30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 30

We just wanted to start off by thanking everyone for their support over the past 29 days! This has been an amazing, sometimes grueling experience and we are so appreciative of all of your support! Sitting down and working on these assignments isn't easy. This was quite the undertaking with a small babe and a business to run while working other jobs. It's been a lot of late nights and early mornings, but it has been worth all of the hard work. To anyone thinking about doing something similar, do it!!! It's hard work, but the reward is so great!

Yesterday: What does your marketing plan look like? If you haven’t looked at it in a while, now is the time. Make sure that it reflects the changes in your mission statement and business plan as well as what you’ve learned from your analytics. If you don’t have a marketing plan yet, now is the time to come up with one!

The last few years have been a little crazy. Two years ago, we were launching our Kickstarter campaign, moving ourselves and our studio, meeting wholesale and retail orders, and getting ready to do all the holiday shows that we'd signed up for. Last year, Rosemary was almost completely out of commission, and Robin was trying to take care of everything life and business related. This is the first time in two years that we've been able to sit down and come up with a schedule for the next twelve months without it being completely destroyed before it even begins.

We approached this exercise the old school way, with pen and paper. We started off by choosing three marketing goals for the coming year. Then we divided a piece of paper into three columns with the months of the year. Our next step was to add any deadlines, important commitments, vacation time etc. Then we chose what our ideal launch deadlines would be for 2016.

From there, everything just sort of fell into place. It's still just a rough draft, we'll be refining it over the next few weeks, and trying it out over this next year. Some things will work out the way we planned, others just simply won't and we'll have to figure out how to schedule those differently. Either way, it's a good start.

Today: Yay! You made it! Take a look at the list of goals you made on Day 2. Where have you succeeded and where have you come up short? What 3 steps can you undertake to maintain this momentum or what can you do to help you reach your goals if you weren’t able to within these 30 days. 

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 29

It's so crazy, we're already at day 29!!! Nearly there, we're in the home stretch!

Yesterday: 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?

For this assignment, we looked at our Etsy shop, blog, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Ugh, that was a mouthful! We decided not to include Tumblr or LinkedIn, or you know Ello (ugh! Ello!).

It was helpful to sit down and look at all of our data all at once. Some of the information we gleaned was surprising (both good and bad) and some of it was more or less what we'd expected to see. It's no surprise that anything baby related was an instant winner on any social media platform. On the other hand, we never knew just how much blog traffic comes from Facebook.

The information from today's task is already proving useful in a more practical sense as well. Since we're currently in the process of evaluating our line of paper goods, we're weaving in the analytics to help us decide what to keep, what to change and what to discontinue.

With this exercise, we realized just how much we tend to focus on the shorter term in regards to our analytics and don't look at the bigger picture quite as much. When you widen your scope, it changes your perspective quite drastically. It's so easy to live and die by the daily or weekly numbers, but it's only when you look at the broader picture that you realize things are not as bad as they seem.

Today: What does your marketing plan look like? If you haven’t looked at it in a while, now is the time. Make sure that it reflects the changes in your mission statement and business plan as well as what you’ve learned from your analytics. If you don’t have a marketing plan yet, now is the time to come up with one!

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?

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!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 26

Yesterday: Buy yourself some flowers today, or reward yourself with an inexpensive treat. You’ve earned it, you’re nearly there!

L-R: Lunch at Proof, Rosemary and the babe, delicious!

Yesterday was delightful! We started the day off going to The Mama Circle's Mama Mornings meet-up at Individual Medley in Atwater Village. It was both our first mama meet-up and our first time at Individual Medley. What a lovely organization and a great way to meet other mamas. It was so kind of Individual Medley to host us for the morning, their shop is full of so many beautiful things! The babe had a great time hanging out, she'd never seen so many babies before!

From there, we took care of some business and dropped off a new order of Greetings from Atwater Village cards to our retailer Treehaus across the street. Their new space is beautiful! So light and airy and full of so many great pieces!

Our 30 day small business cleanse reward was lunch at Proof on Glendale. It was delicious! We haven't spent too much time in Atwater Village. We had such a great time today, we can't wait to go back!

Today: 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.

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 25

Yesterday: Look at your space, do you have boxes that have never been unpacked? A stack of papers you never have time to deal with? Create a window in your day today, put on some music, turn your phone off and tackle those tasks without interruption. Try to get as much done in that window of time. If you can’t finish it in the time you set aside, do the same every day until you’re done.

Robin printing on Sunday.

We would really like to say that we buckled down, turned on the music, turned off our phones and took care of business yesterday, completing our task. We'd love to say that, but we can't. Instead, we had earlier print jobs to finish up, reprints to take care of, a custom project to research and a whole lot of running around to do. By the end of the day, it felt like two days packed into one!

But, we're going to take our own advice, and try to set some time aside today to work on yesterday's task later this week. We'd love to work on it today but we have a whole other day of crazy errands, meetings and projects that need to be taken care of before the week starts in earnest.

Proofing yesterday's prints while we eat breakfast in the studio this morning.

However, we really need to make time for this project in particular. When we moved into our current studio space, we were exhausted. We moved in the middle of December, in the middle of holiday orders and holiday craft shows. We were both still working full time at day jobs and we did our best to move as much as possible on weekends and in the evening. It was a complete nightmare move. Two years later, we're still recovering. And, we still have boxes here and there, lurking in the corners that have yet to be unpacked and dealt with. Now that we're preparing to move again, we need to make it a priority not to move with these boxes still packed.

Scenes from a traumatic move, December 2013.

Today: Buy yourself some flowers today, or reward yourself with an inexpensive treat. You’ve earned it, you’re nearly there!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 24

Yesterday: Develop a calendar system that you will actually use. Try to map out your workflow for the next week to see if it’s going to work for you. Work on it until it does!

When we first started Ink+Smog Editions, Robin was working full time and Rosemary was between freelance contracts. Our product line was rather limited and it was pretty easy to stay on top of things. As we began to pick up steam and Rosemary started a new part time contract, we knew that we needed to come up with a few ways keep everything on track.

One of our solutions was to come up with a monthly workflow sheet. Towards the end of the month, we would sit down and think about the things that we wanted to work on during the next month. What were our goals, how were we going to organize our time, what did we want to blog about... Nothing was set in stone, it was just a way of organizing our thoughts and priorities for the coming month.

We stopped using our workflow system somewhere along the way, probably right around the time we moved to our studio space downtown. Some of the early difficulties we had with the space (unreliable electricity and internet, the struggles of being the second tennant in a new construction that was still under construction!) interrupted some of our good work habits.

Yesterday, we sat down and revisited our old workflow sheet and updated it for November. We've made a few adjustments, adding set printing days for one, removing more elaborate social media goals now that we're more established for another.

We'll see how well this plays out over the next month. Our workflow sheet combined with our giant wall calendar from Paper Source and our daily notebook should be a pretty good overall calendar system. We'll be working out the kinks for the next few weeks, wish us luck!

Today: Look at your space, do you have boxes that have never been unpacked? A stack of papers you never have time to deal with? Create a window in your day today, put on some music, turn your phone off and tackle those tasks without interruption. Try to get as much done in that window of time. If you can’t finish it in the time you set aside, do the same every day until you’re done.