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Maximizing Your Potential: Understand the Relationship Between Capacity and Business Goals
One of the largest issues we see in the service industry, specifically related to CEOs and their time, is that they aren’t aware of what their capacity is or how to best split their time to focus on all of the areas that need their attention. Without the knowledge of what baseline their capacity should cover (i.e. 20% in this area and 10% in another), they also aren’t able to see the clear path forward to reaching their goals. In this post, we’ll be breaking down how your time should be spent as a CEO and how to understand your capacity and its effects on your business goals.
The Foolproof Way to Start Implementing Strategies in Your Business
What do we actually do with information overload? When it comes to making plans for your small business you’ve got ideas and game plans out the wahzoo.
You see a shiny new course from this A-list business strategist and you just have to buy it, or maybe your favorite influencer has just released another free resource, so you rush to download it. Perhaps you’ve spent hours scrolling through Pinterest and saving tons of Pins that look interesting. Or you’ve just finished watching yet another webinar about a new thing you think could help, and you’ve filled a page or two with notes.
Can we get real with you for a second?
All of those countless courses, freebies, saved Pins, and webinar notes don’t mean a darn thing if you aren’t going to actually start doing something with them.
Sure, “knowledge is power”, but we’d like to think you don’t have much power if that knowledge isn’t being applied or even retained because you forget about it the next day when a new shiny squirrel catches your attention.
So, what do you do with a strategy once you’ve learned it besides just letting it sit in your virtual cupboard to collect dust?
These actionable steps will help you to figure out your own actionable steps when wanting to implement a new strategy. And if you have no idea what you even want to implement, stick around for a surprise at the end!
Do This Before You Pitch Your Business to Brands
You’ve been doing this business thing for a little while now, and you feel like you’ve finally found your footing. Everything seems to be going great, except for one thing.
You don’t have any features, collabs, partnerships, or PR opportunities in general!
Opportunities for exposure could be so many different things, but they all circulate back to working with another brand. This could be writing a guest blog post or being featured in a blog post, collaborating with another brand on an upcoming launch, being a guest on a podcast episode, having your story told in a popular magazine, landing an interview on a daytime talk-show program, etc.
Some of those examples seem far more reachable than others, but in order to land any of them, it all starts with the steps you take before and leading up to pressing send on that pitch (and don’t worry, we’ll be going over that, too!)
A few of these steps you might not even think twice about, especially if you’re DIYing this whole pitch-your-biz-to-other-brands thing, which is why we’ve made sure to give you a solid plan to put yourself out there confidently.
You're Building The Wrong Business (And It's Making You Broke)
It feels like you’re still playing “pretend business” and you’re wondering if you’re even smart enough to figure this all out like it seems like everyone else has.
This convinces you that the only way to get clients is to do what works for everyone else - posting 3x a day on Instagram, blogging “value add” content, showing up in Facebook groups where you *think* your client might be and so on…
You’re listening to countless other business owners tell you that doing all that ^ is what’s going to work for you...so why isn’t it?
Here’s the truth: it’s not you. It is the strategies you’re using. They aren’t right for YOUR business.
7 Mistakes to Avoid when Starting Your Business
As creatives, we never seem to be short of ideas and things that we want to try. Unfortunately, though, this can often mean that we rush into things too quickly and get caught up in the excitement, only to wonder what in the world we were thinking a little later on. I’ve been there too. I started my first Etsy shop in 2010 and literally just created things I loved and put them online. My shop had everything, from jewellery to leather bags, artwork, scarves, fashion and printed fabric. I sat and waited for the sales to come in, but they didn’t. It was so disappointing to not have any sales and sit wondering what I’d done wrong. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, so I thought I’d give you the benefit of my initial failure and hopefully get you started on the right foot
The Top 8 Questions to Ask before Hiring an SEO Consultant
Google processes over 40,000 searches every second, which is 3.5 billion searches a day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
My guess is that you can’t go very long without asking Google for an answer. Well guess what, neither can your clients. They are searching for your business right now, but the real question is, can they find you?
If you have ever tried to search for your business by what you do, e.g. wedding photographer or what you want to be known for, e.g. natural light wedding photographer Boston, Massachusetts, and have been disappointed as to where your business ranks on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP), then you are probably in the market to hire an SEO consultant.
SEO consultants research and analyze the trends and best practices online to develop a strategy to improve search engine rankings.
February 2017: Income Report $10,990
As promised, February’s income report coming at you! Inside we’ll chat about what you don’t see (this may have something to do with our new Burrito method), our Facebook Ads experiment and a little #TeamTCC update.
Normally I’d tell you to grab a cup of coffee, but I feel like this one deserves a bag of chips and some fresh guac. Enjoy!
How to Know if You are Ready for Your Own Physical Shop
Do you dream of having your own shop? Do you have visions of customers oohing and aahing over your latest creations while sipping a cup of tea or free-trade coffee? There are several options for showcasing your product-based business, from a rented committed storefront, to fairs and festivals, to a booth in a co-op or antique mall.
As a bookshop owner who has pivoted through a few of these business models, let me share some pros and cons and lessons learned along the way.
Need to prioritize building your email list as a small business, but struggling to pin down which platform to start with? During the last ten years, I’ve been with four different email marketing software companies, and Flodesk by far the longest. If I had to start over and choose again, I’d STILL pick Flodesk.