I’m Sara the “other” partner in The Boutique Group. Here’s my story.

When Blair approached me about being a partner, I was thrilled and scared at the same time. As awesome as the opportunity sounded, being someone’s business partner is a lot of work and responsibility, especially for a new company. On top of that, I have a demanding job that already leaves a lot to be desired with my personal life. I am only 27, but I have to start thinking about marriage and babies at some point right? So although my first thought was “yay”, my second thought was “there goes my personal life”.  So me being my cool, calm and collected self, I thought, there’s got to be a way to juggle all of this, people do it everyday. So after deliberating with my family, friends and lots of  thought, I said “what the hell, I can totally do this”. If I suck and Blair ends up giving me the boot (ouch), then at least I tried.

So now two months into our partnership, I can honestly say that this balancing thing, is not that easy. In fact, its extremely difficult, BUT I’ve been handling it. I just need to make some tweaks here and there.  So here what’s been going on. I was under the impression that I could work on projects, while at my other job. Not so much. You see there’s’ a thing called billable hours and that wasn’t going over to well with my colleagues (what was I thinking?). So then I figured that I could leave work everyday on time and work on the business in the evenings at home. That didn’t work either. Let’s be realistic here, who wants to come home and do more work after a gruesome workday? That would also mean me cutting out after work dates and gym time (that certainly will not do).

So this is what I came up with – just prioritize, genius! Here I am trying to be superwoman, and juggling all these balls in the air and failing miserably and turns out that all my tasks weren’t super urgent. If I just devoted one hour per day during the week and a couple of hours on the weekend, I could totally pull my weight.

It also helped that Blair & I implemented a new plan to have a conference call every Friday to check in and catch up. I also discovered that I need to leave my house in order to get some real work done, because getting caught up in the latest “Real Housewives” drama was way too tempting. The other thing I had to remind my self is that Blair is fully aware that I can only contribute to this partnership part time, so I’ve been putting all this undue pressure on myself, all because I am a total psycho (sometimes).

Anyway, I don’t have it all figured out and I’m sure there will be some more hiccups along the way, but so far I think I’ve found my stride (and discovered a cold brew, here and there helps tremendously) and I’m loving it.

Photo Credits -

Andrew Malone, Flickr

Shutter Monkey, Flickr