clients are.
Part of the Work Reduction For Baby Act included suspending our newsletter distribution. We had to say no to a lot of opportunities, we extended lots of deadlines, and we said “thank you for your understanding” to people so much, even our then 7-year-old daughter Bahar picked up on it.
We’re so thankful that our work allowed us to do this. The whole reason we went into business for ourselves was to be able to put our family first. We wouldn’t have ever been able to do it without putting so much time and effort into understanding how to run a successful business, and how to build a business that serves your life (and not the other way around).
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Success and happiness to you,
Kia Arian and the Zine Design Team
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