5 Small Business Tips from Stak Marketing

Running a small business is no joke and has a sharp learning curve. There's a difference between running a home organizing company and running an organized home organizing company. I had the opportunity to chat with Michelle from @stakmarketing about some of the most important lessons you need to learn as a small business owner. Read the highlights of our conversation below or watch the Live on Instagram.

Michelle is a good friend of mine who owns her own marketing company, Stak Marketing. I have learned so much from working with Michelle. There are so many things that us small business owners end up learning the hard way because we don't have a background in business and marketing.

What are your top tips for organizing a small business?

It's normal to be good at what you do as a business while not being good at the back end of business and marketing things. Michelle and I were sitting together while our kids played, talking about some things that we could do with Reset Your Nest to better organize it on the back end. Whether you own your own small business or are interested in organizing some digital spaces in your life, here are 5 small business tips from Stak Marketing:

Tip 1: Photo Organization

Organizing digital photos is kind of a nightmare. Wouldn't you agree? Michelle knows that this is one of my biggest pain points. While I love organizing, it's so hard to organize photos on the back end because of the many organizing projects we do. Photos accumulate so fast, plus we have to edit pictures and get them onto social media. It's super hard to manage.

One thing Michelle does every quarter with her family (aka every 3 months) is go through the photos on everyone's phones. If you take 10+ photos of the same thing like I do, choose the one you love and delete the other 9. Then, with all of the photos that are left, import them to another location. If you have an iPhone you can use iCloud to store all of my photos off of your phone. If you use iCloud, you can then access all of those photos on an Apple computer (e.g. Mac) to organize your photos by year, month, and activity.

This system can help you to organize photos in a way that makes it easier to find images by month and activity and pull the photos you want whenever you need them.

When you're labeling your images (especially if you have a business) Michelle highly recommends using hyphens between words. If you have a small business and you're importing photos to your website, you'll already be one step ahead because both SEO and Google loves hyphens! Google can read hyphens in a file name like a space (it doesn't read underscores or periods like a space). Renaming your photos with hyphens will really help your website's SEO over time.

Using this photo naming method has really helped me to organize all of our organizing project images for Reset Your Nest. I've been using this same method but in my Google Drive. I keep track of the region, year, month, and client/space through folders and the name of the image.

There are lots of ways you can organize your photos but I think the most important thing is to be consistent, whether you're using iCloud, Google Drive, Amazon photos, Shutterfly, hard drive, or something else. Be consistent and edit through your photos at least once every 3 months. Sometimes I feel like I need to do edits more frequently depending on how many projects we're doing, but the idea is to keep it from getting overwhelming.

And never forget to back up your photos in two to three other locations as well. You don't want to organize all of your photos only to lose them due to a computer or program failure. Always backup your photos!

Tip 2: Create a Brand Guide

Invest in a brand guide, they're really not that expensive, and they're the secret to maintaining consistent branding across platforms. A brand guide should at least include all of the fonts that you use and all of your brand colors' cmyk, rgb, and hex code (color systems).

Somewhere down the line you're going to need those codes to make your brand consistent. It's not a huge investment if you find a company to do it for you. It makes it easier for you and your team to be consistent with branding, whenever you're making changes or updates to anything you can easily reference your brand guide to know what colors and fonts to use.

Tip 3: Weekly & Monthly Checklists

I know that creating weekly and monthly checklists for your business can sound daunting. Michelle shared some of the things she keeps on her weekly checklist:

By following this same weekly checklist every week, she is able to stay on top of her business. Obviously this weekly checklist is going to look different for everyone depending on your business and workflow.

This is one of my favorite tips from Michelle because I have felt like a hamster on a wheel in the past. I have a lot of do-to lists but these tips really help you to know that things will get done in their due time by grouping tasks together. No more working around the clock, through the night, and working early mornings to make things happen. No more keeping a mental tally of all the important things you shouldn't forget to do.

Keeping a monthly checklist can include things like invoicing people at the end of the month. Many small businesses say that they forget to bill people. It's so important but it's just one of those things that you can forget to do when you have so many other things to juggle in your business and personal life.

Tip 4: Don't Be Afraid to Ask For Help

It's okay to outsource, you don't have to do everything in-house! This goes hand-in-hand with Michelle's final tip, her golden rule of business...

Tip 5: You Reap What You Sow

What you put into your business is what you're going to get out of it. Spend the same amount of time on your business as you do with your clients. Give your business the same amount of love that you give your clients or customers. Your clients will notice and you'll feel it as a business. Really prioritize your business, it's like another baby.

When I was first starting my business, I had a friend who's really smart and loves working for start-ups and she told me that I would need to be prepared to invest just as much time on the business side as I was spending in clients' homes. I didn't understand that at first but then I started spending more time on the business than in clients' homes. I was trying to do it all by myself and on a budget because I didn't have any capital to put into Reset Your Nest. I didn't yet fully understand the value of having business professionals do what they're trained to do.

It's like when we remodeled our house; my husband was doing all of the electrical work and he did a great job for not being an electrician. But later we had to hire an electrician to come in and fix it after all the sheetrock was already up and it probably cost us three times more.

For Reset Your Nest, I created my own website, I did so many things on the back end people like Michelle have helped me to fix all of the mistakes that I made along the way and I'm sure it would have saved so much time, money, and energy to hire these people from the beginning to help me get started on the right foot. But I was scared to take that leap and financial investment from the beginning but there's value in outsourcing the things we're not good at so we can focus on doing the things that we are good at. Give your business some self-care and reach out to the experts for help. That's why they're there.

I know this is different from the content I normally share but I get so many questions from those interested in starting their own organizing business for advice on how to get started. I love this approach on how to organize your business because I talk all the time about how to best organize your home. My business wouldn't be organized without Michelle, which is why I needed her help to share her great small business tips with you. Your business is just another space in your life!

My passion for helping other professional organizers achieve success has been my focus for the last couple years. Stephanie Sikora from Sikora Solutions and I have partnered together to consolidate backend costs, collaborate on operations and improve our processes. Stephanie and I are so excited to be offering operations support to professional organizers everywhere. We are helping those in the organizing industry find more success by working together to streamline backend processes. If you want to find out more about what we've learned and benefit from our collective experience, please DM us on Instagram or email info@resetyournest.com.

Jen is the founder of Reset Your Nest, a Professional Home Organizing Business in Utah (servicing Salt Lake City, Park City, Ogden, Alpine, Highland, Mapleton, and St. George). She loves creating order and systems out of chaos and is known for bringing a beautiful aesthetic as well as easy to maintain function to any space. She shares her tips and tricks on Instagram @reset_your_nest.