30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 28

Yesterday: 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!

L-R: Lundeen's in Culver City, a wholesale order heading out to Lundeen's

Sitting down to discuss yesterday's assignment, we realized how far we've come over the past 27 days. As we work through the different steps of this project, it's becoming easier to identify the areas that need work. One of our goals for this cleanse is to learn to work smarter rather than harder and this is the lens through which we viewed this task.

As our business has grown over the past three years, shipping has become a bigger and bigger aspect of our business lives. We ship everything, online orders, wholesale orders, custom print jobs, Kickstarter rewards, samples... And one of the stupidest things we do right now is print all of our shipping labels on our office printer. So the first order of business really needs to be a real shipping label printer (and our inkjet printer sighs with relief!).

It was relatively easy to come up with three tools that would allow our business to grow and/or make our life and business easier. The second step is always slightly more complicated. As Robin mentioned in passing when we sat down to work on this step, "it's always easy to come up with new ways to spend money on the business!" This is definitely true! After some careful planning, we're pretty confident that we'll be able to make our three purchases within the next twelve months.

A trip to the post office!

Today: Take a look at your analytics. Where is your traffic coming from? What are your most popular posts, items or pages. Why is that? What are your least popular posts, items or pages. Why is that? Where are you putting your energy and is it paying off?