What Do You Love About Running Your Business? (And why aren’t you doing more of it?)

There are usually two reasons entrepreneurs start a business: necessity or love. (No, not THAT kind of love.) If you truly love running your business, it’s unlikely you got started out of the basic need to earn a living or because you simply hated your old job.

But, no matter the reason you went to work for yourself, there will always be things you dislike (hate?) about being “The Boss”. The question then becomes, “Why are you doing them instead of the things you enjoy?”

Maybe this quotation from world-famous, serial entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson will help us make it clearer:

“I believe that drudgery and clock-watching are a terrible betrayal of that universal, inborn entrepreneurial spirit.”

Admin tasks, payroll, bills, and so many other things can interfere with doing what you love about being a designer, designing! Or, if you're a furnishings dealer, selling! So, why do you let all that stuff take up 40%-60% of your time, energy, and focus?

If You Don’t, Who Will?

If You Don’t, Who Will?

The almost ubiquitous answer from busy entrepreneurs is, “Well, somebody has to do it!” Right… But the solution is in your answer: SOMEBODY. And, that somebody does not always have to be you!

Back in June, we shared some thoughts on Outsourcing Admin Tasks. Since a few of you have yet to turn over all of that work to a virtual support team, we thought we’d remind you of a few salient points.

1.      As a small business owner, your time is your most precious commodity. It’s an asset even more valuable than your expertise as a designer or furniture dealer.

2.      And yet, your time is also your greatest restraint; the ultimate factor that limits your ability to put your energy, talents, and creativity to their most effective use in the service of your clients.

3.      By delegating mundane business tasks to a virtual team or other sub, you free up more of your time and energy to service existing clients and acquiring new ones. This is what generates revenue, after all – and this is where your focus must be!

We don’t want to belabor the point, but running your business does not have to include more of doing the drudgery you hate than the creativity you love. In fact, if you hated your old job enough to take the leap and start your own business, it makes no sense at all to struggle with tasks you can’t stand.

Looking for Help?

If you're having trouble deciding which parts of your business you should outsource, and which to spend more time on, Ted is available for business consulting and coaching. His more than two-and-a-half decades of experience in the industry, along with running his own business, make him a wonderful foil for your ideas, limitations, and challenges.

Just… Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Outsourcing Admin Tasks – Do You or Don’t You? (And if not, why not?)

There are so many things for which we can be grateful about living and working in the online world of today. We were able to stay connected, virtually, during a worldwide health crisis, despite onerous restrictions placed on most of us. For small business owners, both selling and ordering just about anything is easier than ever. And, especially for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, outsourcing admin tasks to a virtual support team has become a time and money-saving necessity for many.

And so, we ask the question: Do you or don’t you outsource the daily, mundane business tasks that sap your energy, steal your focus from client work, and wreak havoc on your creativity?

If not, it's time you started.

Can You Delegate Admin Tasks?

As an interior designer, you already work with assorted subcontractors like carpenters, plumbers, finishers, carpet installers, and undoubtedly many more. Obviously, you understand the value to be had in outsourcing such specialized work. So, why not try outsourcing the daily paperwork and other stuff you hate?

(We feel the need to add “probably” to that sentence. Because, against all possible logic and reason, some people actually ENJOY doing admin work for their business! We have no idea where such creatures come from but we’re told they exist.)

Of course, most of the subs you work with perform tasks that are outside your skillset. After all, you're a designer, not a tile installer. And yet, if you're like so many entrepreneurs who are proud of their ability to multi-task, there is something about delegating administrative business tasks to a subcontractor that truly bothers you and prevents you from taking that step.

What is it Costing You?

Here’s another question for you: As a business owner, what is your greatest asset?

Even above your skills, talent, and creativity, your time is your most precious commodity. It’s an asset even more valuable than your expertise. It’s also your greatest restraint – the ultimate factor that limits your ability to put your energy, talents, and skills to their best possible use in the service of your clients.

As the face and voice of your business, your time has inestimable value but it is possible to at least estimate what it can cost you to spend time on those mundane tasks.

• According to the financial education website, MoneyCrashers.com, research done by Microsoft found that workers used only about 60% of their available work time. (Yeah, that always connected online thing can be a massive distraction!)

• The average owner of a service-based small business spends about one day a week servicing existing clients and four hours acquiring new ones. The rest of their 40-hour week (if they don’t spend twice that running their business), is spent on tasks that do NOT generate revenue!

• Looking at this another way, whatever you charge clients for your services (maybe $200 an hour?), is reduced by at least 60% by the time-suck of admin tasks you're doing. That means, in a minimal 40-hour week, what might have been $8000 of revenue generated from client work is reduced to $3200. It also means you're now working for just $80 per hour.

• Your hourly rate just plunged by more than half! And you're the owner!

Remember, when you delegate everyday business tasks to a virtual support team, your goal is to free more of your time to service existing clients and acquiring new clients – both of which will enable you to boost revenue and grow your business!

Does this at least make you think about outsourcing admin tasks for your design business?

We sure hope so. And, if you have questions about how or whom to work with, Ted is available for consultation and guidance whenever you need it. Just… Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Want to Land More Design Projects? Don’t Over-Expertize Your Expertise

OK, yes. We made up a word. So sue us! If it got your attention and made you want to learn more about how to land more design projects, we feel no shame. (Well, we don’t anyway, really. It is our blog, after all!)

Anyway, the point we’re trying to make is (and we mean this with all due respect), becoming an expert in one area does not make us expert in others, nor should it. Sometimes, the more we know about something the easier it is to take for granted that others – like prospects or clients – know something about it too.

To put it another way, our familiarity with a subject need not breed contempt. But rather, the more we know the more likely we are to assume what our target audience knows. This can be deadly when trying to close a deal. In fact, there may be no quicker way to kill one.

Like Attracts Like (Not including clients)

It’s human nature and should come as no surprise, that those with similar interests find comfort associating with each other. Interior designers and furnishing suppliers tend to hang together. Salespeople with salespeople, marketers with marketers. Whole industries can become exclusive and the subjects of discussion among experts climb to higher and higher levels.

But, what happens when you're thrown together with a group of laypeople; or just one, a potential client?

Prospects will commonly express a desire but, because they lack the knowledge to make it happen, they look to an expert. In the internet age, they’ll go online to search for info but surely need more. (Often, what they find will be just enough to make them dangerous – to themselves.)

That is where you come in. And, that is where your experience, and your respect for them and their efforts to learn, will enable you to deliver a message that will resonate with them – and help you land more clients.

The key to successfully landing more projects in such a situation is to remember this… The fact that you know the benefits of a home renovation, or how the features the furnishings you suggest will make your ideal client’s life better, does not mean that they do.

Only Be an Expert When Necessary

Ultimately, you really can’t “know too much”, you just need to always be mindful that many people will know far less. And never forget, it’s your job to help them learn what they need to make an informed buying decision.

The fact that you're the one who taught them should take care of the rest.

Ted remains available to work with you on a case-by-case basis with business consulting that is targeted to your needs and goals. With more than 25 years of experience in the luxury furnishings and interior design industries, he has pretty much seen it all. So, if you're ready to work with a professional business consultant who can help you land more design projects… Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Goal-Setting Tips – How to Set Realistic Business Goals

After the debacle that was 2020, setting goals for your business has likely been difficult in the extreme. Now, as we move through mid-spring 2021, it might be a good idea to pause and consider the things we’ve done for our businesses so far this year. After all, according to the latest statistics, fewer than 10% of people keep their resolutions each new year; with 45% failing to reach new goals by the end of January and some 80% giving up by the time March rolls around. This leads us to wonder which goal-setting tips might work for setting realistic business goals.

Have you given up on the business goals you set for this year? You're not alone!

Far too many business owners set either vague or unrealistic goals for themselves, their teams, and their business, making them difficult to achieve. Setting a vaguely worded goal like  “I want to sign more clients this year,” is too ambiguous to capture the imagination, energy, and focus of your team.

If you make your business goals more focused and specific, such as “We will close 50% of all our client projects this year,” it will be far more productive. It’s clearly worded and concise – and it’s also measurable. A goal that cannot be measured will rarely, if ever, be met.

Well-defined goals get met, Ill-defined goals do not.

And so, with all of that in mind, we offer a few things to consider about the goals you’ve set for your business, your team – or yourself:

• Are the goals you set this year narrowly defined and specific?

• Are the goals you set this year attainable and realistic?

• Are the goals you set this year tailored to the talents and skillsets of your team members? (Or yourself?)

• Are the goals you set this year an actual benefit to your business – and your team?

Goals that are ill-defined or patently unrealistic do no one any good, least of all you. You see, poor goal-setting reflects just as poorly on you as a leader and frustrates your team because they’re unreachable. You will be perceived as either impractical or ill-equipped for the job. Both of these impressions will undermine your authority and make it difficult for others to perceive you as an effective leader.

If you're experiencing high turnover or indifference in your team, this may be the reason.

Incremental Goal-Setting Tips

The best goal-setting tip we can offer is to put together a progressive list of goals for your team to aim for, such as, “I will close 50% of all of my clients this quarter, 55% in the next quarter, and 60% in the next quarter …”, and so on. This will keep every member of your team focused on growth and personal improvement and, once again, their performance toward their goals is measurable.

And so, we say again, the numbers must be realistic and, as we also say again, specific goals such as these will be much more valuable to you, your business, and your team than some vague notion of “getting better.” If you truly want your team and your business to “Get Better,” help them set goals they can actually achieve – with goal-setting for success as your goal for this year, the next, and beyond.

Ted remains available to work with you on a case-by-case basis, offering more goal-setting tips and business consulting that is targeted to your needs and, well… your business goals.

With more than 25 years of experience in the luxury furnishings and interior design industries, he has pretty much seen it all. So, if you're ready to work with a professional business consultant who can help you grow your business with reachable goals… Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Business Website Checklist – Your Most Valuable Business Branding Tool

In a recent post, we remarked the lack of local designers and furnishing outlets returned in a Google search. As a result, we wondered if this was the result of a lack of branding by these businesses. And so, we now feel the need to consider the best tool for branding your business: your website. The website checklist below could be the key to more effective branding for your business.

As your online showroom, your business website will generally be the first impression potential clients will have of your interior design for the furnishing business. A well-designed, attractive website has inestimable value for businesses that offer such personal services. And, since the interior design and luxury furnishings are almost exclusively local businesses, adding a local flavor to the content you share will add a sense of comfort for visitors.

With all of that said, let’s get to the good stuff; our checklist of what your website needs to be effective.

Your Website Checklist

The list below outlines the basic elements that you need to have in place for your business website to reflect your brand.

• Page content – A business website should display a minimum of three pages: Home, About, Services/Products. Each should describe in detail your purpose, as well as the benefits of doing business with you. Beyond these three critical pages, you should also have a Contact Us page and a Blog for sharing fresh and timely content.

  • Home page – This is the most important page on your website. With 60% to 80% of visitors landing here first and since first impressions are so important, the copy you create for this page will be critical to your success. This is a great place to share your vision and mission, as well as your purpose.

  • About page – What makes you special? What are your qualifications? Do you have specialized training? Why are you so committed to the path you’ve chosen to pursue? How have you helped others and how can you help the reader? Answering all of these questions will go a long way toward generating interest from your target audience.

  • Services/Products page – Benefits, benefits, benefits… will be the key to selling your services or products. In other words, while sharing features and details are fine, you must also answer the age-old question of all consumers… “What’s in it for me?”

  • Portfolio page – Images of projects you’ve completed, along with testimonials from satisfied clients are as important as any other content on your website. Maybe more so. While quality images are requisite, rest assured you do not need to invest in a high-end digital camera. Most smartphones today have amazing cameras built-in and these should be more than adequate for taking and sharing great photos of the work you’ve done. They’re also easy to upload to just about any WordPress website.

• SEO – Search engine optimization is, and will forever be, a critical element to a successful launch and there are a few very important steps to consider:

  • Word count – While Google won’t necessarily ignore a page with little content, they will not consider it very important if you can’t publish at least 300 words. This is true of your pages and blog posts. Basically, if you can’t offer 300 words on a subject, what you have to say must not be very important.

  • Meta data – Your page titles, Meta descriptions, and tags should all be tailored to the content you publish. All should be descriptive and compelling to attract both the search engines and your target audience. Titles should be 60-70 characters, while descriptions should not exceed 155 characters. Otherwise, it will end in ellipses in the search results which may leave prospects wondering if you’re worth a click and visit.

  • Image alt tags – Hidden in the code behind the images you publish, image alt tags are hints of the image content to the search engines. They can typically be added in the same menu you use to edit and/or publish your images.

• Terms of Service and Privacy Policy (Courtesy of DreamHost.com)

  • A privacy policy is required by law if you’re collecting any kind of personal data, including email addresses. This policy spells out exactly how any information (emails, contact information, and more) will be used.

  • Terms of Service (TOS) statements are not legally mandatory in most cases, but they can still be valuable. Your TOS states the ground rules for visitors who want to use your site.

• Set Your Site to Back Up Regularly

  • If your website crashes or is hacked, or if you install a plugin that causes a problem, having your files backed up regularly and automatically is a lifesaver.

  • There are many ways to approach this task, but one surefire way to keep things running smoothly is by using managed hosting for your website. That way, your provider can take care of restoring backups and automatically archiving them for you.

• Set up a Comprehensive Site Map

  • Sitemaps play a vital role in how search engines “crawl” and index your pages. While a sitemap won’t directly improve your rankings, it can help to ensure that your site is indexed properly.

  • If you use WordPress, there are plugins available to help you generate and manage sitemaps. Google also has an established process for submitting your sitemap directly.

• Add Analytics Tracking to Your Site

  • Once your website is up and running, you’ll need a way to measure how well it performs. That’s why it pays to set up an analytics tracking solution before even launching your site.

• Connect Your Social Media Accounts

  • Promoting your site on social media can be vital to reaching your target audience. Providing icons so your visitors can easily find your social media pages is one of the best ways to do that.

• Check for Responsiveness on Mobile Platforms

  • Whether you’re writing a blog post or operating a Shopify store, it’s vital that your site looks good and performs well on devices of all sizes. One easy way to check your website’s mobile responsiveness is with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Now that your head is spinning and real panic has set in at the length and complexity of this website checklist, it must be said that these are just the beginning of what needs to be done to ensure successful branding from your website. (Hope we didn’t give you nightmares with that bit of knowledge!)

If you don’t feel you have the tech-savvy to do all of this yourself, we have no problem recommending the marketing support team we use to design and maintain our website, Virtual Business Partners. This Chicago-based group of online marketing pros has been supporting TD Fall for years and we’re extremely happy with Doreen and her team. They can even support you with administrative work, freeing you to spend more time acquiring and servicing clients.

Further, Ted remains available to work with you on an individual basis, consulting on how you might increase local brand awareness as part of your marketing strategy.

With more than 25 years of experience in the luxury furnishings and interior design industries, he has pretty much seen it all. So, if you're ready to work with a professional business consultant who can help you become one of those agile entrepreneurs our changing world demands, feel free to… Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Effective Online Branding for Designers and Furnishing Dealers

We recently had an experience that made us ask the question: what is online branding and how can it help in local searches?

After performing a local Google search for interior designers and luxury furnishings stores, we were somewhat surprised to receive 1.96 million and 4.3 million results, respectively. Surprised because we find it somewhat unlikely that a metropolitan area of fewer than 1.3 million like Salt Lake City could support those numbers. (Duh!)

What truly shocked us was that so few local firms were listed on page one of the results: just 5 of 18 for designers and 6 of 18 for retail outlets. (Your own local search would likely show varying results but we find it hard to believe they would be significantly different.)

The point is that seeing results like these forced us to consider whether the lack of locally owned firms in the search results (SERPs) might be a branding problem. After all, our queries offered everything from locater services to online sellers like “Overstock”. These were decidedly NOT what we were searching for.

And so, we decided we might be able to offer an answer to our opening question, what is online branding?

What Is Online Branding?

When it comes to online marketing, differentiating yourself from your competition may be your greatest challenge. If it’s true that the average homeowner knows little about the differences between fine furnishings and the furniture offered at the typical retail outlet, it becomes especially difficult to convince them of the value to be had in high-quality furnishings.

Further, paying for the services of what they may perceive as a glorified shopping service can make working with interior designers seem wasteful, at best. This means that you not only have to educate consumers about the value of design services and luxury furnishings in general but that you offer something that your competitors don’t.

This is where effective online branding can be so valuable.

Building Local Brand Awareness

First, it’s not our goal to offer a branding tutorial in this post. Rather, we’d like to present you with the two most important factors for building brand awareness: reputation management and messaging.

• Reputation management – This is where you establish yourself as an expert in your niche, and as a local influencer, whether as an interior designer or furnishing outlet. The content on your business website will be important here but, even more important will be your blog and social media posts. By sharing high-value information at no charge, you show yourself as a real professional who is not just “in it for the money”.

• Messaging – Creating a consistent message about yourself and your business is a great way to set yourself apart from your competition. Since it’s impossible to be all things to all people, clearly outlining what you offer has huge value. It’s equally important to be clear about whom you offer it to – the types of clients you would most love to work with (beyond those who are simply willing to pay you!).

Building brand awareness should be one of the top priorities of your marketing strategy. It’s a critical step not just in appealing to your target audience, but as a way to create interest, generate leads, and convert those leads into meetings, bids, and sales. In fact, considering the competitive nature of the design and furnishing industries, there may well be nothing more important than focusing on effective online branding.

Ted remains available to work with you on an individual basis, consulting on how you might increase local brand awareness as part of your marketing strategy.

With more than 25 years of experience in the luxury furnishings and interior design industries, he has pretty much seen it all. So, if you're ready to work with a professional business consultant who can help you become one of those agile entrepreneurs our changing world demands, feel free to… Get in touch with TD Fall today.