Build to Enough

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Keila Hill-Trawick: Hello. You're listening to Build to Enough, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to scale at their own pace. I'm your host, Keyla Hill Traywick, and I'll be your chief storyteller and cheerleader in a world that glorifies endless expansion, we're tuning out the noise and discussing the beauty of enough. Each episode will dive into inspiring stories, practical insights, and strategies to cultivate sustainable success on your [00:00:30] own terms. So whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, or aspiring entrepreneur, get ready for a refreshing take on the entrepreneurial journey. This is build to enough. Here on the Build to Enough podcast, we delve into practical strategies to help business owners build to enough. And today we're exploring the hurdles faced by entrepreneurs on their journey and the invaluable lessons that are learned from overcoming these challenges. Here's the thing entrepreneurship is not easy. Even [00:01:00] when it gets easy, it feels like there is always another level to beat. Challenges are inevitable and honestly should be expected, even though they make things a bit harder as we're trying to make our way. But today, I want to talk about a few that I've seen personally or experienced as I've been building little fish, and some ways that we can approach them to make it at least a little bit less hard. Let's jump into the first one, which is financial challenges. Small businesses have [00:01:30] to be funded some way. All businesses do. But when you're small, we don't have usually the ability to raise capital to go out and get funded outside.

Keila Hill-Trawick: And so when we're thinking about how do we build businesses with a little bit of money to start, there's a couple of examples that I could bring up. The first one is MailChimp. Mailchimp had a modest budget when they started very small, and they just bootstrapped their way to success. Shout out to MailChimp Hometown Heroes right [00:02:00] out of Atlanta, but they focused on essential features and leveraging user feedback so that they could grow with their users and thereby make a more valuable product so that they could get more money down the line. And if you don't know, they ended up getting bought by Intuit, they are doing just fine. But it does make me think about this idea of when you're first starting and you're just trying to figure out how to get the money to pay for all the things that you need to do. One of the things that you can focus on is just making the thing that you are doing better, the better that you can [00:02:30] improve it. And the smallest of ways, the more ability that you have to attract customers and clients that will pay you for your service so that you can do it better depending on your business. And this is the case for a lot of service providers, you'll also probably have to navigate seasonal changes.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Now as an accountant, of course tax season, we always know that there is going to be this rise in income and probably this fall as we make our way throughout the year for when our services are most needed. But another example is [00:03:00] Airbnb. Of course, they're having economic downturns in different states and different areas throughout the world, based on everything from weather to changes in the government. It can be all kinds of things. And so they started diversifying their services. When we had travel restrictions through the pandemic, they started offering online experiences, focusing on local stays. So this idea that maybe you can't fly overseas, but here are some things that you could do in your own backyard and still use us to be able to do it. Diversifying [00:03:30] your income streams is a risk tool. It makes sure that when one thing is falling or rising, you've got something to offset it so that all your eggs aren't in one basket. So some of the things that you can start thinking about as practical strategies when we think about financial strategies are, yes, diversifying revenue streams, but also implementing cost cutting measures at all points throughout the year. You should know your absolutely required expenses and those expenses that they're [00:04:00] helpful. They are nice. They add a bit of luxury. But if you had to cut something, you know where that you can start.

Keila Hill-Trawick: And then you always want to maintain a financial safety net. I'm an accountant. You knew that that was going to come up, but just making sure that you have a cash cushion again, for a lot of service providers, we're going to navigate some peaks and valleys throughout the year financially. And you want to make sure that when those valleys show up, there's enough money in the bank to take care of you until you're on the rise again. The next thing that I want to talk about is work life balance and burnout. [00:04:30] I have experienced burnout at least three times that I can acknowledge, probably more times than I can count on specific days that I couldn't figure out at the time. But they happened at different points throughout the business for different reasons. So early on, it was just me. I didn't have anybody to help me. I was working full time, doing little fish part time. And so the burnout came from just like being stretched at both ends and the amount of time that I could dedicate to all [00:05:00] of the things that I was doing. After all, I'm not just a worker, I was. As a government worker, a small business owner, a wife, a sister, a friend, a all of these things in addition to taking care of myself. And so burnout kind of was inevitable and is inevitable for a lot of solopreneurs if you don't get the support that you need around yourself.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Then we got kind of to the middle. So let's say three ish, 3 to 5 years in, there was no hierarchy. So I was hiring people. I was hiring people to help me, [00:05:30] but I was always the flex employee. And to some extent I still am. But we're getting out of that and we'll get to that in a second. But it meant I was the final reviewer of everything. I'm the face of the business, meaning that when people interact with little fish, I'm usually the first person that they're going to see on their screens. That was overwhelming. Every time we had turnover in the business or we changed something in the business, it all kind of fell back to me. And now in my most recent, uh, burnout, I started realizing [00:06:00] that a lot of it was self-inflicted. I was jumping into things even though I had hired people to support me with it. I was so used to being on this hamster wheel of doing all the things that I kind of just built it in as how I had to work, and so I'm getting a better sense of balance. But we're always in danger that I could be the flex employee again if somebody left that I'm the holder of all of the information. So I'm telling you all that story to say burnout is relatively common and it can happen at any phase of [00:06:30] your business.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Your job is to try to head off as much as you can, prioritizing what you need to be doing, setting time management boundaries at the beginning of your business. And that can be everything from how often people can book calls with you to our application process at Little Fish to make sure that we're only getting people who are aligned with what we do and how we do it on the phone and into our service. It also kind of means you got to hire before you're ready. It can be financially daunting to think about who the first person [00:07:00] on your team is going to be, whether that's a contractor or a full time employee. But if you wait too late to do it, you're the person that is holding all of the strings until you get somebody in to help you. Okay, we all know that. Like we said, since entrepreneurship is hard at a lot of different ways, we have to have resilience and perseverance. You are constantly overcoming setbacks and challenges. The market changes your product or service launch fails. There was COVID, [00:07:30] um, you have trouble finding new clients or new team members. So one of the examples that I'll give here is slack. We love slack. We use it all the time. Um, but they definitely face setbacks. In the early years, they were a gaming company to start and pivoted to being a communication platform.

Keila Hill-Trawick: So that meant that they had to start looking at what parts of the gaming platform would really be helpful for where they were headed. And that's us too. As micro businesses, we are thinking about like, oh, is the thing that I'm offering, the thing that the market [00:08:00] wants or needs, is it at a price point that makes sense for who I'm trying to serve? We've got to be thinking about how we can use what we know to shape how we grow, what we're offering, and what we do for ourselves as owners. This means that you've got to build a robust support network. You have to have people around you that are really helping you to build the company that you want to build. Leverage people like mentors or other peers that have been in the game for longer than you have and can [00:08:30] give you the heads up on things that you're going to walk into that you may not even know to be ready for, and then finally adopt a mindset of learning from failures. I am one of the worst at this. I wouldn't even say I'm a recovering perfectionist because I'm not recovering. I am still in the throes of it, but I have gotten to a place where I try to recognize mistakes are inevitable. Again, we're people. We are not machines, and machines make mistakes, but as individuals, no matter how hard we try, [00:09:00] there's human error.

Keila Hill-Trawick: And what we have to say is whether that is because of something that was our fault, something that was out of our control. Failures within the business and within life are going to happen. How can we shift that mindset to think of them as learning experience, so that we can do better next time, instead of ruminating in it for far too long? I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to me. I'm just. I'm just saying. So the final challenge that you may run into are unexpected pivots. So there may be things that are necessity [00:09:30] driven. Uh, Netflix used to be a DVD company. I am old enough to have started when they were DVDs and mailing them to my house, and now we stream everything. But what that meant was that they had to be ahead of the curve. They had to start making relationships with networks. When they saw that networks could pull out, they had to start making their own content. These are pivots that they didn't know when they were making DVDs available to us, but that once you do know it, you need to start figuring out how to push [00:10:00] your company in that direction. And then you've also got to. Up to market trends as much as I am Oversubscriptions, a lot of our software has gotten to a place where you don't just buy it, you are doing the, um, subscription based model.

Keila Hill-Trawick: You are starting to look at it as software, as a service. Think about somebody like a Microsoft Office or Adobe, for example. How do you know that you're going to have to make different changes? Well, one, do regular market research [00:10:30] that's internally, what are your clients asking for? What do you realize is coming up on a regular basis of questions that they have, or things that they want you to provide? Stay informed about industry developments. Again, on a macro level, just understanding what is going on in the bigger picture, but on a micro level, what are you seeing for peers or from peers in your space? Do you see them shifting in the ways that they're offering services or the types of services that they're offering? Does that mean that you should automatically change yours? Nope. [00:11:00] But it does give you some insight as to what might be shifting around you that you won't be aware of if you just stay in your little box and then finally foster a culture of innovation within the organization, within your team. There are ways that the diversity of thought for the people that are working with and for you to help you think of new ideas so that everything doesn't have to come from your brain. But that means that you've got to create a space where people feel comfortable giving you feedback and giving you new ideas that you can implement.

Keila Hill-Trawick: I know [00:11:30] at Little Fish, it has been a game changer in making sure that we are looking beyond just what I think that people want to everyone that is in the company offering a different thought process based on what they're interacting with, with our clients. At the end of the day, every customer's journey is different, and that means that the challenges that you face will not be the same ones that I face or these big companies that I mentioned. But what we all have in common is that at some point, we're going to reach a point where times get tough. [00:12:00] It just comes with the territory. And so hopefully these examples that I shared provide inspiration to you along your journey and the fight to keep going. Challenges are going to arrive, but that doesn't mean that it's time to quit. You just have to be ready for them and hopefully this helps you get closer to doing that. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Build to Enough. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the love with your fellow entrepreneur friends, and make sure to sign up for the Build to [00:12:30] Enough newsletter. The link is in the show notes. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to redefine success one intentional step at a time.