Welcome to Creator Columnswhere we bring experts HubSpot Creator voices to blogs that inspire and help you grow better.
A miracle that has woven itself through many aspects of my life, such as parenting, my health and entrepreneurship, is a consistent application that I love to work with as i grow.
I often call it a ‘life inventory’ where I collect everything I’m working on, learning and feeling, and ask myself what’s going well and what needs to change.
Inevitably, I spend some of my login time wandering back down memory lane to the early stages of starting my business. With more than a decade’s worth of experience, successes, trials and plenty of teachable moments, it’s only natural to wonder what I could have done differently if I had known then what I know now.
While I could wax poetic about all the things I wish I could share with my 20-year-old self, the advice I’d give for starting your own business is pretty simple.
‘Keeping it simple’ might be the best way to sum up what I’ve learned about almost everything in life. So, go back with me to those early days as I share what I would do firstwithout thinking too much, if I were to start my job today.
Maybe you’re looking for a fresh start in your business or some insight from a seasoned entrepreneur as you start your own business journey. I hope this advice helps not only to give you the clearer starting line you are looking for, but also to combat the pressure of start perfectly.
I know you want to mitigate risk and avoid as many pitfalls as possible. But the learning curve is part of the journey. In the meantime, let these five insights guide your vision and make the process as easy, fun, and adventurous as possible!
The first things I would do if I were starting my business over
1. Start an email list.
Starting an email list that has to be my first piece of advice to you because I can’t count how many times I’ve guided new business owners and entrepreneurs to do this over the years.
I learned how much easier growing a business can be when you don’t have to rely on platforms you don’t own or control to deliver your valuable messages to the people you create for.
While SOCIAL MEDIA is important, it can also be a space where you waste time, money and creative energy trying to engage your audience who live on the other side of a strict and ever-changing SOCIAL MEDIA algorithm.
My advice? Get your email list up and running as soon as possible before any of those resources are wasted in places that won’t produce tangible results. A nurtured email list means you appear in the inboxes of people who I want to hear from you, buy from you, and stay there for your stories and growth.
On SOCIAL MEDIA, they might tap that follow button, but from there they might not see your content for weeks, months, or even year.
And unlike your SOCIAL MEDIA pages, your email list isn’t just one hacking incident away from being completely wiped out, it’s an asset you own. It’s a powerful difference from what any other platform can offer you online.
Nor do you create new offers (paid or free)you can see if what you’re serving is compelling enough to make people want to trade their email addresses for it. As a new business owner, this is an easy, free way to start assessing what your audience wants most from you.
2. Find a mentor.
Mentoring can seem like a big move for a new business owner… with an even bigger price tag. At first we crave answers and guidance, but usually with a beginner’s budget, we tend to keep mentorship on the backburner.
I spent a little too much time putting together my plan out of stubbornness and feeling like I had to to earn all my advice.
But even someone who would eventually become a mentor to many, I realized how many mentors I want to give their advice to newbies! And not all mentoring has to be one-on-one or expensive. They exist mentoring opportunities are all around us if we know where to look.
First, look for free learning paths. Tune in to the podcast, like Goal Diggermy business and marketing podcast, where I share not only what I learn in business, but open up conversations with incredible thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to get their insight as well.
Plus, I even drop episodes that are live mentoring and coaching sessions with all kinds of people who are on their starting lines or business milestones.
Learning from other leaders who inspire you can also be as easy as taking a digital course. They can teach you through their courses which can be available at a more affordable price while delivering their brilliance right to your screen.
Find someone who has gone before you and is doing something similar to what you want or how you want to do it. Look for people who agree with the type of business owner you want to become. If they have a course, take it. If they have a book, read it. If they hold live classes or have an online community, grab a seat.
Eventually, whenever you’re ready, you can even ask them to mentor you in any capacity. You might get your dream mentor!
3. Share your focus and goals.
This can be a difficult part of starting a business because the pressure to be impressive or show off our success can prevent us from showing the building process.
Traveling doesn’t always look ‘pretty’ and it can be tempting to hide those parts (like when we clean the whole house before the house cleaner comes).
But looking back, I regret those times when I hid my learning process, waiting for everything to be ‘perfect’, preventing me from growing because when is anything perfect? Letting people on my journey is when my business completely changed and growth started to build in huge waves.
My audience responded to these seemingly messy or incomplete views of my process with a resounding “This is so real!” We connected on a whole new level and more people wanted to work with me, trust me as a client and accept my new offers.
Beyond “relatability,” here’s why sharing your process and focus is so effective: You want your offerings to make sense to the people you’re making them for. The only way they’ll get the clearest picture of what you’re offering is to let them in long before you finally share ‘then!’ moment.
Surprise brings much less results than anticipation. Show your people what you’re working on and let them support you and fight!
4. Clarify your brand vision.
Starting your business it is already a moment worthy of great pride.
I was so proud to finally get out of my windowless corporate office and start my career as a photographer and then digital marketer, but what I needed to ground me was my brand. In the beginning, I really didn’t know the difference between my business and my brand.
A simple way to reduce all of this is to make your business simply your offering. It’s the solution you give your customers, the service you sell, the products you make! But your brand is your personality behind every offer, service and product. Of course, Audi makes cars, but like a man sales say it makes a difference, right?
On your SOCIAL MEDIA, your website, your ads, your blogs, and everywhere else you appear online, your personality should be visible. Don’t hide behind your offers or think they speak for themselves.
In fact, you are their best advocate. Your excitement and confidence in what you’ve created is what resonates with your audience!
Your personality can emerge long before you even have anything to sell. Think about how you appear on SOCIAL MEDIA.
- Do you know why you post or create?
- When you take a step back, is your brand vision clear with everything you post?
- Can you see your unique perspective, flavor and approach woven into your captions and images?
If you’re struggling here, I’ve coined a social content approach called JK5 that might help keep your creative flow simple.
Every time you set out to create a post, choose one of your five unique content pillars that guide content creation and show your brand’s personality to your followers. It could be parenting, pets, style, interior design, poetry or anything that shows who YOU are!
5. Choose your tools wisely.
I learned this analogy through my experience as a photographer, juggling various lenses in my camera bag. I felt that pressure when I was just starting out to have every single lens for every possible scenario.
As my business grew, I bought new lenses, but found that there were only a few that I would reach for again and again. I didn’t need all the fancy tools right away, and in many cases I didn’t need them at all.
When you’re just starting your business, you’ll probably be overwhelmed with all the options for the best tools and platforms. Your head will spin.
But most of them are not necessary for what you need on the first day. You don’t just have to spend your time and money I’m looking for as a job when it could easily distract you from being able to do real work.
Take a few steps back and analyze what your greatest needs are. Differentiate between ‘nice to have’ and ‘need to have’ in order for your growth to progress.
The key to knowing the difference is looking at the tasks that are already on your to-do list versus the ones you’re looking forward to in the future.
For example, you may need to invest in accounting software before you can start working on your website. In fact, I will fully admit that until THIS year, I didn’t have a real branded, designer-made logo.
You can go further than you ever imagined with much less than you think!
Respect your journey
Overall, the biggest surprise for me is that I don’t really want to repeat any of it.
Nor someone who enjoys the learning process so much, it was only through hiccups, guesses, mistakes and early days that I managed to awaken the relentless lifelong learner and educator in me.
My learning path is the only reason I can have enough insight to meet people at their starting lines or messy environments and help them skip some of the confusion. I like to help smooth the starting lines.
You’re capable of much more amazing things than you may know, so I’m all for helping people like you get there.
So while these are in some ways insights born from moments of ‘regret’, I’d say I value them much more as transformative experiences.
Respect your weaknesses and challenges along the way! Not only have they helped YOU become who you are and the skills you carry, but they are also a pathway for you to help others get through the mess because we’re all here just trying to figure out how we’re going.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/starting-business-over
