I am going to take a little departure from the typical strictly business nature of my posts, to address a more personal side of network marketing this time around. I am sure most of you heard the “be your own boss, set your own hours” sales pitch. Well, this is one of the truly meaningful benefits of network marketing to me — especially today.

You see, I am a single mom with a 15-year old boy. How many of you know that raising children today presents a different set of challenges than it did to our parents? Raising a child in a two-parent family is difficult enough, but for a single mom who lives 900 miles away from the dad, it can be especially challenging.

Teenage years are difficult at best, and you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back there. I remember feeling awkward, unpopular, and just wishing I could wake up one day and be grown up with my teen years far behind me. (Of course, it took me another 20 years or so before I finally felt grown up, but that’s another story!)

This morning I got the dreaded call from the principal. My son was apparently involved in a little hand-to-hand combat with another teenager. Not only has my son been suspended from school for a week, with an additional week of in-school suspension, but it looks like he may be suspended from riding the bus for the remainder of the school year. (Yes, this is only September, so that’s 8 months!) Now, how many employees out there with normal jobs could just rearrange their work schedule to accommodate not only dropping their child off at school at 8:00 in the morning, but also picking him up at 3:00 in the afternoon and taking him home for 8 months?

You see, one of the great benefits of network marketing is you can truly set your own hours. I can rearrange my day easily to accommodate this change and still get all of my work done. Can you?

Now, I want to stress that it may take some time for you to reach this point. If you are like most of us, you are trying to start your network marketing business while you are employed full-time. But, I’ve talked about having a dream before and how important it is. If you are a parent, a very real and vibrant dream you could choose to focus on is more time with your family. I look forward to spending afternoons doing the par course with my son, or exploring one of our state parks and hiking to a waterfall we haven’t seen yet.

You can make money at any job. You can work from 8:00 until 5:00, five days a week. You can make even more money if you work overtime, or do shift work. And I’ll agree 100% that money will buy you things, and personally, I like things. But, there is something I like and value far more than money. You see, I can spend money, be happy with my purchase, or regret it, and I can replace the money I spent. But time, once it’s spent, is gone. It can never be replaced.

If there is one thing benefit to network marketing that outshines the rest, to me, it’s time; time to spend with my 80 year old mother; time to spend with my 15 year old son; time to spend with my brother and sisters and their families. This is my dream. And, whenever things don’t seem to go as smoothly as I want them to in this business — maybe my latest marketing idea was a flop or the last tool I purchased was a waste of money — I remember how fortunate I am to have time and the freedom to spend it the way I want, and I am grateful for how very, very wealthy I am.