30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 23

Yesterday: Create a customized checklist of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly tasks for your business.

There's nothing quite like making a list of all the things that you do on a daily basis to make your head spin! Yesterday's exercise definitely brought home that we need to be working smarter not harder.

Especially lately, it always feels like we're rushing to do things. That we're constantly printing or packaging or shipping. Somewhere along the way, our carefully crafted work schedule gave way to a little bit of chaos. A good deal of this can be attributed to the arrival of the wee babe, it's hard to print during nap time. But some of it started during the pregnancy when everything revolved around energy levels and nausea.

A little of what's on the press this weekend, hurry up and get your postcards before they're gone. We won't be carrying them for much longer!

Sitting down yesterday and making the initial list and then organizing it into daily, weekly, quarterly and yearly tasks was very helpful. It's very calming to feel like everything is finding it's place. We're going to test out our checklist over the next few weeks to see if we've covered all our bases and to see how it actually works with our lives. A plan is great, but it isn't worth much if it isn't something you can actually stick to.

Today: 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!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 21

A snapshot of a corner of the studio this morning.

Yesterday: Make a list of the business goals you would like to accomplish by this time next year. For each goal, list 3 concrete steps you can take. One in the next few days, one in the next few weeks and one in the next few months.

For this assignment, we tried to keep the scope narrow. It's so easy to come up with a gargantuan list of goals that exist somewhere in the future. But, since we're trying to keep this project firmly rooted in the possible rather than the fantastical, we thought it best to start small.

Over the course of the day, we came up with a list of goals that we would like to accomplish by this time next year. We started off by each thinking independently about what we would like our goals to be and then we started discussing our ideas together. As our discussions progressed, it became clear that we had five objectives that we could agree should be our priority for the coming year.

Our next task was to decide on three concrete steps to take for each goal. It was really helpful to break down the exercise into three temporal levels. By creating a plan for the next few days, the next few weeks and the next few months we were able to each take on specific responsibilities as well as make a more detailed plan for overseeing the project over the next year. We both feel very confident that we will at least make great progress in these areas over the next year if not reach our goals entirely.

Today: Review your business plan. Does it need some polishing? I bet it does! If you don’t have a business plan, now is the time to write one down!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 16

Yesterday: Sit down and read over your mission statement. Does it still accurately reflect your business and it’s aspirations? Polish it until it does. If you don’t have a mission statement, now is the time to write one!

Before we started working on this step of the 30 day small business cleanse, we really didn't think that we had an official mission statement. Like a lot of small businesses, we started off with an idea about what we wanted to do and we just started doing it. In fact, I'm not even sure that we really knew that we were starting a business when we started our business. A friend of ours was organizing a pop-up shop and asked us if we wanted to participate. At the time, we'd just started working on some linoleum blocks using photographs that Rosemary had taken of neon signs. So we thought, well why don't we just turn them into cards rather than prints and sell those. We printed them by hand (literally with our hands!) and that was the beginning of Ink+Smog Editions.

Ink+Smog Editions in the beginning.

Fast forward three years and here we are, still working with urban imagery, still crushing on neon signs, still interested in the city that surrounds us. As we've grown and changed, we've developed what we like to call our elevator speech. Our thirty second spiel about who we are and what we do. But we'd never really thought about it as a mission statement. But it is. In a nutshell it explains who the company is and what we're interested in. We probably couldn't have come up with a better mission statement if we'd sat down and tried to come up one.

One of the really interesting parts of this 30 day project, is that it is giving us the opportunity to connect with our company. We're sitting down to do work only to realize that we'd been slowly working on or thinking about a lot of these things over the years and in many cases, we've already down at least the foot work if not the actual work of the assignment. This project is bolstering our confidence in part because we're realizing that even though we've never sat down and worked on some of these points in as concrete a way as we felt we needed to, we'd often done the work more organically along the way.

Today: Catch up and relax! Take some time today to tie up the loose ends from any of your earlier projects. All done? Then relax!

Oh we are so looking forward to this! Baby cuddles here we come!

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 12

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

L-R: packaged wholesale order ready to ship, Wholesale street in DTLA near the studio and a display of Ink+Smog Editions cards at Urban Radish in the Arts District in DTLA.

Over the past two years, we've been slowly building up our wholesale presence. You can see some of our retailers here. One of our objectives is to turn more towards the wholesale end of our business. This was the main impetus for upgrading to a Heidelberg Windmill press a few years ago. In order to do this, we have spent a lot of time recently reviewing our wholesale materials and trying to rethink our wholesale process.

We've spent a great deal of time discussing where we want our wholesale business to be, but have only just begun working on how to make the process simpler and faster. Yesterday's exercise was really great, it forced us to think about all the different ideas and obstacles we've been talking about but then we had to boil everything down to three ideas.

Working on the wholesale exercise yesterday with coffee.

One thing that keeps coming up time and again in this project, is that it is more than time for us to build our own website. It would be particularly helpful in this regard since it would allow us to create a wholesale portal that would simplify the process both for us as well as for our wholesale buyers.

The second idea we discussed involves our invoicing process. At the moment, our invoicing is cumbersome and a little complicated. We need to do some research into a new method for creating as well as keeping track of invoices.

And third, we would really like to move to Freshbooks. This is very much tied to our second solution. In order to do this, we need to change banks since ours is not currently supported by Freshbooks.

These three ideas are really just a beginning, an entry point into a much more complicated discussion. We will start with these three and see where we go from there.

L-R: A display of our cards at Los Angeles County Store in Silverlake (photo courtesy of their Instagram), the cover of our 2015 Look Book, some of our cards on the Beautiful Things LA bus (photo courtesy of their Instagram)

Today: Assess your product line. Lay out one of each of your items in such a way that you can see exactly what you’re producing. Does everything work well together? What is missing? Where do you go from here?

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!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 2

Well here we are, day 2 of our 30 day small business cleanse.

Yesterday's Task: Clean up and declutter your physical workspace. Clean off your desk, create a space to work over the next 29 days!

The assignment for day one was a good way to get our feet wet. We were lucky enough not to have to start out from absolute scratch. We were both really sick with a nasty cold last week, and as a result we did a mini cleanup early in the week in order to de-germ the studio. There were still a few piles here and there as well as some materials that had been shifted around from surface to surface for the past few weeks that were finally dealt with properly (there is nothing like a good deadline, and a little public pressure to help you get things done!). Oh, and miracle of miracles, we finally fixed the work calendar that hangs above the standing desk! It may seem like a small victory but it was pretty huge for us!

Our desks look much better after today's cleanup!

There's something about clearing your work surface off, washing it down and re-organizing it again that makes you feel like you have things under control. Like you're clearing out the cobwebs and are ready to get to work. Overall it was a pretty gradual way to get this project started but probably just the right speed for us right now.

L-R: We finally fixed our wall calendar (btw, just above the calendar are our very first experiments in letterpress, from grad school!) and afternoon baby cuddles as a reward!

Today's Task: 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.

Today's undertaking requires a little bit more consideration. It'll be a good exercise to help us put down on paper some of the ideas we've been throwing around for the past few weeks. Although we're over the moon that the little one is sleeping through the night, we do sort of miss those 3am nursing/pumping sessions. Not only because of the irresistible baby cuddles, but also because we often had great impromptu business meetings strangely enough.

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 1

Today is day 1 of our 30 day small business cleanse. Today's task is to clean off our physical workspace. We've decided that means our desks.

Carving linoleum blocks on our desk before the concrete.

We've shared the same concrete slab desk for nearly six years. It's a desk we made when we first moved to L.A. It started off as a wooden desk, but after a few years as our linoleum carving station, it refused to come clean anymore so we covered it in concrete. 

L-R: the standing desk where Rosemary is working these days, the concrete desk where Robin is working these days. Both are clearly a mess!

At the moment, this desk is piled high with cards that need to be packaged, as well as piles of random things. We have a really bad habit of letting this area become a landing strip for the odds and ends that are important but that don't have a home of their own, mostly paperwork and packaging materials. This has become particularly bad since the baby was born partially because Rosemary has been camping out on the new standing desk. It's a lot easier to get work done there while baby wearing and during naps, it's just those few steps further away from the studio bassinet making it less likely to wake her up.

Today we'll be cleaning up both areas. We need to set things up so that we keep these spaces reserved for paperwork and not turn them into a magnet for random papers and projects. Wish us luck!

welcome

Welcome to the RDesignsLA blog! We're really excited about our new venture, and can't wait to share it with you! This is where you'll find information about upcoming events, see what's going on in the RDesignsLA studio, and find out what fun and interesting things we stumble upon in the city of Los Angeles.

We're very busy right now getting ready for our first event, we're participating in Platform's Holiday Bazaar tomorrow night in Highland Park. We're working on a series of linocut greeting cards featuring historic Los Angeles roof signs. 

We have some really exciting things coming up in the next few weeks and we can't wait to share them with you! If you want to be kept in the loop about what we're up to, please follow the link below to be added to our newsletter. We promise we won't bother you too often, and of course we'll never share your information with anyone else.

Follow this link to our newsletter signup page. Also, please follow us on Twitter where we tweet under the handle @RdesignsLA or like us on Facebook.

Thank you again for your support!

Rosemary + Robin