The Six Figure Mom

Starting a Business - A Reverse Interview with Brittany Coker

August 27, 2019 Erin E Hooley Season 1 Episode 22
The Six Figure Mom
Starting a Business - A Reverse Interview with Brittany Coker
Show Notes Transcript

Starting a business can seem overwhelming, but with proper planning and appropriate action, you can set yourself up for success!

Join host Erin E Hooley and special guest Brittany Coker in this reverse interview where they break down the creation of a business plan, making and planning proper goals and the mindset needed to achieve them.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the conquering chaos podcast. I'm your host, Aaron[inaudible], president and founder of multimillion dollar e-commerce children's clothing line, Bailey's blossoms. So it turns out I'm pretty good at business, but what really lights my soul on fire is providing other entrepreneurs and mompreneurs with the tools they need to truly succeed. So if you have a business or have one on your heart, you're in good company. Pull up a chair or dropping some earbuds and let's conquer some chaos today. Alright guys, I have Brittany

Speaker 2:

Coker here in the house with me today. I'm super excited. She is a new business owner and this is going to be a little bit of a different interview. We're going to be doing a reverse interview. She just launched her boutique, it's called barefoot and southern boutique out of Florida and she's got lots of questions is most people do when they start their business. So we're turning the tables and she's going to be interviewing me and I'm going to be sharing a lot of different case studies from Bailey's Bostons and Peyton Bree to hopefully help anybody who is on their path to entrepreneurship. Either starting it out or thinking about it. Take that next step and scale up. So Brittany, welcome and thank you so much for being here. Hi Aaron. And thank you for giving me this opportunity. I'm so excited to be here. Of course. It's great to have you here. Before you start turning the tables on me, why don't you just take a quick minute to let everybody know just a few fun things about you and what set you on the path to entrepreneurship. Why I live in Tampa, Florida with my husband and my two daughters and ever since I can remember I've always worn it to all my own business. I have a background in retail and I've held many positions, but I've known a comfortable career track. But I knew deep down that it wasn't for me. I just didn't know exactly what I wanted to do but have always been drawn to the challenge of launching and building my own company. So eventually I quit my corporate job. I returned to school. Um, right before I had my first daughter in 2016 and then it wasn't until I had my second daughter in 2018 that I knew I wanted to open a children's boutique. And my girls are definitely my inspiration behind the boutique. And I wanted to create a one stop shop where customers could find, you know, unique outfits and accessories for children. And I also love to support and empower other women. While I was trying to compile a list of children's brands to Carrie, it was very important that the majority of those brands were created by women and mompreneurs like myself. That's awesome. I love that. It's fun because I've been able to look over so much of what you've been doing and a lot of your thoughts and you've clearly put so much time and effort and just heart into what you're creating and it's so evident and you can even just feel that through, through your voice and just even in what I've read about, about you and about your company. So that's a really great testament to who you are and what you're creating. Thank you. Awesome. Okay, so I know that starting a business can be a little bit unnerving. There's 1,000,001 questions, and when you take it to Google, there's 1,000,001 different answers in. A lot of times they conflict with one another. So I know for me, I'm going, man, if I could go back, I would have loved to have had a mentor right from the beginning to say, I've already done this. I've already walked this path. Here's what's worked. Here's what hasn't. Let me give you a little bit of direction based off of my experience. Rather than trying to sift through all the weeds in the noise online as it can often be a little overwhelming. So I'm excited to turn the tables over to you and let you just ask some questions, things that would help you to be able to set you off and be able to help you scale and grow up into what your goal and your ideals are. I've been trying to figure out strategies and tools that will help me succeed on social media. I know it's extremely valuable. And finding customers on social media has a direct impact on my sales. Do you think it's beneficial if I set a social media goals or make a social media content calendar? Absolutely. So I'm huge on intentionality. Any time that we are passively approaching any avenue, whether that's social media or otherwise, without a very clear goal and directed deep back into that goal, we often have a much higher rate of failure. So when we take that goal and we say, okay, what exactly, what am I trying to accomplish here? Before I take so much of my time and my effort and my resources, and even sometimes my money and put it behind something, I would suggest getting very clear on what you're trying to accomplish. So block out, okay, on this platform, my goal is to accomplish, I want a thousand people. Well, why do I want a thousand people in my group? Well, I want a thousand people because I feel like that will produce x amount of income. Okay. And then you can just kind of back into the why and what you're doing and the efforts that you're doing. Do you have online presence right now? Yes, I'm on Facebook and Instagram. Okay. And are you selling predominantly on Facebook and Instagram or do you have a website? I have a website as well, but it's funny because I have less followers on Facebook, but I sell more from Facebook. Isn't that interesting? There's so many things to test and learn, so you have more people on Instagram, but more purchases coming from Facebook, so that can help you. A lot of times when you start a business you, what you'll do is you'll craft these goals based off of what you assume is going to happen, but then you need to be flexible enough to learn from what's actually happening. And then you take and you say, okay, well here's my goals that I set in the beginning, but at the end of quarter one, so three months in, I should be stepping back, analyzing those goals again and saying, do these still fit based off of what I've learned? Because 99% of the time you're going to be pivoting based off of those directions. That experience is going to help refine where your goals are headed. So you might say, hey, yeah, Instagram gets a lot of great engagement but no conversions. So I'm going to keep posting on Instagram, but maybe instead of three times a day I'm going to knock it down to two and it's because Facebook drives more sales. Instead of posting two times a day, me and mom bump it up to three and then you can start to analyze those efforts in that time you're putting in. Okay, great. I know you previously mentioned and one of your podcast episodes that there is in humanizing your brand. I feel like I need to put a face behind my store of our customers. You know, they're so important. I want them to feel valued and I want to build a relationship with them. Do you think it's a good idea or any advice you'd have on conducting live stales giveaways, product promotions? Absolutely. So humanizing your brand is so important because trust is such a huge issue today. And the number of times that we've even been knocked off, people have taken even our copy, like word for word things that we put in our posts and put them in their own, taking the pictures so people get really nervous and people getting scammed on Facebook, scammed on Instagram, Ebay, Amazon, all these different places. It's not uncommon. And so it's really important that we put a face forward, a story forward so people know this isn't some knock off person or this isn't some overseas company trying to dupe me. They're actually in Florida. This is an actual woman. She's got children that I know her name. I know her story because it connects you when we get knocked off and people say, man, you get knocked off and undercut. But for me, I go, I'm not going to stress out about the fact that somebody just made the exact same item that I just made and they're selling it for$5 less because I have that relationship. And if you have that relationship that engender trust, somebody who feels connected to you, that in genders loyalty and regardless of whether or not they can save$5 by getting some knockoff because they're loyal to you and you have that relationship and they know who you are, they're not going to fall for that scheme over there. Awesome. And as far as my website conversion rate goes up, more people are visiting my website, so that's great. I'm excited about it, but they're not buying any tips on that. Okay. So I actually want to back this up a little bit and go into business planning a little bit because so much of this is feeding there. So have you created a business plan for your company yet? I have. In the beginning it was kind of more of like the goals that I had. That was one of my questions too, was a about a business plan. Awesome. Okay. So do you mind if I back into the steps of a business plan and then we can take it over to the conversion rate because it all kind of funnels together. Okay. So when you're starting a company, obviously the a business plan, the irony of all of this is I did not start with the business plan. Really. I did not. And so I was very definitely, and that's not to devalue it, that's to show you that not until I got clear on my business plan did I see exponential growth because I put together some guide rails, some parameters that said, this is within the realm of what you need to do. Every choice you make, every decision, every add on we bring into place needs to make sense into what we've created. So I had created this brand and even this persona without intentionally realizing I was doing that. So what I did was I unintentionally projected myself onto the company, but not until we sat down as a and as a team and we said, okay, everybody took out piece of paper and we identified what we thought the brand was. There were a lot of similarities, but there were some differences and some things that came into place and I'm like, oh that was an intentional, if I knew that that's the way it came across, I never would have made that decision. Then we had to backtrack and cleaned some things up. So a business plan, right? Step one is to get clear on your vision and your mission. Why am I doing this? Obviously outside of a paycheck, cause we all have to support our families. We all got to eat, we all got to be comfortable outside of that. What is the purpose? And I love Simon Sinek so I don't know if you're familiar with him, but there is a, if you Google Simon Sinek, no, your why I believe is what it's called. It's a great video and it talks all about how the greatest companies start with why not what and not how. And once they get clear on what their why is, everything else falls into place and people connect with your why. Why am I doing this while I'm doing this to empower women? I'm doing this because I'm solving a problem. What's the problem you're solving? The next one is your goals and your objectives. Getting very clear that provides the guardrails for all future decisions and those parameters to live within and then you draft out your short term, your mid term and your long term goals. So what am I going to accomplish in month one? What do I want to accomplish by the end of Q one so month, three mid year, six months in by one calendar year, 12 months in, what are the PivotTable accomplishments? I want to say I have in the bag at each of those points and then you can block back in and say, okay, if I have a goal of selling$1,000 in my first month, what does that look like? What do I need to do to make that happen? And we'll get there in a little bit. After you define your goals and your objectives, then you need to define your audience. That's the next step. Writing down three to five scenarios of who you're talking to because it matters. If you're talking to a 20 year old new mom versus a 45 year old seasoned mom, you're not going to talk to them the same way. One of the biggest problems I see with a lot of people starting business, regardless of the type of business it is, is they're trying to talk to everyone. I want to get everyone's approval. I want to get everyone's permission. I want everyone to be my customer. But the more you do that, the more people you unintentionally weed out, niche down to scale up and as you niche down to scale up and then he'd say, okay, well let's create three to five based scenarios of who I may potentially be talking to. You're selling children's clothing so it could be a single mom named Suzy. She works, she's available on nights and on weekends. Okay, stay at home mom. She's running ragged, she's got babies and toddlers nipping at her heels all day long. She's only available only in the morning before her kids wake up sometime around lunch because their kids are napping. And after bedtime and so then we can continue going on. Oh, there's the grandma, there's the, the single dad, all these different things. But as you create three to five baseline scenarios that he'd pick the two or three that you're going predominantly, yes, there's going to be outliers in here. The aunts, the uncles, the dads, the grandparents, but who am I really talking to? Who? What makes up 80% or more of my audience? And then you say, okay, you have to put yourself in that person's shoes. What does that person want to feel like when I'm talking to them? What's the language I'm going to use? Are they exhausted with their kids? So they need me to make them laugh? Are they overwhelmed and they just need some reprieve? Are they financially strapped so they want a good deal? Are they a trendsetter? So they don't care about price? They just want to have the best, freshest trends on the market. So you see, as you really define who am I talking to? Your language changes. If I'm trying to get you to buy$10,000 Gucci Bag, it's, I'm going to talk to you differently than if I'm trying to get you to buy a$10 tee shirt. Right? Absolutely. Totally different language. So it's really niching down on who I'm talking to and getting that language into the parameters of who that person is, giving them what they want, showing up where they are at, and then also understanding each of those different people. They have different behaviors. If you have a grandma who shopping the chances of grandma being on Instagram, it's probably a lot less, you may have to reach gram of via email or via Facebook, but if you want millennial mom or even the younger the up and coming new 20 something year old moms, they're going to be on Instagram, they're going to be on snapchat. What are their behaviors? Where do they hang out? What do they like, what is their schedule like? And then how can I hit them in that schedule? So the reason Bailey's blossoms have worked for me from the beginning was because I was the young mom and I was just talking and the people that were listening happened to beat the young moms. So it worked. But now my kids are older, so I have to be more intentional. Now I'm the middle aged mom and I'm still talking to the young mom, so I have to make sure that I'm still relative to them. So I have to do a lot more research now where I'm going, oh, when I was a young mom, everyone was on Facebook, everyone was on blogs, but now they're on Instagram. Some of them are on Facebook. My behaviors have to change my understanding, so I constantly have to hold those focus groups to keep my mind fresh, to understand where my people are, because the demographics the same, but the behaviors shift in time. Does that make sense? It really does. This has been so helpful already, sir. Thanks. You're so welcome. You're so welcome. What comes after defining your audience is you need to define why you, what makes you better or more special or different than everybody else selling children's clothes or doing whatever it is. And anybody who's listening, if you're going way, don't sell children's clothes. I'm a, I'm a coach, I'm a mentor. Whatever. What makes you better or special or different than your competitors? Why you? The reality is Baskin Robbins has more than three flavors for a reason. They're true. And Yeah, go ahead. I know that I have, you know, I have a whole lot of passion and grit. I mean, I love being a mom for sure because I'm teaching my daughters about passion, self-sufficiency, you know, hard work. And it's given me the opportunity to inspire them. And I feel like a lot of people, a lot of moms can connect with that. And you know, it's, this has been great so far and I just, I love what the feedback you're giving me and I feel like that defining my why is really going to help me and the business and defining your why also, it puts the passion behind your purpose. So you know what you're trying to do. You know what your purpose is. But there are going to be times in business where it's not going to be fun. There's going to be bad days, there's gonna be days where you're going to soak your pillow and tears and wonder what internees and you were thinking starting a business and honestly has already happened. But I mean, I keep pushing forward, so I still have my days where I'm like, oh my gosh. I mean there's, there always, it never goes away. It just continues to grow and grow. But it's that ability to push past it and say, you know what? I want the learning experiences from this more than I want the perfection in my performance. I'm gonna Learn, I'm going to grow and that's worth it to me. So I'm going to allow myself to fail when I allow myself to look foolish because I want those learnings. And did that mindset will take you so far. Awesome. Thank you. What's after defining what makes you better, special, different, why people need to come to you, what is it about your story that people can connect with? And like you said, yours is you're just driven to really empower women and you want to show your daughters what's possible by showing them, you know, what, you can grow up and you can be anything you want to be. Absolutely. Because look, this is my dream and I'm going to chase it and I'm not going to apologize for it and it's not going to be perfect and it's going to be messy, but that's okay. Yeah. And it's important to me for them to see, like you said, for them to see that. And you know, I love children, I love seeing my customers wearing our apparel and I'm sure you, you know, you know as well and I do want eventually donate a portion of the proceeds to a local children's charity. Again, don't know where to begin. So, oh, I love that. And that fits so well into the next piece of your business plan, which is budgeting. Okay, perfect. Set a clear budget because your budget and your goals are going to be BFFs. Okay. You can have big, big goals, but in order to accomplish big goals, sometimes you need a big budget, so make sure that your goals and your budgets are friends and they can remain so and grow together. Unless of course you're getting outside funding, which of course has its own pros and cons. Now with your budget, there's three key components are going to be your inventory. If you have an inventory carrying model, your payroll, which my friend includes you. Yeah. And your advertising in your marketing. Those are the three big, big, big ones. Obviously shipping and that type of stuff. There's more in there, but as you're setting up what your budget looks like, then you can say, okay, and what are my goals as far as top line sales? I may sell$100,000 worth of goods this week, but what's my profit at the end of it? You know? So there's top line and there's bottom line and understanding what your bottom line needs are and then you can say, okay, what does my profit margin need to be in order to make that happen? And then you can understand what your top line sales need to be in order to get to those bottom line. Okay. And as far as within those three, as far as the advertising was a question I had to email marketing, I have about 15 subscribers to my email list, which is good and I just don't know how to go about the email marketing growing that. Absolutely. Okay, well that's awesome too because the next one is your marketing strategy. So the next is your marketing strategy and figuring out how you're going to hit your people. And this is the last one. Outside of testing and learning, so your marketing strategy, you're going to say, okay, where are my people at? I've already identified who they are. I already identified how they want to be talked to. Now how do I hit them? I know my budget for each platform. If I even have a budget or I'm going to get super creative and I'll tell you I didn't have a marketing budget for couple years. I want to say it was like three years. I didn't give myself a real marketing budget, so, and I don't think that you need to wait that long, honestly, once you start turning a profit, I would say hit it hard, but just make sure that you can afford it within the realms of your goals. And as far as you know, the budget, I know Facebook and Instagram are doing the marketing. What are your thoughts on that when you're first starting out, everything is just testing and learning and so it really comes down to, again, what are your goals and what is your budget? If you Max out your budget on your inventory, then your marketing and your advertising is going to take a hit. Right? I think a lot of people put all of their budget into, into the extra things. You know, even people that go, oh, I have a clothing line, so now I need these fancy dress forms. I need these beautiful hangers. No you don't. You can do, you could be super basic, get the extras when you can afford the extras. But there are first things that come first. So when you are defining what your marketing efforts are going to be, you mentioned live sales, you mentioned giveaways. That is exactly how we started to grow Bailey's Bostons from the very beginning. So when I didn't have two dimes to rub together, I got super creative. So in the very beginning, as you know, I was customer service, I was order fulfillment, I was designed like all I was, all the things as you are currently, all the things and there's parts it that I loved and parts about that I'm like am when I can afford to hire somebody first and not be doing that anymore. Thank you very much. But it really is that ability to just say, okay, where, where do I want to go from here? What does this look like? So getting creative on those efforts. And we would take, we would do monthly giveaways because we want to do in gender engagement. And a lot of times we would say, okay, what's the objective of the giveaway? Because while giveaways are nice, we want to be nice, but we also know that we need to be able to eat at the end of the day. So we can't just give away things to give it away. It needs to drive some type of a behavior. So there always needs to be a call to action associated with what you're doing. And the call to action should predominantly be driving a conversion. So or, or setting you up to drive a conversion in step two or step three for a giveaway, for example, you can say, okay, my goal is to get traffic to the website cause I know that with x amount of traffic I get x amount of current conversions. So if you say, okay, with this giveaway, I'm going to give away a$25 gift certificate to my shop. Okay. But that's really easy. But it doesn't drive many people to go to your shop. All they're doing is, I'm just going to give you my name or I'm going to, you could say, hey, in order to enter this giveaway, here's a link to sign up for my email list. Perfect. So you now you're saying, I'm going to give you something. I'm not going to give it to you for free. I'm going to make you do something. So that could be one objective. I want to grow my email list. You can grow it that way, or it's traffic to your website, go to my new arrivals section and comment below with your favorite new arrival for a chance to win it. Love that. I love that. And now all of a sudden I've gotten people onto my website. I've just engendered a little bit of trust. They were there. Now I can retarget them that much easier. So it's giving them something to do that you can work with. You can hit them up later just saying, Hey, I'm going to do this because I'm nice. Drop your name below doesn't help you at all. It has to help you in some way. Yes, absolutely. Or, um, to take it a step further, want an extra entry tag, a friend tag a mom that you know would love this. And we've done things where it's like best friends giveaways. We're going tag a friend for a chance for you and your friend to win. And then they don't feel like they're annoying their friend. They're helping their friend. It's providing a real way for people to provide value to people in a way that doesn't feel like sleazy car salesman. Yeah. And I hate that too. I hate it too. I'm like, there's so many ways to do it well. So giveaways were huge for us. The other thing that we did right from the get go was photos. We did QT contests. And the reason we did that was the first time I had a photographer, or actually it was a mother and she sent an image and she said, I love what I just got from you. Here's a picture for my daughter's first birthday. And I thought, how do I get more of these pictures? It was gorgeous. I was doing all the photography. I was learning like I didn't, I wasn't that photographer. How do I get more of that? And so I wanted to incentivize people to share their content so that I could share their content and what that did unintentionally again, but down the road I'm going. That was genius. I just didn't realize how awesome it was because what I did opened up and I said, okay, I want your content. I want your adorable child to be a part of the brand experience for this company. What does that look like? You send an an image, it's going to be on my Instagram. It's going to be on my Facebook. It may even be on the homepage of my website. It could go out in an email blast, but in essence, you share this with me for a chance for you to win a gift certificate. But again, it's, I'll provide you provide, this is a win win situation. You get to do this. Can I be honest with you? Yeah, I've done, have you? I've done it several times and I've gotten the cutest pictures back. Isn't that great? And I've actually made a sale. Yes, I actually made a sale off one of them. That's amazing. And honestly, especially for online sales, when you're selling a physical product, the picture, the pictures it, yeah, it really is. The picture is it. And the number one thing we do, if we're looking at a product and it's not selling, the first thing we do is we change the picture. Okay.[inaudible] we don't change the price first. We changed the picture first and then if we still can't sell it, then we look at the price. Good idea. And then the last part of that whole thing, like I said, it's just test and learn. You just test the tar out of everything. Is Facebook gonna work better than Instagram? I don't know. Is it, let's test it. Let's see what happens. You take the same content and he posted on the same platforms just to see which one drives further at the same time. And then you can just start testing. Who's converting, who's interacting, what behaviors do I get from which platform? At the end of the day, when I have money to spend, where am I putting the money? So the more you test, the more you learn, the more you can go back to those goals, those beginning mid term longterm goals and redefine and just make them that much more secure. Say, okay, now I know. So instead of it being a mile wide parameter, now it's only three quarters of a mile and it gets smaller and smaller. And as you niche down again, you scale up. Okay, awesome. And as far as when I'm doing the email marketing, how often do you, is it just for new sales or what do you recommend I send out to my customers? Or how often? That's a great question. That's going to be another test and learn for sure. When your unsubscribes start to tick up, now it's too much. You're gonna scale back a little bit. We don't want to annoy people, so we need to, we need to push it. We need to be personal. But there's a couple of different things. Not every email has to be sales, but every email can sell. So you can do a new arrival blast. You could do a look book. Here's five ways to style one piece. Okay, good idea. Another one is customer content. Like, oh my gosh, got this testimonial, got this feedback, got this unboxing video, got this, whatever. Love this. Love you guys so much. Thank you for your support. It can just be a, I appreciate you. Here's what's going on behind the scenes and here's why it matters so much that you're sticking in this with me. I did have a customer do that. She sent me an unboxing video and it was beautiful, like it looked like a professional. I mean it was awesome. That's gold and fostering those relationships is just huge. It is, and her daughter is so cute. It was actually a Bailey's lost some stress. The Harper Dress, was it? Yes, that she wore for Eastern. It was so cute on her. That's awesome. Now I do use Shopify and it's a fantastic platform. I love it. Do you any tips for using, I'm not sure if Haley's Boston's use Shopify or just any tips you can give me from our website. We do use Shopify. Oh really? We do, but Bailey's blossoms and Peyton for are both on Shopify. Wow. I love that. I really do. There are multibillion dollar companies out there that you Shopify, you mentioned conversion rates and struggling there. When you taking it back to your business plan, what makes you better, special, different, and why you right. So conversion rates, when somebody comes on to your website, in essence, they're stepping into your home, but they don't know who the heck you are. So first and foremost, you need to make them feel safe because nobody's gonna feel at home. Oh, there's a nice comfy couch. I'm going to go put my legs up on the table when they'd never been there before. So it needs to engender trust. There could be reviews, testimonials, product guarantees, shipping guarantees, return policies, all those things where people are going, Ooh, but what if the worst case scenario happens? What if it shows up and it's got a gaping hole in it? What if it shows up and it's like seven sizes too small and it looks like it's made for an American girl doll? You know what I mean? There's always those, those concerns people have. So putting all of those potential fears that people have, getting into the mind of your customer and putting those at ease, addressing them front and center. Another one is simplifying the customer experience. So you test your experience by getting on your own website and go from it. Start to finish, make a purchase. What is your email flow look like? What are your automations? Do you have better set up? What confirmations are they getting? Um, and make sure that it is enough to where they feel secure, but not so much to where they're overwhelmed. And then also getting other people, friends, family, people who are willing to be brutally honest with you and ask them to test it. So what do you like? What do you not like? I never want to be the only opinion at the table because that's a very, very small testing pool. And if I'm wrong, that's a lot of burden stress on me. So let's get all the voices in here and let's talk about it. Another thing to increase conversion rates is a sense of urgency. There could be a sale or promotion or an offer at checkout. Does it? Bailey's Boston's. When you subscribe to an email list, it has like a percentage off. Yes. Biggest thing is when you're on social media, and this is just going back to Facebook and Instagram, you can spend a ton of money on social media trying to hit the people that are already following you, that Facebook and Instagram are refusing to show your stuff too, which is really frustrating. So you may have Mike, we've got 500 and almost 550,000 followers on Facebook, but we'll be lucky if 60,000 people see it, which is just above 10% that's awesome. Which is ridiculous. I'm like 10% of your people seeing it as awesome. That's crazy. So taking it off the third party platforms as much as possible is huge, but also just having their information in your own wheelhouse. So saying, I own this email address so I can reach out to them whenever I want or even better. Another thing that we've been testing has been SMS and SMS is so much better, such a higher conversion rate because for me, even if I don't want to read that message, I'm going to open it just to make the number go away on my phone. It's a higher conversion rate than the emails, is that what you're saying? Way Higher. Really. Okay. Because everybody opens it. I can delete an email without ever opening it. I have to open the text message. Same thing with Facebook messenger. We just started that as well where people are subscribing to Facebook messenger. We just started it yesterday and we already have a couple, I don't know, maybe a thousand subscribers and it's been great because again, that's another thing. We can send as many messages as we want. The one thing is you just have to be careful not to abuse that. You don't ever want people to say you're obnoxious and then take it off. So just monitor the way you're using it continues and grows that trust in that relationship. Another thing is an app. We have a mobile app, so all of those different things are outside of Facebook. They're outside of Instagram. So yes, while we hit those very hard, we love those platforms. I also want to make sure at the end of the day, if Mark Zuckerberg comes back and says, hey guys, this has been fun and all, but I'm done with businesses. I'm ripping the carpet out. You're all off the platform, please. If you are selling on what platform, don't make it someone else's platform that you have no control over. Get that email list, grow that list, grow that SMS list, look at having an app. There's, there's different things that are in your wheelhouse that are additional little micro cabins, if you will, on your property that you can hit as much as you want regardless of whatever happens on some third party platform. Awesome. Thank you so much for that. I mean, do you have any tips on how to maybe to increase sales or maybe connect with customers just maybe on a personal level? I think that is so important. Absolutely. So that humanizing is so huge and we've talked a lot about different areas where where you can really magnify the one thing that we haven't touched on that I think will be really beneficial. I think a lot of people make big goals, big sales goals, but they don't actually know what that breaks down to. So I want to sell$100,000 this month. What does that look like? That's great. But without a plan, it's just a big wish. It's not a goal until you really have a broken down to what does that look like? How can I actually make that happen? So for example, and I'm just for easy math, we're going to say$100,000 a month as your goal. I want$100,000 a month that I know cause I can look in Shopify and say, okay, I've even, if you only have 10 orders so far, you can take the average of those 10 orders and it'll say, hey, guess what? Your average orders 50 bucks. Awesome. Okay, well, if I want$100,000 a month, and I know my average order is trending around$50 well I know I need 2000 orders in order to make that happen, right? But then you can say, okay, what's my conversion rate? My conversion rate per Shopify is 2% meaning I get a hundred people to my website, two people purchase. I get a hundred people to my website to be able to purchase at$50 as a hundred bucks. Obviously, very easy math here, right? So then I can say, okay, at$100,000 a month, let's say it's a 30 day month that breaks down to$3,333 a day. Okay, well what does that look like? Well, that's 66 to 67 orders a day. What does that look like in terms of visitors? And so that you can really just break it down and say, okay, if this is my goal, how many people do I need to drive to the website? How many orders need to be placed and in order to get those orders, how many people in order to get those people, what efforts do I need to do? Okay, well then I can say when I post on Facebook, I get an average of 100 visits to my website. When I post on Instagram, I get 20 visits to my website. When I sit down and email on average, this is how many people see. You see what I'm saying? Where you take that and you say, okay, if this is my goal, what efforts do I need to fill in the gaps to make it equal that degree of traffic to be able to get those sales? Then you can start to progress and grow that, but it really just comes down to getting actionable steps because sometimes our goals can be so lofty that they shut us down. We're like, oh, I don't actually know how to do that. Yes you do. But what you're doing, if you're not breaking it down, is you're standing at the bottom of the staircase looking at the top of the stairs thinking, well, I can't get up there. Well, no, not in one jump, but if you just look at the next step in front of you, it's not going to overwhelm you. You just have to look at the one step, break it down. Say, okay, my goal is here, but what does it look like? This step, this step, this step, this step, and just break it down really financially and get as granular as you can. And that's when you test and learn and you say, okay, we're going to take a one step at a time and there are some steps that I'm going to trip on and I'm going to go, Whoa, that didn't work. But at least you're on the path to progression. Thank you so much. This has been amazing advice. I have a lot of planning to do, don't we all? Yes. Your podcast has been so inspirational to me. And are there any other resources that you recommend? One of the biggest things that I've noticed is that as I make time for me to personally progress and it puts me in that mindset, that growth mindset, it's so much easier to scale my company. My morning routine has gotten really locked down because I've noticed that I am on my a game when I am on top of my morning routine, but if I let that go the whole day yes is let go become cranky, oh, so cranky, you know, my workout, get my morning started. It's just, I completely understand that. Yeah. So No, I start my day getting up an hour before my kids. I go for a walk and while I'm walking I'm listening to a podcast or at night instead of watching Netflix, I could read a chapter in a book or something that just elevates me rather than checks me out. There's so many things that we do to check ourselves out of our lives, whether that's scrolling on Facebook and Instagram or watching a show. If we have big goals, we'd elevate our actions to get there. Absolutely. There's so many people that say, oh I don't have enough time. Yeah you do. You do have enough time. You just need to shift how you're using it. You don't need to work 80 hours a week to get to your goals. You just need to work smarter with the time that you have. So really, really focus in on how can I simplify, what am I doing, what are those time wasting activities that I can cut out or minimize so that I can maximize my efforts somewhere else. Amazing. Thank you. You're so welcome. I am so excited for you. Thank you. You've got a lot of drive and I could just, I wish everybody could see your face cause you've got just that glow about you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I'm, I'm trying really hard. I'm pushing every day and I'm learning as I go. And again, this has been a great opportunity. I can't thank you enough. One more thing. So your mom, your yourself, any advice on just how to balance Oh girl, that that opens up a whole can of worms. I'll tell Ya. That has been the one of the biggest struggles for me. Really one of the biggest ones. I can have a great mindset one day and a really terrible one. The next, we need to be incredibly self-aware to make sure that we are not nitpicking ourselves to death. Okay. It, there is no perfect mother out there that it's the worst and especially the more time we spend on social media looking at other people's lives, at least for me, the more negative I become about my own life. Absolutely, and that is a goal of mine to to, you know, to stop doing that, to focus more. Just put my focus somewhere else rather than doing that. If you are looking to somebody to uplift you, but you're getting off going, ugh man, how come not doing that? Good. How come I haven't accomplished that? If you're looking to get inspired, make sure the accounts you're following are inspiring you, give yourself five to 10 minutes Max. Get your inspiration for the day and get off. Awesome advice. Give yourself the ramp up that you need and then get out of there because you got big things to do. That's the biggest advice I have. You got big things to do and getting sucked in is not one of them. The only other advice I have is give yourself grace because it is so easy for us to compare our beginning with someone else's middle or someone else's end or we focus on the one time that we snapped and we turned into a monster rather than the 99 times where we were crate. You know, and we need to focus on the great things cause I don't want to, I don't want to teach my kids to hone in on the negativity. There's always going to be bad things. You will find them. If you're looking for it, you'll find it. But if you're looking for good, you'll find that too. So look for the good in everybody around you and your kids but also yourself cause it's there and it's abundantly there. But we don't give ourselves as much credit as we deserve. Thank you so much. This has been great opportunity for me and I appreciate it. You're so welcome. Yeah, I know there's gonna be a lot of people that are gonna want to follow you and your journey in entrepreneurship with your new barefoot and southern boutique out of Tampa, Florida. So where can they find more of you? Sure. They can find us on Facebook at barefoot and southern Btq. We're also on instagram@barefootandsouthernandatbarefootandsouthern.com. Awesome. Thank you so much, Brittany. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for taking the time to connect with me here on the conquering chaos podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, will you please take a moment to leave a review? It's the fuel to my fire and lets me know that my efforts to enact change and broaden your perspective of what's possible matter. Thank you so much for your support. If you want more content like this, don't forget to subscribe and connect with me on social media at Aaron[inaudible] or at Aaron[inaudible] Dot Com have APN tastic day. Get out there and congressman chaos.