Y’all have asked several times what it is like running multiple businesses and how I get everything done for each one. I have partnered with Office Depot to share a bit of behind the scenes of my businesses and how I manage it all.
I haven’t really gone in depth about what each business does, so I wanted to give y’all a little bit of background on that first. My main business is a government contracting company that does high-security I.D. cards for governments and municipalities all over the world. My Dad started that business 20 years ago and now he and I run it together. My Dad is where I got my entrepreneurial spirit and it's very special to be able to learn the ins and outs of business from someone I love and respect so much. While I enjoy the government contracting business, I really missed having a creative outlet and being able to share my favorite experiences and life on our hobby farm. That’s how Moderately High Maintenance started back in 2016. My Dad and I also have a luggage tag company that creates customized plastic and metal luggage tags for consumers.
For a lot of bloggers/ content creators the goal is to quit their normal 9-5 job to pursue the blog full time. That has never been my goal because I love what all of my businesses do, so I have learned to outsource, delegate, and batch my tasks so that I can keep everything going at once. For the government contracting and luggage tag businesses we have a great staff of team members that help keep things running smoothly and efficiently. Moderately High Maintenance has a great team of contractors that help me outsource tasks, but the content creation portion is still all me.
Since I run Moderately High Maintenance out of my home office where space is a valuable resource, one of my main difficulties has been organizing products that get sent to me. Don’t get me wrong, I truly appreciate companies sending me their products to try and share with y’all but it is physically impossible for me to try everything that is sent. I do my best, but only a fraction of what is sent makes it to y’all and I only share what I truly love.
So the big question is what do I do with all of it when it’s sent? As soon as it comes in it needs to be sorted based on what is required. Some products are just sent for me to try and others require photographing and content creation. Part of how I run operations in my content creation business is through processes that are set in place and run every single week. One of those processes is shooting with my photographer, Lillian Morse Photography, every single Tuesday. This allows me to shoot content for blog posts and upcoming collaborations consistently. After I have photographed products, I still have to have a place to put them and I have started to sort them based on type. I love having organization within organization so I use a large container and then use these stackable bins from Office Depot.
What I love about these Office Depot Brand mini stacking bins is that I can stack them and put them inside of a larger container that I can store in a closet out of the way. Office Depot is the only place that sells them and since my online order was over $45 dollars, Office Depot also offers free next business day shipping! This is perfect for all of the exclusive items Office Depot offers that help keep my business running.
I use my handy dandy label maker to label all of the different types of products.
Regardless of what my process is, I love that even though I live in a tiny town with the closest Office Depot being over an hour away, I can count on Office Depot’s free next business-day or two-business-day delivery to help me keep my small businesses running smoothly! More information on delivery options is available here.
Office Depot sponsored this post, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
