30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 27

Yesterday: Think about your branding. Does it still fit your company and it’s newly polished mission statement? Does it reflect your refreshed business plan? If it does, then think about 3 ways to strengthen your message. If it doesn’t, think about 3 ways to bring everything in line.

L-R: old blog layout, new blog layout.

Branding for Ink+Smog Editions is something that we've always approached as a work in progress. As our business grows and changes, we think it's important to have our branding grow and change along with it.

For the purposes of this exercise, we've defined branding as the entirety of the Ink+Smog Editions experience. As we've made our way through this 30 day small business cleanse, we've worked on many aspects of our brand's overall identity. Still, there are a few items that need to be brought into line.

Our table display at the Unique LA 2014 summer market.

The three areas that we feel need the most attention at the moment are our collateral, our website and our signage. Believe it or not, we are only just coming to the end of our old offset business cards. We need to sit down and design our own letterpress business cards, it is long overdue. Second, as we've discussed in earlier assignments, it is high time that we get our own website up and running. We also need to go through and update all of our Etsy listing images. And third, our show signage could use some work. We update our display every year, and while last year's metallic balloons were a crazy hit, we haven't really found anything that works quite as well this year.

We have integrated each of these three tasks into the scheduled workflow for the next few months that we created on day 23 of this project. We're hoping that by creating a deadline, we'll have the impetus to move forward on these projects that have been on the back burner for too long.

Today: What tools does your business need to grow? What would make your life and your business easier (other than winning the lottery!)? Make a list of 3 moderately priced purchases for your business that you can make over the next year. Then create a financial plan that will allow you to acquire them. Be realistic!