Wow, would be one word that would describe this fall. It has been totally crazy, and I love it!

Here’s what’s been happening:

- The business that I started 1 year ago has really taken off. When I started working for myself I was worried that I would make almost no money in the first year. So, I set my sights with a very moderate goal in mind -an income goal that was enough to make ends meet. One year in I’ve more than doubled the goal and the outlook for next year looks very promising!

- I hired someone to help me with my workload – saving me time to live a pretty normal life! When you start your own business you work like crazy. At a certain point you may even have no life. And that’s the point to step back. Why are you doing all this hard work anyway? To lead a better life, right? So I figured out what worked to get new business and keep clients happy – that’s my job. The other behind the scenes things that I don’t necessarily need to do all myself – I’ll got help with some of these. Freeing up more time for me to live an actual life! I no longer have to pass on every single invitation that comes my way!!

- We sold our condo. We live in a wonderful little condo with a view that is out of this world. The problem? It’s tiny!!! This condo is where my husband lived before we were together – it’s great for a bachelor, but not great for 2 people, especially when one of them works from home! So we put on the market, and started to look for a bigger place.

- The bigger place we bought was actually a house in the country! That’s right, a place in the country! We were originally looking for a house in downtown Toronto, but the prices were so high for something decent that we expanded our search, and by chance happened to find a gorgeous house on a nice piece of land in one of our favourite towns in the province. We went to see the place once, and bought it the next day.

- But we don’t plan on moving to the country full time, so we also rented a place in the city! Country bumpkins we are not, and while we love the idea of sitting by the fire, spending quality time in our peaceful house in the country, the reality is that we love the city life too, and the vast majority of our client meetings are downtown. So we’ll spend a few weekdays in the city attending to business, and then the rest of the time in the country.

To sum it all up things have been crazy, but good crazy!

For all of you out there that would love to start your own company and experience the freedom that comes with it. Just do it! Yes, it will be scary, yes there will be some risk involved, but just think of the rewards! Want to be able to spend time with your family and work in a fulfilling career – what’s stopping you? Want the freedom to travel for a month every summer to come back to a growing business – what’s stopping you?

There’s a beautiful life waiting out there for you.

What are you going to do about it?