30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 9+10+11

It's pretty clear by now that Friday (and most of Saturday) was a bit of a disaster! We are back up and running however so now we'll try to catch up and get back on track!

Working on Friday's exercise, listing our strengths and weaknesses.

Friday: Make a list of your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Be honest and ruthless. Create an action plan to implement the changes you need.

Friday's exercise was a version of SWOT analysis (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats) often used to assess a business, it's resources and environment. It's a great way to understand your business and discover what you do well as well as where you could be improving.

This was a hard task to undertake, maybe one of the hardest we've worked on so far. It's really difficult to step away from your business in order to examine it objectively, or as objectively as possible. We were surprised at how easy it was to see all of the flaws or weaknesses but difficult to see our own strengths. It was a very valuable exercise, not only because it allowed us to isolate what we thought we were doing wrong, but because it showed us how easy it is to get caught in the failure trap, to see only where there is room for improvement rather than celebrating what you're also getting right.

L-R: working on Saturday's tasks, our workflow calendar, Herman Heidelberg.

Saturday: Try to think of 3 things that are holding your business back, and come up with two solutions or plans for each one.

We felt like this exercise really built on what we had worked on during Friday's task. By examining our weaknesses, we were able to ascertain where our business was doing well and where it needed more work. But most importantly, we were able to figure out what our weaknesses had in common. And these are what we see as the things that are holding our business back. By going through and working all of the steps of this cleanse, we're slowly working our way through issues we've always had as well as learning how to address new issues as they arise. Hopefully this will make us a stronger and more resilient company going forth.

Our composing table before the cleanup.

Sunday: Clean up and declutter your production space. Do the same for your shipping area if you have one!

It's always more challenging to declutter our production space than we think it'll be. We seem to have a tendency towards workspace creep, projects and materials slowly spread out until they cover all surfaces. This has gotten much worse since the baby made her appearance. It felt really good to go through and tidy things up, and we took the opportunity to get rid of a lot of things that we'd been holding onto for a while. We're very much looking forward to dropping off a few bags of stuff at Goodwill!

Today: Review your wholesale process. Come up with 3 ideas to streamline your process and begin implementing them.

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 9 (sorry no posts today!)

Hi there,

Unfortunately we won't be able to post today's installment of our 30 day small business cleanse. As many of you know, we've been weathering a heat wave here in Los Angeles, and as a result we had a power outage yesterday during the day that lasted into the wee hours this morning. We needed to get ourselves, and most importantly the wee one into some air conditioning. All the moving around and lack of familiar surroundings turned everyone's schedules upside down, including the baby's. We will be back on track by monday, we promise!

Best,
Rosemary+Robin+bébé

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 8

Yesterday: Delete apps from your phone or tablet that you don’t use. Organize the apps you do use in order to optimize your device’s layout.

This exercise was pretty straight forward, but applied to us differently. While we share a lot of the responsibilities of running our business, we also play different roles. We decided to each talk about how we approached yesterday's assignment. We do not have a tablet at this time, we both have iPhone 5S smart phones.

Robin: I don't use my phone for business as much as Rosemary does. I began by reorganizing the layout of my apps within my phone. Previously, I had my business-related apps spread out over my phone's three screens. So the first thing I did was to move everything Ink+Smog related to the first screen. I then played with the layout, taking apps out of folders and making them more accessible. I also deleted a few apps that I'd tried at different times but never really used for one reason or another. The one thing that I still need to do, is go through and delete old text messages, the data portion of my phone keeps growing and I feel like I need to get it a little more under control.

Rosemary: I've been spending a lot of time on my phone over the past year but especially over the past few months. I was really sick for a lot of my pregnancy, and so ended up working from my phone a lot. In that time, I've moved my apps around countless times, optimizing the apps I use for the business while make room for pregnancy and now baby apps. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how my app layout. The first thing I did, was go through my apps and delete ones that I use infrequently or not at all. I then went through and cleaned up the ones that I do use. Honestly, cleaning up my favorites in Safari is what has made the most difference for me. I used to keep countless windows open all the time. Now, with the pages I actually need stored as favorites, I don't have to spend all that time hunting around for what I need. I too need to delete old text messages. I've already downsized a great deal, but there's more to be done.

We both found this to be a really helpful exercise. It helped us figure out what tools we're each using and how we're using them. It was also a great opportunity to share the tips and tricks we've each come up with along the way.

Today: Make a list of your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Be honest and ruthless. Create an action plan to implement the changes you need.

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 7

Yesterday: Sit down and look over your website critically. What needs work? What needs to be freshened up? What have you been putting off? Get to work, create an action plan!

Before we get started, why not take a look at our online shop to see what we're talking about!

This was not a difficult task to undertake, but for some reason it's been the hardest blog post to write so far. Maybe it's because it's our seventh day in a row, maybe it's because it's been a particularly long and exhausting day, or maybe there's no good reason at all. Whatever the cause, we might as well start at the beginning.

We approached this exercise from two different directions. First, we sat down and wrote down all the things we've been talking about over the past few weeks. We discussed what we thought was working well and what wasn't. We tried to approach the matter the way we would approach a studio critique in art school, to look at our site as though we were complete strangers. We were honest and forthright and we tried not to go too deeply into any one point.

L-R: our discussion list and the Etsy worksheet, our Etsy shop's front page, working on our shop critique

Our second approach was to try critiquing our shop using the Shop Critique Worksheet that Etsy sent out to all of it's sellers who had signed up for their holiday season email seller's seminar. When we were first starting out, we signed up for community critiques rather frequently in order to get feedback on how we were setting things up. We had mixed results with this line of attack. It was very helpful in that it sent us off in search of very specific information and asked us to look at that information in a different light than we had previously. However, it's scope was rather limited and didn't really help us come up with an action plan.

Some of the listings in our Etsy shop. We need to change our background, the wood just doesn't photograph well.

With the information we gathered from our discussion and the results of the critique worksheet, we then sat down and came up with our action plan. We now have a much more specific list of tasks we'd like to accomplish and a number of items to research further. Chief among those is to reshoot all of our items since we're not entirely enthusiastic about the background we used as well as updating our shipping profiles and finally utilizing the new shipping tools that Etsy made available in the spring. We also need to go back and research shopping cart websites again as well as finally secure our url!

Some of our Greetings from... cards.

In the meantime, we've updated the look of our shop to fall into line with the update we made to our social media accounts earlier this week. It's nice to have everything all fresh and tidy!

Today: Delete apps from your phone or tablet that you don’t use. Organize the apps you do use in order to optimize your device’s layout.

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 6

Yesterday: clean up your inbox, organize your email. Unsubscribe from any mailing lists you don’t read regularly.

L-R: cleaning out the inbox and baby cuddles!

The instructions for yesterday's endeavor were relatively simple but good grief it took a long time!
Having a small babe has definitely changed how we get work done around here. The majority of this task took place on our phones while balancing a sleeping or near-sleeping baby on the other arm. It also hasn't helped that we're all slowly getting over a pretty nasty cold.

Be that as it may, it felt good to delve into the wilds of our email inbox after putting it off for so long. It's amazing how easy it is to flag an email as important and how hard it is to unflag it after the matter has been dealt with. We had soooo many flagged emails, it was ridiculous. Now that we've reduced the number of flagged emails, we feel so much lighter. We've also gone through and unsubscribed from a number of email lists that we rarely read. This was always such a pain, every time they would arrive in our inbox, we would groan and talk about unsubscribing. Instead of taking the time to unsubscribe as they arrived, we would always just quickly delete them and move on. It feels so good knowing that the added pressure has been removed once and for all. We also took the opportunity to send emails that we'd long been putting off. After this exercise, we feel rather virtuous. Now the trick will be keeping up with the regular maintenance!

So far, the tasks for this project have been pretty simple and relatively easy to deal with. Our main obstacle has been making sure to create the time to work on them carefully and consistently. But then, that is one of the main goals of the project, to become more organized and to get back to healthy work habits. So we seem to be on the right road.

Today: Sit down and look over your website critically. What needs work? What needs to be freshened up? What have you been putting off? Get to work, create an action plan!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 5

Day 5 of our 30 day small business cleanse!

Yesterday: Take a look at your social media accounts. Refresh your about pages, change up your profile pictures and cover images. Have you combined work and personal accounts? Does that work for your business or brand? If it doesn’t, then think about creating a separate account for each. Also look at the people and businesses you follow or like. Carefully evaluate who or what you can unfollow or unlike.

Our new Twitter design, including the profile photograph taken by Duran Castro for his blog The Diligent Hand. The background photograph was taken by Rosemary atop the Ace Hotel in DTLA on a very cold day in January of this year.

Yesterday's assignment was to breathe some fresh air into our social media accounts. We'd been toying with some new ideas on various platforms for the last few weeks but as part of this exercise we unified them all under variations on the same design.

We were particularly excited to finally use one of the photographs taken of us last year by Duran Castro during the photo shoot we did in our studio space for his blog The Diligent Hand. We like all the photographs that he took that day but especially love this one of us proofing prints while setting up the press.

We also devoted a great deal of time to tidying up our social media accounts. While we share a lot of media across different platforms, we've found it increasingly frustrating to look through them. We had never really found the time to systematically go through each and every person, page or business we liked or followed. There were a number of inactive or neglected accounts, an inexplicable amount of pages that we had no recollection of ever following and several accounts that made sense during our earlier and less focused iterations.

L-R: our blog yesterday before we refreshed our design and afterwards.

It was really interesting to sort through who and what we wanted to follow. It led to numerous conversations about who we are as a company and what our brand and thus scope of interest should include. As we've grown and shifted over the past nearly three years, we've assumed and shed several identities as a company. We've moved further away from our fine art studio training and are really learning how to function more in the sphere of graphic design and illustration. It was fascinating to see how our Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter feeds changed almost instantly as we pared things down.

As part of this task, we also closed down a number of profiles on social media platforms that never quite panned out (ummm, we still don't know what to do about ello!). We've always known that it's important to keep an eye on our online identity, but it's sometimes hard to find the time. Now that we've really gone through and streamlined everything all at once, it should be a lot easier to keep up with as we go along. And we look forward to utilizing tools like Twitter and Tumblr much for frequently now that they're much more manageable.

Today: Clean up your inbox, organize your email. Unsubscribe from any mailing lists you don’t read regularly.

This is one job we are definitely not looking forward to!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 4

Welcome to day 4 of our 30 day small business cleanse!

Yesterday: clean up your computer. Start with your desktop then move on to your files. Choose a file structure then implement it. You’ll be amazed at what you find lurking in unexplored corners of your hard drive.

L-R: our inspiration for the day, hard at work, how we really felt at the outset of this project.

Our assignment yesterday had us plumbing the depths of our computer hard drive. In the interest of full disclosure, we only worked on our business files and left our personal files out of it (or else we could possibly still be working on it today!).

This was not a project we were particularly looking forward to and we did make a last minute shopping trip to Target as well as spend a little time on Facebook and on the internet looking at memes before we buckled down. Then we listened to Ice Cube, drank some coffee, put on some gangsta rap and adulted!

When we finally got down to work, we were pleasantly surprised to find that for the most part, our computer files are pretty organized. Over the years we've come up with a relatively easy to follow file structure. However, there was definitely some room to improve. We ended up focusing on cleaning up file names and locations as well as resolving a few redundancy issues.

It felt good to go through and clean things up, it certainly makes finding things a lot easier since we don't need to do quite as much digging around for things anymore. All in all, it was helpful exercise, we feel like we're getting things organized and making our lives a little easier with each day of this project.

Thank you for all of the encouragement we've been getting from all corners, it definitely helps to hear!

Today: take a look at your social media accounts. Refresh your about pages, change up your profile pictures and cover images. Have you combined work and personal accounts? Does that work for your business or brand? If it doesn’t, then think about creating a separate account for each. Also look at the people and businesses you follow or like. Carefully evaluate who or what you can unfollow or unlike.

Don't forget, it's not too late to join us on our 30 day small business cleanse, here's our schedule!