WorksWonders – the first year 2012

By Angela Bensemann

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun 

 (John Lennon)

This time last year Jane and I were at a cross roads.  Should we take the plunge and launch WorksWonders or should we flag it and spend our time and energy on our existing businesses?

We didn’t even know what WorksWonders was back then.  We knew we wanted to help women on their endeavours towards a better work/life balance as others had helped us on ours. But we didn’t know how we would achieve this.

We did have an overriding motivator though.  That was that we did not want to get to this Christmas and say – “oh I wish we’d given it a go”.  We wanted to be able to say – “we gave it a go and this is what we learnt/got out of it”.

This is a quote we use in our workshops and I can’t think of a better way of summing up how glad we are we just got on and did it.

              

You see a year ago we had a business plan and a financial model – you know how I like to plan.  But guess what?  Life doesn’t always go according to our plan.  Two of our business partners needed to pull out of the venture and pursue other opportunities.  That left us with a quandary.  We had the willing to give this thing a go but we no-longer had the financial backing to do so in the way we were planning. What to do?

Jane came up with the idea of launching a blog and a facebook page, building an online community and finding out what sort of products and services would appeal to our followers.  Desperate not to lose an opportunity to be part of something exciting I agreed. We now work on the premise that regardless of success or failure, we'll learn and gain experience with every new thing we try. The fact that it's often good fun is an added bonus.

Not taking ourselves too seriously and having fun on one of our "photoshoots".

If you had told us a year ago we would be running goal-setting and confidence building workshops we both would have shaken our heads in dis-belief.  If you’d told us we would be running clothes swaps to raise money for worthwhile charities I would have said, “why?”. 

If you’d told us we would have launched an e-book that people were actually reading and that we had further workshops and charity events diarised in for 2013 I think we would have been quite impressed.

So now at the close of 2012 we’ve clocked up 260 facebook ‘likes’, and we've topped 6,000 page views on our blog. 
 

We’ve met plenty of inspirational women in our workshops and ever-expanding network and managed to raise some funds for a school in Africa.
 

We've produced weekly blogs with many fantastic guests sharing their stories with you all.

But guess what – this is just the beginning – we’ve got plenty of plans for 2013 which include launching our on-line products for sale.  The big question now is – what will we be doing this time next year?