A Few of Our Current Favorite Resources

The CBL recently hosted an open meeting where we invited fellow business owners and makers to join us for an evening of wine, snacks and lots of resource sharing. It's always great to get perspective from other makers on what they've tried, loved and hated. Funnily enough, a few people kept claiming they had nothing to share, but I knew that everyone has a few apps, books, or whatever they absolutely can't do business without. I'd never heard of at least 75% of the resources people shared. It's so powerful, and necessary, to connect with other small business owners. I've collected some here that are universally helpful for all small business people.

What are your favorite small business resources?

Photos:

• Whitagram - add white or color frames to assorted photo sizes
• A Color Story - photo editing app with filters that enhance colors within photos you've taken
• Pic Tap Go - intuitive photo-editing app that can post images to social media
• Snapseed - mobile photo-editing app with similar features to photoshop.

Operations + Accounting:

• Grasshopper - virtual phone system for entrepreneurs
• Wholesale Matchmaker - wholesale dating service (very limited slots available)
• BenchWorks - inventory/production management for makers and artists
• Ship Station - shipping management

Organization + Planning:

• Evernote - organize everything
• If This Then That - pretty much helps you automate almost anything
• Freed Camp - free project management system
• Follow Up Then - creates super simple email reminders
• Planoly - visually organize and plan posts for Instagram
• Etsy on Sale - helps schedule and plan item renewals
• Instapaper - saves articles in one place for you to peruse at your leisure
• Mapstr - map app that tracks cool stuff and creates sharable maps
• OneTab - saves tabs into list format

Non-App ie Old School Resources:

• The Library - a great resource for books (obvy), research and a quiet space to work. Some libraries even have e-books you can check out onto your Kindle. Yipee!
• Deep Work, by Cal Newport - suggestions to get to the 'real work' part of business
• Clear Solutions - simple, aesthetically pleasing display pieces
• The Printful - on-demand printing and shipping of your designs on t-shirts, posters, etc.

Help! How do I use Snapchat?

That was my plea to my best friend who heads up marketing for a fairly big kids clothing brand. Her reply, I have no idea! We were both totally baffled, feeling both incredibly old and totally brain dead every time we tried to use the app. Basically, if you're over the age of 25 you've probably never used Snapchat even though the app has been around since 2011 (I have vague memories of a former assistant talking to me about this app where pictures disappeared within 24 hours..). In the beginning, it was mostly used for dating and entertainment (hello, pictures/videos disappear "forever" after a certain amount of time, essentially the perfect app for sending d$@*k pics), now it's a mainstream marketing tool used by major companies (Cosmopolitan, MTV, ESPN) to reach out to their audience and with roughly 8 billion (yep, it's nuts) videos viewed daily it's kind of a big deal. Because of that and my major writing phobia, I decided I needed to get myself and my business onto Snapchat since a portion of my demographic is in the millennial age range that uses the app. After a few sad, failed attempts to use it, I hit the interwebs for the answers. Below are some of the most useful articles I found on both how to use the app and why I'd even want to. So, start reading and get yourself and your biz on Snapchat. If you're so inclined, feel free to follow me on Snapchat here. Happy snapping!

Very good tutorials to figure how the hell Snapchat works:

• http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-snapchat-2015-12
• http://www.wired.com/2016/04/how-to-use-snapchat-guide-millennials/

Some good ideas for how to use Snapchat for your business:

• https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/270663 and https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2016/04/ways-small-businesses-use-snapchat/
• https://www.shopify.com/blog/75307013-snapchat-marketing-the-key-to-discovering-and-engaging-your-most-loyal-fans

Some Snapchat facts:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrdW4iP-U40

Some people you I think use Snapchat really really well:

• Everlane - https://www.snapchat.com/add/everlane
• P.F. Candle Co. - https://www.snapchat.com/add/pfcandleco
• Gary Vaynerchuk - https://www.snapchat.com/add/garyvee

A Little Thought Experiment That Might Change Your Business

When you have an established creative small-business, it is easy to get swept up in the day-to-day tasks, urgent orders, and seemingly never-ending avalanche of to-do lists. While obviously all this needs to get done for your business to continue running, it is equally important to step back periodically and examine the bigger picture of your self-employed life.

One of those bigger picture questions came to me recently while reading Chip and Dan Heath’s fantastic book Decisive. The book systematically destroys the common cognitive biases we all face when trying to make decisions, but also provides enlightening theory on decision-making, and actionable advice on how to make better decisions in your own life. It’s a great read for anyone, but is especially pertinent to the small-business owner, who is faced with countless decisions every day that they alone are tasked with making.

Image © 2015 Justin Gammon

One of the four “villains” of decision-making discussed in the book is Narrow Framing, i.e limiting the options we consider when making a decision. Humans have a tendency to narrowly define our choices when making a decision, so much so that most of our decisions in life are posed as merely a “should I do x, or not do x?” question.

The authors encourage us to break out of this narrow decision framing to come up with better solutions. One of the techniques they suggest is called the “Vanishing Options Test.” When struggling with a decision, pretend there is a genie who, instead of granting you 3 wishes, takes AWAY 3 options from you. As the authors paraphrased it:

“You cannot choose any of the current options you are considering. What else could you do?”

This simple technique forces you to come up with creative solutions that would have never occurred to you, had your first instinct choices been available to you. “Until we are forced to dig up a new option, we’re likely to stay fixated on the ones we already have… Removing options can ...do people a favor, because it makes them notice that they’re stuck on one small patch of a wide landscape.”

Reading through this section of Decisive, I was immediately struck with an idea for another thought experiment:

What would you do if everything in your business was destroyed?

Think about it. All of your inventory is lost. Your website crashes and is unrecoverable. You lose all your marketing, branding, and art files. No more business cards, line sheets, or show booth set-ups.

Would you rebuild your business the same way? Would you simply recreate your same products you lost? Would you make your website look the same? Would you even name your business the same?

When I’ve posed this question to fellow business-owners, almost all of them answer that they would change some parts of their business. Some would have different product. Others would change their branding. Some would throw it all out and begin in a totally different direction. The obvious follow-up question to someone who would change when forced to is …

“Well, what’s stopping you from changing now?”

We all are guilty of letting inertia and busyness make the decisions for us, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If there is something you would do differently if your business imploded and you were forced to start over from scratch, chance are you can make that change now, without the whole disaster scenario.

We get up in our heads about what we can and can’t do in our businesses. Tell ourselves that our customers won’t like this new line of products, or that it doesn’t fit into our current branding. But the truth is, you own your business, and you are your own boss. You can make whatever decisions you want. Sometimes all it takes is a little thought experiment in order to give ourselves permission to make our business what we want them to truly be.