In honor of National Small Business Week, I'm sharing some tips and tricks I've learned over the last 18 months as an entrepreneur. In November 2015, I started Pace & Love Marketing with the vision to support and grow small businesses in the food industry through social media marketing and business development.
Whether you're thinking about starting your own business or looking to sharpen your skills, Skillshare is a great resource. You can learn about everything from photography to calligraphy and even how to sew. This can be a good resource for anyone who wants to develop new strengths or even share his or her best practices as a teacher.
Are you looking for a side hustle? Or, maybe you're looking to outsource some of your administrative work. Upwork is a way to hire people to create your website, find an accountant or even a virtual assistant.
If you feel like you're going in a few different directions, this is a good one: I use Getplan to plan my day. I like it because it's a to do list meets calendar. You can drag your action items from morning to afternoon or slide to the next day-- but they don't go away unless you actively click to cross it out.
My CRM (client resource management) of choice is Streak. It connects to my google mail and I use it to handle sales for my clients and for my own leads. It's affordable and very user-friendly.
My accountant is great, but it's important for me to maintain my own bookkeeping everyday. I use the self-employed app through intuit. Use this code for 50% off!
Who loves podcasts? How I built this and Food Marketing Nerds are my top go-to podcasts right now, and I'm hooked.
Finally, my favorite digital resource is my social media unified platform, Falcon.io. I can engage in all of my clients' social media activity, create content calendars, measure analytics and run listening reports to get to understand specific topics. Falcon is the closest way for a human to feel like a wizard.
As we enter this new month, I'm holding myself accountable to plan ahead and stay organized. This starts by putting pen to paper and writing down my goals. I'm happy to cross one of these goals off the list: writing my first blog post!
What are your goals? Feel free to share them in the comments and check back next month to see what you've achieved. Also, if you have other favorite resources or tips for entrepreneurs, don't hold back! Let's build each other up and conquer May together!
Pace and Love,
Kelly Pace Stegman
Founder, Pace & Love Marketing
Photo by Zach J. Kane Photography