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How to Know When You Should Pivot or Start Over in Your Business
There comes a point in every service-based business owner’s journey (especially in this market) where they hit what feels like a huge cement wall. Leads feel harder to come by, prospects feel harder to close, and it seems the only way to get through it is to either demolish the wall or change directions. In this case, that would mean pivoting your offer or scrapping everything you’ve built and starting over.
Roundup: 5 Must Have Templates to Help You Review Your Year in Business and Plan for 2023
The end of the year is possibly our most favorite season of business! It’s the time where you get to reflect on your year in business, assess your analytics and results, and plan for the year ahead. Because this is such a fun time for us, we love making sure our audience is equipped with the resources to help them make these things happen. In The Creative Template Shop, we drop so many helpful templates for reflection and new year planning.
With hundreds of templates to choose from, we wanted to do a quick round-up of our top 5 must-have templates to review your year in business and plan for 2023!
What is Relationship Marketing: 5 Ways to Create Lifelong Customers
In this day and age of hot trends that dissipate just as quickly as they come, the backbone of marketing tends to be forgotten about: relationships. In every social media strategy, you’re trying to post the things that will build a better relationship with your target audience. When running paid ads, you’re picking and choosing who you want to display the ad to so that you can nurture those relationships. But when you strip away whatever conduit you try to mask it in, relationship marketing will bring so much more reward when implemented as the real, raw thing.
We’ve been able to successfully sell our services over the years mostly thanks to relationship marketing, and we can’t wait to share with you 5 ways to create lifelong customers and clients.
One Week to More Clients (Without Paid Ads or Social Media)
The thing about paid ads and social media is that no matter how excellent your strategy is, more often than not, you’re bombarded with leads that aren’t at the quality you need them to be. Heck, any kind of marketing can be confusing because of all of the new trends that come in hot and go just as quickly. We’ve said it a million times before, but relationship building and networking is where you’ll find your highest quality leads and potential clients. It’s even possible to do this and gain new clients in just one week.
In this post, we’ll be teaching you how to narrow down your offer, find your network, reach out to potential clients, and hold discovery calls and coffee dates all in the span of a week.
$118k In Contracted Revenue in 30 Days - Here’s How We Did It
For the last seven years, we’ve worked with clients in a variety of capacities. When we first joined forces and started offering services, we were a local branding and marketing boutique. Then we flourished in the online course industry, but over the last year, we’ve been working with a handful of clients outside of our typical education products inside the Incubator. We loved getting back to the 1:1 experience, so we decided to open up a waitlist for our done-for-you services to a wider audience.
Lots of tweaking and repeating took place, but in 30 days we’d contracted $118k at a 60% close rate. Keep reading as we break down how we did it!
How to Overcome Perfectionism, Procrastination and Imposter Syndrome
Perfectionism, procrastination and imposter syndrome are three struggles that go hand in hand. When perfectionism is discussed in our industry, or in the context of work and running a small business, it often gets paired with negative behavior like procrastination. This causes indecision and feeling like you don’t actually have any idea what you’re doing, otherwise known as imposter syndrome.
Luckily, there are ways to not overcome these feelings– there isn’t some mindset exercise you can do to make them completely disappear, but you can make shifts to prevent them from inhibiting growth in your business and perhaps actually serve you. Keep reading to find out how!
What You Need to Know About Client Acquisition in 2022
Client acquisition is likely the single-handed most asked about topic we get from our audience and members of our various communities. Lately, we’ve been hearing a common complaint from business owners that they need more leads. While there have been some market shifts recently, they’re not necessarily impacting the way we acquire clients. It may feel like it’s changing when actually, everything with clients is exactly the same.
Here’s the thing; marketing is cyclical. There are things that work now that aren’t going to work in 6 months, then in 2 years, those things could come right back around again. There will always be hotspots, but you shouldn’t rely on them if you want consistency. We have lots to talk about on this topic, so let’s dive in!
How to Improve Your Client Experience as an Event Planner Using Dubsado
At this point, we think we’ve established that Dubsado is the perfect CRM for service-based businesses. Really, it doesn’t even matter what kind of service-based business you are or what industry you’re in– Dubsado is almost guaranteed to be a surefire option for you.
However, many people use it in different ways depending on their industry and their own client processes, one of those industries being event planners. So, today, we want to cover how to use Dubsado specifically to improve your client experience as an event planner!
The Best Way to Streamline Your Client Projects as a Service Provider
Managing your client experience is one thing, but managing and streamlining your client projects is a whole other beast to tackle as a service provider. You might be wondering what the difference is, so when we talk about managing your client experience, we mean all of the communication, appointment scheduling, sending forms, proposals, contracts, getting paid, and all that jazz. (Dubsado’s our trusted CRM for that– here’s why.)
On the other hand, you also have to deal with the actual tasks that come with fulfilling a client project for both you and your team. For this, we recommend using a project management system like Asana. It’s robust enough to handle even the most complex projects, yet simple enough that if you don’t need to use all of the fancy-shmancy extras, you don’t have to.
Today we’ll be diving into the best way to streamline your client projects using Asana!
What is Intentional Design and How it Can Benefit Your Business
When it comes to building websites, many people place most of their focus on aesthetics. While it’s important that a website is attractive and grabs visitors’ attention, intentional web design goes beyond just looks and takes into account multiple factors that impact your website’s performance. When you hone in on things like your goals, SEO, etc. and consider them along with your web design strategy, it’s possible to create something that’s both stunning and that drives results.
In this post, we’ll be breaking down the importance of strategic and intentional website design and sharing a look at our design process and its effects on our clients!
Service Providers Making More Than $20k Per Month: Essential Skills You Need For Sustaining & Growing Your Business
We know firsthand how challenging it can be to build and grow a business that can withstand the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. We’ve worked with service providers in all stages of business, and while they can all equally be difficult to navigate, they each come with their own unique struggles. For the service providers who are already hitting $20k months and beyond, there are essential skills needed in order to continue building a sustainable business and experience continued growth.
Making Less Than $20k a Month, Read This
There comes a time in every service provider’s career when you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling on your income and time. You really want to hit those $20k months, but you would need 24 hours of daylight alone to be able to make that happen or at least a few clones of yourself. At this point, it’s crucial that you start scaling your business, thinking about hiring, raising your prices, cleaning up your systems, and more– all the things that, coincidentally, we love talking about and have had numerous conversations about on our blog and podcast.
To save you the time, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to compile our resources on all of the topics you need to be learning about right now so that you can get unstuck from this rut and grow a thriving service-based business.
Service Providers Earning Less than $5k Per Month: Essential Skills You Need to Have a Successful Business
There’s undoubtedly a flood of information and resources on the internet for service providers looking to grow their income to $5k+ months. Unfortunately, that also means that it can be difficult to know where to look, what to search for that’ll actually be helpful, and find reliable resources. When you’re a smaller business, your number one priority is essentially increasing your revenue, and there are a number of skills that are essential to have in order to make that happen.
In this post, we’ll be giving you our best resources to help you hone in on those skills so that you can finally break free of the feast or famine mode that so many small service-based businesses find it hard to come out of in the beginning stages of business.
Top Website Design Trends in 2023
The main point of design trends is to break expectations. We want an element of surprise, whether that’s through color, shapes and patterns, animation, or overall layout. This’ll be reflected in the trends we’ve noticed that we’re going to break down for you in this post, but don’t let these trends intimidate you– there are a lot of ways to add in that organic surprise that feels really true to your brand direction.
How We Are Working With Clients in 2023
Sometimes, being in business since 2015, makes us feel a little prehistoric. Our company has certainly had its fair share of evolutions and pivots as not only we have grown, but our clients as well. We’ve had the privilege of working with folks from across the globe whether they tune in to our top-charting podcast, get sucked into our rabbit hole with our Trello for Business course, join our growing community of creatives, work with us in an intimate group setting or hang out with us 1:1 to tackle the big stuff. We thought it was time for us to update you on our suite of offerings and give you insight on how you can make magic happen with us.
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.