30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 14

Yesterday: Evaluate your current accounting system. What is working? What isn’t? What would make things easier?

Finding an accounting system that works for us has been one of our biggest frustrations over the past few years. For a while, we were using an online system called Outright that worked pretty well. It automatically kept track of every purchase and all we had to do was go through periodically to make sure that everything was properly classified. The system wasn't perfect but we were able to print out reports that helped us file our taxes and it was really easy to keep track of everything. It was very low maintenance and it was free to use. However, it was eventually purchased by Go Daddy and everything changed. Updates made it clunkier and it became more complicated for us to use, so we decided against making the jump when Go Daddy decided to make it a paid program.

We're currently stuck deciding between Quickbooks and Freshbooks. It would be far easier with our current banking setup to go with Quickbooks but it's a steeper learning curve and more of a financial investment. We can't currently choose Freshbooks because our bank isn't supported. From everything we've heard, Freshbooks is amazing for businesses like ours.

What it comes down to really though, is sorting out our banking situation before we move on to choosing a new accounting system. We love our credit union, but it's so incredibly limited in what they are able to offer. We so badly wanted our foray into cooperative banking to be a success but we've been miserable almost since we joined. We just can't put it off any longer, we need to sort things out so that we can move on and simplify our lives and our business.

Today: Review your client/project process. What works, what doesn’t? What are your road blocks. Brainstorm 3 ways to simplify your workflow and then create an action plan for implementing them.

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!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 3

As we get to work on day 3 of our 30 day small business cleanse, we're starting to settle into a pretty good routine. Happily, this is one of the project goals that we worked out as part of yesterday's assignment.

Yesterday's undertaking was to assess your overall situation. Where is your business now and what are you trying to achieve with this cleanse? Make a list of goals for this project.

Our list of goals for this project, but first coffee...

In many ways, this gets at the crux of why we've embarked on this project in the first place. The past year has been erratic at best. Many of the work habits we had gave way to stealing moments here and there to get things done. This has led to a certain level of chaos. The first order of business then, is to get ourselves organized.

Our second goal for this project, is to clean out the dead wood. It's an opportunity to examine what we do and how we do it in an effort to figure out what is working and what isn't. To pinpoint our weaknesses and come up with strategies for dealing with them.

Third, to create healthy habits. Constantly working on the go is the obvious outcome of not having much of a set schedule for the past year. It was very difficult to plan very far in advance, and as a result, we were often flying by the seat of our pants. Working this way all of a sudden meant that things got missed, or forgotten, or done twice. By getting back to healthy work habits, we will be able to get more done in less time. The obvious and immediate reward will be more baby cuddles!

The fourth goal may seem the most obvious but important to mention nevertheless. Our main objective is to figure out the lay of the land. Where are we now and where do we want to be. This includes a year from now, two years from now, five years from now...

And lastly, our intent is to learn how to work smarter and not harder. We've been doing a lot of reading lately, and one of the things we've found the most helpful are the creative business blog posts by Sycamore Street Press. Their post 10 Steps to Working Smarter (not Harder) has been especially helpful since we find ourselves in a very similar situation. We're not able to maintain the crazy, all-out work schedules we once had. This last goal may sound a lot easier than it is.

All in all, yesterday's task was a good early step. It led to some really great discussions and has allowed us to chart a path that we both feel comfortable with. And most importantly, it's getting the creative juices flowing!

Today''s goal: 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.

Ugh! Wish us luck!