It’s hard to believe that five years have passed since I clicked “publish” on my first Instagram post to announce my business launch!
Terrified of making the jump, terrified of the things I anticipated, terrified of the unknown, and here I am.
Turns out, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Over the past five years, I’ve learned a lot about myself. If you’ve ever heard the saying, “If you want to learn anything about yourself, just start a business,” I can tell you with 1000% certainty this is absolutely true.
It’s been quite the journey so far, and somehow I also feel like I’m still just getting started.
To celebrate, in this blog post, I’m sharing five things I’ve learned over the past five years in business!
5 Things I’ve Learned During 5 Years In Business
Life can get messy.
We all know that life can get a little messy sometimes. I’ve come to embrace “doing it messy” as a lifestyle and continuously having a little grace, because who has time to make things perfect before we just do the dang thing?
What does this actually look like for me? When I decided to make the leap to self-employment, I learned really quickly that I had to just take the next step. My business started messy: without a solid business structure or pricing, without a functional office setup, and without a single warm lead.
But I started.
Now, “doing it messy” looks a little like “building the plane while it’s in the air,” because if I have something that will help my business, I need to do it yesterday. I’ll figure it out as I go, because I have all the resources to put it together on the back end while I’m promoting it.
However messy it looks from the outside and feels on the inside, I keep taking the next step forward. At the end of the day, I don’t want to be the person who gets in my own way of moving the needle, because if you’re waiting for something to be perfect, or not doing something, you might as well be doing nothing.
Showing up matters.
One thing I really loved about this type of work, when I still had my day job, was that I could stay totally behind the scenes. I didn’t have to get out there and sell. I didn’t have to get myself to networking events and show my face on social media.
Now, as a solopreneur, I do all of those things (and more). But what I’ve learned is that, no matter how hard it is to show up to networking events or meetings with new people, I’ve really put my best foot forward by joining all the things. I’ve even given presentations. And if you know anything about me, you know that is totally outside my comfort zone. But all good things have come from it.
I’ve made valuable connections, meaningful friendships, received amazing feedback, grown my network, learned a whole lot about business, and myself. Imagine that.
Experiments can be fun.
Now that I've learned quite a bit more about analytics, tracking, and how to analyze my own data, it’s become kind of fun to try different things lately.
Framing my marketing efforts as experiments makes it feel a whole lot easier (and more fun) to try something new when I have the data to back it up. If it worked well? Great, I’ll do more of that! If it didn’t work well? Ok, I’ll try something a little different next time.
Making data-driven decisions has always been part of how I operate my business and help my clients. Having more and better data, and the ability to understand it better, has made all the difference with how I pursue my own marketing.
When you understand the data, everything comes together in a way that makes it much easier to work with and make decisions from.
Mistakes happen.
This is one I don’t really like to admit out loud. I mean, we all want to do everything well and without error, right? But when I take the time to reflect on a mistake, however big or small, there is always a lesson that I choose to see as a silver lining.
I use this perspective to help support my clients as well. When we shift to the learning or growth opportunity, it turns into gratitude and the ability to move forward differently.
Plus, being grateful for a silver lining learning opportunity feels a whole lot better than beating ourselves up over it.
Constant Refinements.
Every time I work with a client and wrap up a project, I look back at how things went and see if there are any areas for improvement. My focus is on results-driven design work, so if there are ways I can refine my services to better serve my clients so they can find success and flourish, I’ll do just that.
My Brand Strategy & Identity packages are designed to provide a solid foundation for your business, and our work together. My approach sets you up for success with a solid creative direction to lead the design process. Brand Identities are designed with intention and personality to help you stand out from your competition.
My Website Design & SEO packages expand on that work to utilize your website as the center of your marketing efforts. Because if your website isn’t actually working for your business, what are we even doing here?
If you’re not quite ready to jump into a full design project, check out my Brand Visibility Checklist and Website Self Analysis.
My goal is to provide a clear strategy and functional design for the purpose of getting traction in your business.
Here’s To Many More Years of Form and Flourish Design Co.
All in all, it's been an honor to work with so many incredible people.
I’ve celebrated wins with them. Supported them through struggles. Shared a few tears. But most of all, I’ve earned their trust to support them along their own business journeys. And I’m so very grateful for that.
I’ll continue offering brand and web design services in various ways to work together, and I'll continue to support my clients so they can flourish as well.
Here’s to the next 5 years being just as great!
