Courses Online Letting You Live the Dream

Once upon a long time ago, there was a Mum and a Dad, seven children and a dog. They all lived together in what was a relatively organised household. By relatively organised, I mean a quite structured environment. We had lists and we had schedules, but mostly we made sure that we were always looking at least a couple of days ahead.

It has always been important to us that, as parents, and more-so working parents, we ensured that as our brood was growing up that they did not miss out on anything that children from smaller families might experience. Thus, high on our priorities was having a good balance for work / life. Fast forward, and now all our children are successfully adulting and managing their own work and family commitments, using skills that they have inherited from us.

As we raised our family we were always self-employed and had to work hard and often long hours to provide the lifestyle that we wanted. Saying this, it meant that we made changes to the way we worked by working from home and having the flexibility to enjoy assemblies and children’s sport without feeling guilty in the workplace.

Just before our youngest daughter started school, we started our business. Our business passion was helping people and teaching people to be successful in their business with systems and checks, thus freeing up time to work on their business (if they chose to), or for life balance.

Our different skill sets complement each other’s. When our business was starting, it was clear we need a plan. We discussed how many hours a week we wanted to work – how many weeks a year we wanted to spend not working and just living the dream. Our plan included taking time off every school holidays and holidaying as a family. It was about creating memories for our children to pass down to our grandchildren. How much money would we need to earn to achieve this?

We began to network and treat our little business like we were a major corporation. Our organisational skills kicked in and we sat down and worked on our goals. Long term (over 12 months), medium term (6-12 months) and short term (3 months). We included business and personal hopes in our goals – and we went out for a business dinner every 3 months to discuss, review and update our goals. We broke our dreams into bite-sized pieces that we could manage, we sometimes moved the benchmark and we high-fived our successes. To this day, some twenty-two years on, we still use the same method of setting and reviewing our goals. It’s thrilling to see your long-term goals eventually become short term and then ticked off the list as they’re achieved.

We always valued our business relationships and partnerships. I do not say partnership lightly – the businesses that we work with have always been very encouraging in offering opportunities to grow our own business. As our circumstances changed, so did our business model. Initially we provided consulting and classroom training in various computer platforms, desktop and cloud. We now provide many other training opportunities for small businesses. Initially we worked in Melbourne, maintaining offices in Bentleigh East and Docklands. We extended to deliver training all over Victoria, Canberra and Hobart. Our client base is now national. Now we deliver online training, or consult using the vast array of platforms made common during the pandemic. We have a few niches, because we still train our flagship products, but are always adding to our offerings.

Over the last twenty-two years, our business has grown just like our passions. Our new clients are mostly word of mouth referrals. We believe our longevity and our success is due to our ethics. We treat businesses as people and treat them the way that we would like to be treated.

Our business model has changed from time to time. We are in a change mode now – because of the pandemic. Many of our face-to-face clientele now prefer a remote environment. Regardless of where we are in the different business modelling stages; we always come back to, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and it’s always the same answer. Lifestyle. Not to be affluent, but to have the time and the resources to spend on the things we love and value.

Gone are the days that our lifestyle was for our children – it’s now about our children’s families and our extended family. It’s about being able to spend quality time with elderly parents, whenever they need us. And finally, we have embarked on a new chapter in our lives - we have decided on a tree-change. It’s time for us to enjoy what we preach – a healthy work / life balance.

We’ve relocated our home from Melbourne to regional Victoria. We have an office on our property where our desks overlook the snow on the mountains. We have an open fire in our office which provides a perfect working atmosphere. Today’s technology allows us to service all of our clients remotely and develop relationships with businesses all over the globe. It doesn’t matter where we live or work if our minds and bodies are healthy. And to think we put all this in place, decades before the pandemic, makes us really proud.


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