Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast, I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about making time for your business development. What does that mean anyway?
Yes. And why should we do it? More importantly, what business development is when you're committing time and energy into building your business on an ongoing basis. Now, whenever we start up a business, we've got all this passion and allegedly lots of time. But as we start building the business, our time gets shorter. And it's really important that we continue even when we're really, really busy to explore business development.
Yeah, like Melanie says, when you first start your business, you're all energetic and you go and take courses and how to do different things and you discover, you know, different aspects about bookkeeping and the laws regarding finances and taxes and invoicing, etc. And the further down the line you get with your business, the less time you have to sit and do this. So have you kept up to date with your financial rules? Have you kept up to date with your books? Have you kept up to date with everything, or are you struggling in the last week before the tax returns due to get everything done? And we're not just talking about money here. We're talking about upskilling and we're talking about improving how you do things in your business. Melanie, when did you start Stomp?
Oh, gosh. Well, I started working on Stomp in April 2013, and I launched my business Persay on the 7th of November 2013.
Right, so that's about seven years that you've been going and having stayed the same in those seven years in terms of anything?
Well, there's still only one employee. That's pretty much everything that's consistent. And... no, nothing stays the same at all, when I first started, my circumstances were different I had younger kids, had less time and my energies weren't wholly devoted into setting up my business, which happens to a lot of people who are starting up and want to see if they can make a success of it. Sometimes they're working in the evenings on their startup because they're working full time or just weekends, I say. So it's it doesn't really matter where you are in business, whether you're full time or part-time or startup or existing. We all need to spend some time committing time to developing your business. And you know, myself and Esther right now, we're very, very busy with our own work, but we're still spending time. I probably say I'd spend maybe a day and a half a month, which is quite a lot actually developing my business, my business strategy, my marketing strategy and currently my website strategy. And if I'm if I don't spend that time devoted to it, then when it is quiet, you know, there's no fallback for me. What about yourself?
Exactly. Whenever you have the time, you don't tend to do as much or that's the time that you start panicking. You know, there's less clients. So now what do I have to do to get the clients in? But when it comes to sales and marketing, it takes time. So if you haven't devoted that time from NOI or from six months ago, then it won't show in the short term. You know, you won't start publishing stuff today on social media and tomorrow have a brand new client. I mean, we don't love that, but it's not the reality for a lot of us. But when it comes to learning more about the changes in your marketing and the changes that you have to do compared to, say, in your case seven years ago, in our case five years ago, social media isn't the same. Whenever we first started out and posted things on Facebook, they had such a bigger reach and such a bigger audience. And now you have to change that up. And instead of just posting text or to just posting images, look at what is working best as it videos is it posting once a week? Is it posting four times a week? All these things and they constantly change. So you have to keep constantly updating and upskilling in and knowing what's going on within the social media platforms, reading up on it. Melanie does a blog once a month on social media round up what has happened in the previous month. But even sometimes when that comes out, things have changed, haven't they, Melanie?
it's almost immediately out of date. I put it out on the first day of the following month. So, you know, they say it was December right now. And so I would put out my very full round up on the 1st of January just so that I can get the last minute, last gasp things up as well. And so it's immediately out of date.
Yeah.
What I do, is I send it to the people that want to hear about it, that want to know about it straight away. So the subscribers and that's one of the areas I work on constantly. Yeah. And the hope is, is that then they'll pass it on to other people. They found it supportive and that's, I know it's just an email list, but it's still business development. It's keeping what would have been a cold relationship warm.
Yeah. Yeah, I know. And you've got that strategy going that we've always been talking about strategy and you've got that strategy going of at least once a month. They're getting information from you, at least once a month they are hearing useful information about what you do and about social media and how it affects them and other things that people can do are to take courses. So Melanie and I both run courses on different aspects of social media, on different social media platforms, right now obviously, we're not doing them in person, but we are doing them online. And so there are lots of ways that you can keep upskilling and build on your business and keep building the foundations up from the foundations and make it strong and make your business development even better.
But this is down to time management, that's the problem that a lot of small businesses and sole traders have, and we totally get that. Well, I was going to say we're both small, but one of us isn't.
I am still small. So, I mean, under 250 employees is still small.
Very funny. But how many employees do you have?
Five.
Right. And then there's me. So, yes. So I am the accounts person. I'm the salesperson. I'm the marketing department. I'm the course creator. I'm you know, I do a lot of, the graphic designer. Not very good one. Thank God for Canva Pro. So, you know,
There are other platforms available.
Yes, there are. But for me, I use Canva. But, you know, it's at the end of the day, I've had to manage my time a lot better because I don't have staff. And because you've got staff, you've got more people coming in and then you reach a point where you still have to manage your time better, correct?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think to, you know, at the minute where we're not going out to events and we're not blocking off that day in the calendar for a conference or for training or whatever, it does get harder to find the time because you're constantly at work, at the desk, in the office, in the garden shed, wherever you work from.
She works in a shed...
I do, it's very nice. But there are times that you need to just block off that time. And Melanie and I both use Google Calendar to just block off time in our in days. Just say right now I am working on X, Y, Z right now. I am going to take a course in whatever it is. And there are loads of places online that you can take courses. Udemy ,Shaw Academy, there's loads of them. Think of I mean, everyone has courses now, especially online.
So what I do is I try and devote most of Monday to making sure that myself and my clients are prepped and ready for the week, and then the rest of the time I'm devoted to speaking to people in Zoom, which of which I'm doing an awful lot of these days. And then I'm also going through, you know, the prep work in order to do these and all of these needs. So a small window, I suppose, the prep work, when they do small window before I speak to somebody could be for a couple of hours and then there's writing up and follow up emails and that sort of stuff. And so we'll have to allow space between the next call. And until I actually started doing this, I didn't realize quite how busy I was. And I've been doing this quite consistently for about three months now. I've always kind of used Google Calendar, but never consistently. And now I'm definitely saving enough time for business development, website creation, blogs. As you know, I write lots of blogs, so I need to set time aside for it, for research, for creating or finding images. And if you don't set that time aside now ahead, you won't make time for it later.
No. And then it'll never get done. And then your blogs won't get written, your emails won't get sent, your sales calls won't get done, your marketing strategy won't be completed. I mean, it's a vicious circle and the busier you get the last time you spend on your business.
Yeah. So I said, I'll talk today was to get you thinking about different ways that you could add business development to your incredibly, incredibly busy life already, but also think about how to manage your time better think about outsourcing is quite funny. We were both laughing when we mentioned this earlier on. We should have thought about that first. If this stuff that you don't like doing, outsource it, OK? Or if you just don't honestly don't make time for it, outsource it, because there's some amazing Vas out there. There's some amazing website developers who will, you know, maintain and update your website for you, you know, shop around, get recommendations. You'll be surprised what you find. And there could be quite local as well.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And do you spend a little bit of time sorting out your Google calendar or your Ikal or wherever you have it? It's we recommend Google Calendar or something that's online because then you see it on your computer, you see it on your phone, you get the notifications, they pop up, they remind you, I mean, because we do like Melanie and I were both laughing, you know, we don't even know what day was today. If it wasn't because of the podcast, we'd be completely lost. I'm sure you're in the same boat.
I'm not even kidding. I actually have lost grasp of what day is on and it's go for my calendar because all the days are sort of melding into one right now.
So, yeah. And I'm sure we're not alone in that either.
Well, I hope you found today's topics really, really useful and try and find what works for you trying to vote some time, if you can, maybe a couple of weeks away, but put some time in now and to let us know how you get on and let us know if you prefer Ikal or Google Calendar or whichever ones you use.
Yeah. And if you would like to get on one of our trainings due to get in touch with us, we do deliver them separately. But I'm sure we could come together and do one together as. Have a good weekend, lots of fun. We'd get done, talk to you next week, guys. Have a good one. Bye bye
bye.