
Meet Tanya Goodall Smith, one of our new 17hats Ambassadors. Tanya runs WorkStory Creative and WorkStory Education in Spokane, Washington. She specializes in branding and visual communications, helping her clients to develop an authentic visual identity across a range of media.
Here, Tanya passes on her advice to anyone starting a small business.
Through my companies, I help brands to look ah-mazing, so thcat the small business people behind those brands are proud to share what they do. Their confidence soars because all their brand elements look “legit.” In the end, they make more money and grow their business.
I also mentor photographers and creatives. I’ve learned so much over the last 20 years about how to run a successful creative business. I feel called on to pass my knowledge along to those who are making their way along the journey I’ve already traveled. Becoming more efficient is one thing I cover in my coaching and classes – including how to utilize a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) like 17hats!
My top three tips
If you’re a one-on-one service provider like me, your business can only grow as large as you have the time to spend offering the service. Figuring out ways to streamline, optimize, and outsource have made my business more efficient. Here are a few ways to maximize your time, impact, and income:
1. Planning. Effective planning helps you stay on track with your goals, your priorities, and your to-do list. By deciding in advance what you need to get done and when you’ll do it, you won’t be dropping the ball, or jumping from task to task without ever completing anything. Planning is the key to maximizing your time.
2. Automate, automate, automate. The more decisions and actions you can make in advance and automate, the more time you’ll have free for providing the one-on-one attention you give to your clients. Plus, you can take on more clients, which equals more money! Automating tasks with software like 17hats also eliminates the need to hire an employee to do those tasks, which equals higher profit for you.
3. Outsource. Whether it’s cleaning and laundry or low-level tasks you can’t automate, outsourcing is another way to free you up to focus on your area of expertise. Here’s how I determine what tasks to outsource. If they can be done by someone else for a significantly lower hourly rate than I charge for my time – and I can produce additional income by taking it off my plate – I’m in!
For example, I hire a cleaner who charges $50 to clean my house. She’s fast and good at what she does. It would take me five+ hours to clean my entire house, if I could even do it without distractions. My hourly rate is $150. If I work during the three hours she’s cleaning, I’ve made $450 with a profit of $400 after paying her. If I consider it would take me five+ hours to do the task, I would be losing $750 in revenue that I could have been making by working instead. I use this same metric for other services.
17hats can help, big time
17hats can be instrumental in automating and streamlining your business systems and processes. When I first signed up years ago, just the option to track my time and auto-generate an invoice with a link to pay was huge. I was wasting so much time making invoices in a document, sending them via email, and then hounding clients to send a check!
Since then I’ve gone on to utilize quotes, contracts, workflows, contact management, pre-written emails, and more. It saves me so much time and headache. And it frees me up to focus on serving my clients.
Parting advice
My business has evolved through the years. I love the flexibility that owning my own small business provides me. I can work around the schedules of my husband and kids. It works really well for our family.
I hope my advice helps any of you who are seeking that same sort of work/life balance with your own small business.
I can say from experience that streamlining, optimizing, and outsourcing have made my business more efficient. Ultimately, steps like that have let me make more money, with the ability to scale and grow.
Good luck out there!
Tanya Goodall Smith’s website and social handles:
instagram.com/workstorycreative/