Not all is lost, even if your business depends on social gatherings! Here's how we cope.
For many small business owners like us, this forced halt can be used for the betterment of ourselves, and our business.
Meditation, Jogging and building a website
Owning a small business comes with many challenges. From learning Quickbooks,and effective marketing, to invoicing clients, and inventory counts, these are just some of the tasks on our plate. Did we mention these are just a few of the admin tasks? In addition, there are the less glamorous parts of the business, like washing pots and pans, ironing linen, deep cleaning the grills, and working 16 hour days. These, and so many other pieces make up the puzzle of small business ownership. Owning a small business challenges you to wear multiple hats, and to get your hands dirty. For us, this is the fun part, and why we enjoy it so much. It means that we have control of how we run our business. But what happens when the world stops, and you have no other choice than to halt your business run?
As a catering company, we live for celebrations, literally. Our business runs on people gathering in celebration. Our guests invite us to help them celebrate birthdays, engagements, quinceaneras and even weddings. We in turn show up with our delicious food. It's truly a dream job. We get to help bring people together over great food. Personally, we can't think of anything better. But while we come together as a community to flatten the curve, our business is at a standstill.
So, what now? What does a small business owner do when things feel so out of control? (We won't get into the complicated details on applying for loans, grants, etc.) We will instead share the simple actions we've taken to feel more in control. In both how we manage this stressful time, and the ways we chose to work "on" our business instead of "in" our business.
Honestly, first things first, just breath. It''s that simple and maybe cliche, but during these difficult times, nothing has helped us more than breathing. For us breathing comes in one of two forms, one of them being meditation. Just ten minutes of breathing and mindfulness, first thing in the a.m, helps us brace for the day. The second is jogging. We found breathing to be a multi use tool. We've maintained our neighborhood jog schedule, and let us tell ya, this type of breathing makes you feel like you can conquer the world. Together, meditation, and jogging have help us take care of ourselves and in turn be able to help our business.
Specially now more than ever, being able breath is such a gift.
Once we found some mental clarity, we felt better equip to focus on parts of the business that were otherwise neglected. Here's the truth, we had a bad website, we don't mean bad like it wasn't legible or had bad photos, rather than bad as in" our SEO wasn't even set up correctly!" Which is the worst kind of tragedy, it's truly a miracle we were ever found online!
By the time you read this, our not so cute ,old website, will be a thing of the past.
This uncertain time has allowed us to work on our business as opposed to in it.
After watching countless online tutorials, and reading Donald Miller's "Building a StoryBrand, we got to work on our website and SEO. We changed every single thing about it, from color scheme to fonts, to new and improved photos, and most importantly the content within the site.
A total overhaul of our website felt like the right way to spend this time. After all, our website is a valued employee that is telling the world all about us 24/7.
In retrospect, we can't be too mad at ourselves for having a bad first website, we didn't know half of the things we now know about the inner workings of marketing a small business.
What really matters is that we had a website, flaws and all, we had to let it exist in the world for us to be found, and for us to learn what we did in a year.
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