Ten past three. You’re stuck in the pick-up queue (third car from the gate, engine off, radio on low) when your phone lights up. A client wants to catch up tomorrow. Nine o’clock, their office in Double Bay, and could you bring something to leave with the team?
Sure. Of course. The brochure does exist. It’s a PDF you finished around eleven last night, and the printer at home has been blinking its low-ink light at you since the school holidays.
If you run a small business in Sydney’s east and have kids at school, some version of that afternoon probably sounds familiar. Mums seem to get a generous helping of it. The clients are real and so is the work. What’s missing is a decent run of uninterrupted hours. Instead you get scraps: forty minutes while someone’s at swimming, a bit of time after bedtime if you’re still upright, a phone call in the supermarket car park.
So this isn’t really about big strategy. It’s about the small, boring jobs, and stopping them from eating the week.
The admin nobody sees
Ask any small-business owner what takes up their time and the honest answer often has less to do with the work they’re good at than with everything around it. Invoices. A supplier who still hasn’t replied. A proposal that needs reformatting because the client’s system won’t open the file. The business cards that were in the drawer. Definitely. Last month.
None of it is hard. It just turns up unannounced, usually somewhere between dinner and bath time, which is about the worst slot in the day for anything needing a clear head.
It helps, oddly, to stop treating this as a failure of organisation. It’s part of the job. Give it a name and you can start planning for it.
Working out what needs you
Not every task needs the person who owns the business. Obvious, yes. But plenty of owners keep doing jobs themselves because explaining them to someone else feels like more effort than just getting on with it.
A simple test: would the result be any worse if someone else did it? Bookkeeping, scheduling social posts, packing orders and printing may be delegated to a part-time assistant, a suitable specialist or a local service, depending on the task, the budget and how much expertise it calls for. That frees your limited hours for the parts that do rely on your judgement, like pricing, looking after clients, and whatever creative spark made you start the business in the first place.
Grouping the little jobs
Constant switching between tasks wears you out, and parents do it all day anyway. So some mums carve out one set window a week just for the odds and ends; Tuesday after drop-off is a popular choice. Invoices out, orders in, a quick look at what’s running low.
It doesn’t need to be a perfect system. The goal is fewer Thursday-night ambushes. A running note on your phone (packaging, receipt books, business cards, whatever tends to disappear) makes it easier to reorder before you’re down to the last one. Or stick a list on the fridge. Harder to ignore there.
When the deadline is tomorrow
Good habits won’t stop everything from landing at the last minute, though. The networking breakfast gets brought forward. Someone pulls out of the weekend market and their stall is suddenly yours if you want it. A client decides they’d prefer printed proposals, not a link.
That’s when local services are worth knowing about. Some print centres offer same day printing for selected products, depending on the job and what the local centre can manage. Ring ahead to check turnaround and pick-up times, especially for anything a bit out of the ordinary. For an urgent job, it may save you from wrestling with the home printer the night before a meeting.
Which, at ten at night, with someone calling out for a glass of water, is a small mercy.
Leaving some slack
Most working parents plan their week right up to the edges. Every hour spoken for. That works fine until a child comes home with a temperature, or a client shifts a deadline, and then the whole thing tips over.
Even a small buffer changes how the week feels. One afternoon with nothing booked. A personal rule about not promising anything new for the same day. Reordering stock and printed bits before the box is empty rather than after. None of this will make life calm. It might make it a little more manageable.
Asking for help (and letting people give it)
Lots of us are bad at asking. Some of it’s pride; some of it’s that explaining a task feels slower than doing it. But the people around you are often more willing than you’d guess. A partner who can take Wednesday’s school run. A friend happy to swap childcare on market days. Another local owner who knows a bookkeeper they trust.
Sydney’s eastern suburbs are home to business owners across all sorts of industries, from home-based consultancies to shopfronts in Paddington and Randwick. Local business groups, school communities and online forums can turn up practical recommendations, along with some reassurance that you’re not the only one juggling.
The bigger picture
Running a business around a family is never going to be tidy. There’ll be nights when the laptop comes back out after the kids are asleep, and mornings when you leave the house with someone else’s lunchbox.
Working harder rarely fixes that. A few dependable systems for the small jobs might, so more of your energy goes into the part of the business you care about. And maybe next time a client asks you to bring something along tomorrow, you’ll just say yes, and mean it.
Juggling Work & School-Aged Kids: What Mums Need To Keep In Mind
