How To Grow Your Small Business! 6 Tips | Entrepreneur Life, Hair Accessories

Hi guys welcome back to my channel. My name is shannon the founder of oh so curly, i'm a hair, blogger and also a girl boss. Entrepreneur type realist, advice giver. So if you enjoy that kind of content make sure you subscribe to my channel for more and let's just get straight into this video, so in this video i'm going to talk about the best things i've done for my business in a few past videos, i've talked About the mistakes i've made and the worst things i've done within my business. So in this video i wanted to shine a light on the best things i've done for my business, in hopes that you guys can take that knowledge and apply it to your own businesses and see the growth that i've seen from doing these things. So, let's just get straight into the first one, so tip number one is outsourcing. That is probably number one on the list of the best things i've ever done for my business. You'Ve probably heard me talk about outsourcing before in my past videos. I actually, a few years ago, maybe three years ago, outsourced a lot of tasks within my business so that i didn't have to work in my business. I could work on my business and that has given me so much more free time to think about ways to grow the business and think more into the marketing side of things. Instead of the operating the business, i outsource to a business called support or business services, and i will leave a link for them down below this, isn't sponsored or any kind of thing like that. I just like to share. I'Ve referred a lot of people to their business and they've been a great help to me. First thing that i outsourced was customer service because i found that it was hard to be fulfilling orders posting on social media. Doing all the other tasks, along with replying to customer queries and sorting out refunds and returns and any other kind of questions they have regarding orders and the website that i outsource to a virtual assistant, business manager and she takes care of all of those emails that Come through my inbox, which takes a lot of weight off my shoulders, and i don't have to worry too much about that side of things. But i also, of course, check in and make sure that everything being said between two parties makes sense and is, according to my guidelines, you can also outsource other things, for example social media. In total you can outsource engagement, you can outsource outreach to companies. For example, we outsource also with supportable services our wholesale side of things, so they manage the emails for any wholesale inquiries that come through, and we also outreach to other retailers that we may want to work with. So that is something that i don't myself handle. I just give it away to the third party, which is support or business services. So if you are struggling with having too much things to do too much things on your mind and just having no time to actually work on ways to grow, your business definitely think about outsourcing to someone else. It will change your business life. The second best thing i've done for my business is diversify year. Manufacturers i have, over the past six to seven years, been back and forth from suppliers in the eu, in china and in the uk, and i've found that it's best to have multiple choices when it comes to your products, because you don't ever want to get in A position where one of your manufacturers stopped doing the product that has been selling well and that has happened to me multiple times with different products within my brand and then you're stuck in this position. Where you don't know where to get this product from, then you find your left in that position, where you have to again try and test the products from the new supplier and make sure meets the same standard that your price product had, which is a whole journey. In itself - and i have done a video on some of my trials and tribulations within that side of things manufacturing and changing suppliers in another video. But if you do want me to dive deeper into this, definitely let me know in the comments down below but having more options than one that you've tested and tried, as a sort of backup plan is very sensible and the best way to move forward within your Business because things do happen, for example, during the 2020 um situation that had worldwide a lot of people had issues with suppliers being cut off. I know a lot of businesses that had hair products and skin care products had problems getting their pots for the products. So you never want to be in that situation always have a backup plan, whether it is a more expensive plan. At least you have that, on the background, just in case something like an emergency happens and you're cut off from your supplier. The third best thing i've done for my business is building a community before i've even launched my products. I did this with oso curly. In the beginning, we just started off as a instagram page sharing images of girls with curly hair as a sort of inspo page, and we shared advice here and there too. But in the back of my mind i knew that i wanted to eventually launch a product, but i wanted to make sure that we had an audience to do that too, and also build a community. We would do on fridays, follow a friday and shout out some of our followers on the friday and just thank them for engaging and interacting with our page, and this really helped to build a community and a lot of our customers. And followers still remember that. From back then, to this day, and it's really helped them to fall in love with the brand and the products, and we catered the products to what they actually wanted to the fourth best thing. I'Ve done for my business is have a an accountant, and this is something that i've only just invested in and just done, and this is six nearly seven years down the line. Please don't wait as long as i have done. That was probably one of the worst things i've done for my business, not having an accountant, but for a very long time. I was doing my accounting myself until i changed to a limited company, which means that i can't really do it myself. I'M not an expert in that side of things, but what i was doing for a long time is just recording my incomings and outgoings and then trying to like really break down the cost of each product. But i tell you when you get an accountant. They just know certain things that you wouldn't know off the top of your head and they get way deeper into your finances and your business, so getting an accountant will set you forward rather than backwards. So i definitely would recommend outsourcing an accountant or just a financial advisor in general, so the fifth best thing i've done for my business is recording my process and my journey on the back end of things, for example, on a monthly now for the past year, i've Been recording kpis, which i had no idea what they were. I kind of did it manually just by writing down how many sales we had each month and recording how many followers we got each month. But kpis are key performance indicators and this is a way for you to see what is going well and what's not going well and what's changing within your business month by month throughout the year we just have a spreadsheet and it has different sections. For example, shopify orders wholesale orders instagram followers. What sales did we have on that month? How many sales we got, how many email subscribers and so on - and this is just a good way for you to like look into how your business is growing and what's happening throughout the month, because you don't want to sell through your business year by year and Not really record what's going on and what has caused an influx of orders on what has caused. Maybe a downward spike in orders so definitely make sure you start to record kpis. Alongside of that, you may want to start writing out and recording sops, which are standard operating procedures, just recording what you do in your business, how long it takes what you do step by step, for example, when fulfilling an order. How long does it take you to print off your label and pay for the postage? How long does it take you to pack the box? How long does it take you to go from here to the post office and back? I recently done that this week and realized how much time it actually takes to make a product and send a product, and you can factor that into your product cost, because if you were to pay someone to do the job, you'd have to pay them. For that amount of time, and how much would you pay them for that? So these are things that you really need to keep in mind for a growing business. If you want to hire staff in the future, you need to be recording what they need to do and how long it takes, and it will just make the process of hiring way easier. Now the sixth thing that i've done to really help the growth of my business is reading books, listening to podcasts and just really research in business on a regular basis, not just in the beginning, not just when things are going wrong, but on a consistent basis daily. If you can, what i typically do is i follow a bunch of podcasts using the podcast app on my iphone and whenever they have new episodes, it just pops up on my screen and i usually like to listen to podcasts when i'm on the way to places When i'm driving, when i'm in the gym along with that, are books, of course, so i read a lot of self-development books in the beginning. Just to get my mindset right and then i also started to read a lot of business advice books as well, which i'll leave a list of my favorites down below. I often go back to the books that have helped me as well in times of need just to reboost that mindset that i was in when i was reading it and you could read a book once but not actually apply the methods. So, for example, right now, i'm rereading the 12 month the 12 week year. I listened to it on audible a few years ago, but now i'm rereading it and applying it again to my life, thanks to my friend ashley, who put me onto it again. So i'm reading that again, audible's really good for those who can't actually sit down and read a book whether it's by a kindle or a physical book. So i definitely would recommend signing up to audible. I pay for it monthly and i'll get a free book. Every single month, so it kind of encourages me to read more, which i like and there's just like a whole bunch of books within the business section and the self development section that i have within my wish list that i just pick one every single month. Along with that, i want to stress the importance of mentors surrounding yourself with like-minded people, for example. This is a reason why i started my boss-up group, and a lot of the members are thanking me now because they feel, like i've, never been around similar people. To me, within the similar sector and other product business owners, so they're really enjoying the community side of things, and it's just great to learn from someone who's been there before you. I have mentors myself that have helped me along my journey. Some are on a similar level as me that we kind of learn from each other together within the same time frame, and then some are way ahead of me in business and have been in business in different sectors for years, and i learn new things from them. Even though they're not in the same industry, there's certain things that i hadn't even thought about that they think about, and it just helps you to expand and to grow, so i'd recommend investing in a mentor or just kind of find mentors in online interviews. I found mentors within eric thomas and les brown and tony robbins just from watching their videos, so you don't always have to pay for a mentor or a mentorship program. You can do it freely just by watching videos, but when you want more detailed and one-on-one advice, i definitely recommend investing in a group program similar to the boss up group, so i'll leave the link for that down below. If you are interested. Those are some of the things that i feel have really helped to boost my business and grow my business over the years. I hope you found this video helpful. Let me know if there are any things from this video that you are now going to implement in your own business. Make sure you subscribe to my channel for more and i will catch you in the next one. Bye guys