But I’m a motivated, smart, creative business owner, why can’t I do it all myself?

You can, but the story usually goes like this….

Motivated, smart and creative small business owner has an innate do-it-yourself attitude when it comes to promoting her (or his) business. After all, that's the stuff it takes to launch your own business in the first place, right? New website? Check. Get a Facebook page and post every other day? Check (well, once a month is ok, right?). Write a weekly blog post for customers? Check (well, more like semi-monthly). This takes time and attention, but that's ok. She doesn't mind working on it early in the morning, after her daughter's soccer game, or during those elusive “slow times” at the store.

After some time, she wonders if she's doing it right because no one seems to notice. (How come no one comments on my posts?) She starts to get fed up that these updates are taking away time she needs to order new products and get the bank accounts balanced, so she hands off the Facebook updates to her favorite employee. This works great! Superstar employee is so awesome, she's going to update the website, too. Wow, excellent! Then the store gets busy (Yay!) and superstar employee needs to prioritize other tasks like helping customers, or sadly… gets another job. Owner doesn't really want to take on the social media and website updates again (Ugh!), so her son plans to help out for the summer. (Mom, you really need to be on Instagram.) This works out ok, until son goes back to college. (Drat.)

This motivated, smart, creative business owner is now fed up with having to worry about this online stuff. She knows her Facebook page hasn't been used in the past few months. Can I just get rid of it? She goes to bed at night feeling guilty that once again she forgot to remove that website coupon that expired in 2014. Tomorrow, definitely tomorrow! Someone points out that her address is wrong on Yelp. (What the heck, I didn't even know I was listed on Yelp?) She sees a headline about how a WordPress site can be hacked if it's out of date, but she's not entirely sure what that means. Crap, does that even apply to me? 

Sound familiar?

It does to me, because this is the story of almost all of my clients. I'm trying not to make a sales pitch here, but the short and sweet version is — seriously, drop me a note. I can help you. I'll help wrangle everything into one manageable system that you can work with more easily, or I can take the whole darn thing off your plate so you can go sleep at night guilt-free. (Believe me, I have my own guilt… yet another day that I forgot to fix that car headlight. Darnit!)

Send me a note and let know if you need help.

do-more-what-you-love

Yeah, I'm a nerd. I actually like this stuff.

Just like your passion is what inspired you to start your business, I actually love all this website-logo-facebook-google stuff. I especially like simplifying things for small businesses, because I know all too well what it feels like to be overwhelmed with something you don't enjoy (um, accounting). I work with all this technology every single day, so I'm good at it and know what works for real people running local businesses.

Here are some of the things we can talk about: What are you doing now? What's working for you and what isn't working? What do you enjoy? What do you despise? What would do if you had more time or money to invest? Who is your ideal customer? What kind of response or results would you like to see? What are your goals?

Still want to tackle it yourself? Sounds like we might be somewhat like-minded, because I tend to have a DIY approach, too. If that's the case, I can help out with the “techie stuff” like domain, hosting, WordPress security and backups (which by the way, is super-duper important).

Real relationships are what win in the end.

At the end of the day, what makes me happy is feeling useful and helping people. I don't want to rule the world or make a billion bucks (that would be nice… but I'm guessing I'm not cut-throat enough for that). The thing that big boxes can't do that small business can is nurture real relationships with their customers and community. It's those relationships that make the crazy life of a small business owner worth the stress, and those are the sorts of business I want to help — because I'm one, too.

Questions? Comments? Send me a note.

—Leslie