A Day in the Life of a New Business Owner
March 27, 2008 by clarifying
In September, I opened Clarifying Concepts, my medical-writing business. I provide grant writing, speechwriting, technical writing, writing for the public and regulatory affairs services for the Washington DC metro area.
Opening a business is like rolling a stone up hill: hard work. You are responsible for everything, everything takes time and there are only twenty-four hours in the day. To get ready for the launch of this blog, I spent huge amounts of time yesterday trying to get my websites up and running. I find working on websites a huge time-sink, mainly because you have to sit around and wait for the uploads, which is just as time wasting as sitting around for downloads. It is hard to find other things to do, because there are so many windows open on your computer screen, which you can’t shut because you are going to need them again in case anything goes wrong.
I have two websites: One for medical writing and the other for my novels. The novel-writing one is not yet finished, so I will give out its URL in the next day or so. If you are interested in my medical writing site, point your browser to clarifyingconcepts.
I worked hard yesterday not only to make it accurate and pleasant on the eye, but also to make it spam resistant. So there are no clickable entries on the site, and you have to replace “at” with @ and “dot” with a period. I have been having such problems with spam recently: I get 500 spams a day, so I am happy to do anything I can to cut them down.
One of the joys of opening a new business is that you get to meet new people, because it is vital that you do everything you can to get your name out there. Yesterday, I went to a toastmaster’s meeting here in Dupont Circle, Washington DC. This group consisted of a wide variety of people from all over the world. One person was from Yugoslavia, one from the Middle East, one from India and there were some ladies who sounded like they might have come from the Caribbean. After the prepared speeches had been made and critiqued, we were all called on to make tabletop speeches. The theme was “Women’s History Month”, and so Madam Table-Top (what a great name) was giving potted histories of various famous women associated with this town, as prelude to asking her questions.
For example, she said: “When Nancy Pelosi became the first woman speaker, she promised to bring civility back to Washington”.
She paused and we laughed.
She put her glasses on and peered in my direction. “Cynthia,” she said, “I know it’s against the rules, because you are an honored guest, but would you speak about how we can bring civility back to Washington?”
Various people started to murmur.
“I picked her because she has a good laugh,” remarked Madam Table-Top.
Well, I always have an opinion on everything, and I like to speak in front of people, and so I rose. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll have a go.”
And so – in 58 seconds - I told everyone that the best way to bring civility back to Washington was to lead by example. I said that a recent political campaign had been marred by remarks that were not the kindest things this person could have said, whereas another campaign was notable for the fact that the person leading it always seemed to take the high road and inspire people. I said that if we wanted to bring civility back to Washington, we should be very careful about the words we used, and we should all focus on trying to be kind and compassionate. 
Asklepios image: wikipedia
Quill pen image: wikipedia
– Cynthia Haggard is a medical writer and editor and lives in Washington DC. She recently opened her own business. To see what services she offers go to clarifyingconcepts (c) 2008 All rights reserved.
