Advertising a small business

This whole entrepreneur thing is quite the wild ride.

I've reached the point where I'm starting to get anxious about whether I'm going to piss off my current Personal Chef clients because my availability has been so dramatically reduced. In fact, I've got two meetings to meet potential clients this weekend.

Long gone are the days when people could phone me up and get a booking in the same week. Now it's more like two weeks out. Which is GREAT, for me, don't get me wrong, but I can't get around the bad feeling I get when someone calls and I tell them I'm not available to cook for them.

While I'm thrilled to be in demand, I'm just about as busy as I can manage by myself. I can do the cooking, and handle the parties and Personal Chef clients, it's the office work, the paperwork, that boggs me down.

I've stopped actively advertising. I am no longer paying for google ads, I've stopped pimping myself through flyers and business cards, and hee hee, I'm a hair's breadth away from covering up the phone number on my truck. Referrals from my current clients are fantastic. I also get several requests for business cards when I cater parties. My website is high in the list of resutls and gets a lot of hits that lead my target market to me. Things are going great.

Now, to add fuel to the fire, my Food TV show comes out on 2/8/06, and the reality show comes out after that. I know, people would kill for two TV shows focusing on their business, but right now I'm wondering if it's not so good in the realm of timing. What good is it to generate publicity if you can't handle the leads? If you can't actually work for the people who want to hire you?

**sigh** I feel like a jerk for complaining about that, because I'd be so sad if it was the other way around.


...and thanks, everyone, for all the sweet get-well wishes. I've abandoned the crutches and can limp along on both feet faster than if I were to use them. (Man, I hated having to go so slowly!)

Last thing I ate or drank: latte and home-made banana/sweetpotato bread.

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