3 Major Things We’ve Learned After 3 Years in Business
Starting a business is incredibly difficult and nerve-wracking. Most small businesses don’t make it past their first year, let alone achieve three years in business as VVITCH has done. There have been many lessons learned, and they never stop coming — which we appreciate.
As a founder of a boutique digital agency with great purpose, our fierce leader, Jen, would be remiss if they did not take a moment to assess what key things they’ve learned over these past three years running VVITCH.
Friendly reminder, you should stop to reflect too as a small business owner! Here are the three major things we’ve learned at VVITCH, with plenty left to learn.
Undervaluing Yourself and Your Time Is a Form of Self-Sabotage
This is a hard lesson to learn, but the truth is that if you aren’t charging enough for your time and your work as a small business — whether solo or with a growing team — you’re likely losing money. This can be factored as either lost wages or sometimes in literal cash. These losses add up.
If ignored, those losses could lead to the closure of your business, or it could cause frustration and resentment. Why should you fall out of love with what you’ve started? And there is no reason you shouldn’t value the services you provide by pricing appropriately for your time, skills, and quality.
Be sure to do the math necessary to figure out the actual cost of your services so that you know what to charge to ensure you still make a profit. In addition to the cost of the materials and time to create your service or product, don’t forget to consider the following in your pricing calculations:
Credit Card Processing Fees — which all payment gateways, like Square or Venmo, offset to you the small business owner when you accept credit cards as a payment method in your business
Taxes and other Fees – Uncle Sam doesn’t care how long you’ve been in business or that you missed your income goal for a quarter. He wants his cut regardless, and there are many ways to unintentionally underpay if you don’t do proper research or hire a tax professional.
Your Business’ Overhead — which can literally be everything if you operate a business out of your home, but most definitely should include any administrative and marketing costs for running your business.
Your Desired Profit — it can feel wonderful to close new clients or make several sales, but if you’re just breaking even or barely making a profit, you need to rethink how you’re pricing your services or products.
Most importantly, don’t forget to price for growth. This includes not just new marketing initiatives, but also the flexibility to try out new products and services, offer training to your team, increased employee salaries — all of that will allow you to increase your audience and customer base, which helps you to attract more skilled talent to your team as well.
Protect Your Personal Time or No One Else Will
We’re still people at the end of the day. This means life can come at us just as fast as if we weren’t running our own small businesses. For instance, Jen needed to move to contributing part time to VVITCH in order to accommodate their health during the process of being diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
Now Jen’s disability and the importance of prioritizing their personal time can happen without neglecting or avoiding our clients at VVITCH. This protection of yourself and your time is important in order to ensure you’re able to continue to show up day after day. And this especially applies with clients.
Clients will engage with you however you let them. As soon as a client starts to push a boundary on your time, it’s important to establish guidelines for communication. If you make yourself available to people 24/7 then they will come to expect your attention 24/7, and be disappointed if that suddenly changes. Instead, set expectations early and often that you’ll be respecting your work hours and personal time.
If you started your own small business, you probably had some desire to be in control of your time and calendar, so be sure to empower yourself to do just that. It can feel uncomfortable to set these boundaries because society has taught us to always be “nice” while dishonoring our own needs.
Yet the truth of the matter is, if you’re constantly drained there is no way you’re able to deliver your best work.
Build In Time to Review Your Processes and Your Accounts
If you’re looking for a way to bring in more money and work to your business, this is a great way to start. And, we must be honest with ourselves — in order for a business to scale you have to have processes that work.
Analyzing your processes on a semi-regular basis allows you to see where you could automate things, such as communications with new clients or preparation of contracts. This frees up your time to take on more clients and projects. Creating more efficient processes also means that you are reducing the total cost of your services and increasing your profits. Better improvements in process allows you to take on more work and earn more in profits — an absolute win-win.
If you’re like us, you’re also probably using a number of different tools and subscription services to run your business — and if you’re like us you’re also probably not using them to their full potential. Remember to go through your expenses and look for recurring subscriptions and services that aren’t serving you and your business, then cancel them so that you can make the most of what you spend.
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VVITCH continues to grow and we’re so thankful for the clients we have built relationships with over these past three years. As we continue to learn and grow, there are many more lessons we’ll have along the way.
Who knows, our next three years in business could be our greatest teacher yet!
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Meet the Authors:
Jen Siomacco - Founder and UX Designer
Jen has worked in technology, marketing, and publishing for ten years. After years as a CX/UX designer in the corporate world, Jen was a former owner of Catalyst Wedding Co. prior to starting VVITCH Digital Agency. Now, Jen is committed to helping small businesses grow into revolutionary brands.
Brittinee Phillips - Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
