When it comes to running a business, few things are ever as easy as you think they will be. In this episode, Emily is sharing a peek behind the scenes at the growth of Almanac Supply Co., her product and retail business. Learn how the team continues to innovate and find purpose in the work from updating processes and systems to furthering the growth of the company through marketing tactics that help bridge the online and in-person shopping experience.
Get full shownotes for this episode here >>
When it comes to running a business, few things are ever as easy as you think they will be. In this episode, Emily is sharing a peek behind the scenes at the growth of Almanac Supply Co., her product and retail business. Learn how the team continues to innovate and find purpose in the work from updating processes and systems to furthering the growth of the company through marketing tactics that help bridge the online and in-person shopping experience.
Get full shownotes for this episode here >>
Welcome to Being Boss, a podcast for creatives, business owners and entrepreneurs who want to take control of their work and live life on their own terms. I'm your host Emily Thompson. And in this episode I'm flying solo to share with you four of the biggest projects that I've been tackling at my retail company Almanac Supply Co. to give you a peek inside of the systems and updates we've made to take it to the next level. You can find all the tools, books, and links we reference on the show notes at www.beingboss.club. And if you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to this show and share us with a friend. Whether you want to grow your business with content marketing, social media or speaking on stages or in highly produced zoom rooms, I've got a podcast recommendation for you. Queue up an episode of The Shine Online hosted by Natasha Samuel brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. On her show Natasha interviews the brightest entrepreneurs she knows to bring you no fluff advice, honest discussions about the mental health and lifestyle aspect of entrepreneurship, and actionable strategies and success stories of those who have mastered the art of shining online in this conversational podcast with some hard hitting episodes on marketing your business and filling the latest of her lineup. Give it a search and listen to The Shine Online wherever you get your podcasts. Hey bosses, we're hanging out together. Just you and me today on this show to talk about what's been going on at Almanac Supply Co, It's been a hot minute since I've come in to give an update like this on my company here on Being Boss. And I'm really excited to be doing it in this way today because we've been doing a lot of things. And as I do all these things, I always think about coming in and sharing with you all the ups and downs and the lessons that I've learned. But as I come in to interview all of our new guests and all of my favorite business besties sometimes I don't have time to come in here and share with you these sorts of things though, I'm excited to dive in here to give you some really good nuggets. What I think is going to happen here is that you are going to get an inside look as to what I'm deeming, for whatever that's worth, to be the most important things for my attention in this company. So if you're relatively new around here, or maybe you just need a recap, here's a little bit about Almanac or in its fullest form Almanac Supply Company, Almanac Supply Co. I call it Almanac on the daily. So I want to give you a bit of a recap of what that company is in case you need a refresher. So I launched Almanac in 2018. I launched it as an online business first but also doing some local markets and pop up shops. It is a retail company where we make candles and source crystals or rocks from all over the world. That is the core of our product offering but we also have expanded our product lines to include things like art prints and hats and some apparel and keychains. And my god stickers these days are wild. But the core of our offering is our candles which we make in house and our crystals which we source from all over. I like to think of us as like a really classy rock shop. We launched and started online. We were online for the first several years, made it through COVID as an online business. And then we opened our first brick and mortar store in July of 2021, here in Chattanooga. I'm actually now recording this in this space that was originally our first brick and mortar store. It has now become my office here in the North Shore neighborhood of Chattanooga. I love being up here. And this is a special little space but it was incredibly small and we were kind of bursting at the seams almost immediately. We got the opportunity to move into a larger space in Spring of 2022. So just last year, we opened up on May 1 just almost across the street like sort of caddy corner to across the street from our old shop. Right on the main sort of As I have moved along my entrepreneurial journey, I've sort of found myself pushed in and drawn into specific directions, where most of the things that I have done have just sort of happened. Whereas Almanac, I very much so tourist strip of Chattanooga of the North Shore neighborhood. And that business has been open since or that started on purpose, I did everything very intentionally to start that business. It is, and it was and is my dream And I knew that I was doing something that wasn't done with this kind of intention, maybe really ever before or I'm not the first, I'm sure. But I think I'm definitely one of the first which is incredibly cool. And we're also doing some other cool things. So not only are we combining online and offline in a really sort of new and awesome way. But we're portion of the business has been open since May. I do run the company with my life and business partner David, and it also combining maker products and sourcing from outside of what we're making ourselves. We're combining a lot of business, if I were to start a business, which I did, that's what it would be, which I did, I'm living my dream. Am I different kinds of ways of doing business into a business model that at the moment, y'all I think is working. So Almanac is, Almanac is a really cool place to be. And it's, it's honestly where a lot of my energy is these days, I'm obviously still here running Being Boss. I'm here on the show, and I'm in the community. But I have built everything in a way so that Being Boss, really, it's less than half of my time for sure. And most of my energy is going into this not? And when I started it, I knew that I was, or my intention was to start a next generation small business, I amazing company that Almanac is becoming. So I'm excited to share some of these things with you today about what it is that we really focused on in 2022. So I want to share the four or not the four I want to share four large projects is my business, basically. It's our business obviously but it's my baby business. Every other business that I have ever that we tackled in 2022 from marketing to internal processes to give you that peek behind the scenes at what it looks like, or what it is that I have deemed important for this phase of business. So let's get started. In 2022, we started in a very different place from where we ended. I know this episode is wanted to combine the mom and pop feel of a brick and mortar, we did not start with brick and mortar. But that was coming out I think mid February. I'm currently recording it in mid January. So about this time last year, it is quite possible that the new store was not even a glimmer in our eyes. Right? It was about this time, maybe literally, I'm gonna go look later, I would not be surprised if it is literally the day that I'm recording this. We heard that the space across the street that the business was closing down. And I remember telling David like go over there immediately and get the information for her landlord. Because I absolutely want it. It may not have happened yet. So always the goal was to make it into brick and mortar was combining this sort of mom and pop brick and mortar done I started it by accident if I'm being quite honest. Except for I obviously bought that tanning salon back in the literally a whole year ago. It wasn't even on my roadmap for anything that has happened in 2022 to happen, which is such a crazy thing like that is not lost on me in any way, shape, or form. I've thought about it most moments for the last six months that like wow, six months ago, this wasn't even a thing. Eight months ago, this was not even a thing. 10 months ago, this was not even a thing. Literally now 12 months ago, this was still maybe not even a thing. atmosphere with a good use of technology and a deep understanding of online business. And bringing all of these And if it was it was the most bare glimmer of hope. So we were able to move into that space and without having made a plan to do that in the beginning of the year. We also started 2022 with four employees. And we have ended with 10 in person employees, including David and I, and four remote mixture of employees and contractors. So we're looking at 14 day before, you know social media was a thing, that wasn't an accident. But it wasn't a business that I started, it's versus four, it was a very big year for growing the team to help support the store and all the processes that happen around it. Again, the beginning of 2022, I thought we'd probably keep the four maybe up to five or six of extra things together in a way that not many people do these days. And is still honestly in the grand scheme of especially, you support, so that David and I wouldn't have to spend as much time in the store. I never anticipated that we'd be ending the year at about 14, we also doubled our revenue in 2022, which was amazing, and like, literally just doubled it like those, those last couple of days of the year, David, now we're looking at the stats, just watching that 97 tick to a 98 tick to a 99. And then on the last day 100% growth from the year before, very exciting to see that happen, and know, being a merchant in the world. And we're just like at the very beginning of this process. And I knew that as I especially in its exactness for us to double revenue from 2021 to 2022. Also, as we moved into a new store, we were able to add product categories and expand our marketing and start doing kind of something again, that I fell into and, you know, took that opportunity by the horns, I guess and ran with it. events and some of these things that have always been dreams of mine with this company. So many of those things came to fruition and 2022. And I am so grateful for each and every one. So as a whole, the year was huge. It was so much more work than I thought I was getting myself into. And as I sit here and I've been reflecting back, I had my Almanac CEO day dove into Almanac, that I was starting online to build a really strong foundation in the field that I was most last week, I mean, I'm like, my brain is filled with numbers and charts and all kinds of things that in every single bit of it is just me being really impressed with what we've been able to do and the past year. But there are four big projects that really defined 2022 at almanac that I really want to share with you because they think you can take some really, really great nuggets for your business. As I go through these. If I'm being quite honest, there were five, there were five big projects. But today I'm not talking about the brick and mortar store. So I'm going to talk about What are you taking by the horns and running with it? That's not a conversation for here and now. four big projects. And one of them is not even sort of the biggest one. I did a whole episode of starting the brick and comfortable with, and the area that I have been working for over a decade. But I wanted to I wanted to bring it into the mortar store, back in episode number 306 are really moving and growing into the new space. So episode 306. It'll be in the show notes if you want to go back and look at it. But know that I'm not talking about that today. Because there are lots of other like, that's on, that allmost didn't happen. I mean, it did. Obviously, we've spent about six weeks really preparing and eight weeks, six to eight weeks, really preparing and getting into that new store opened on May 1. real world. That was so long ago that was like five years ago, it feels like so whenever I look at what we did this year, that was almost a little blip. Like it was such a little thing to get going. And all four of these other projects that I'm talking about have taken significantly longer than six to eight weeks. So in a way that brick and mortar though it did the most for the business. And it was a very large project in and of itself is a small thing compared to some of the other things that we've been working on in the company. These are also things that I'm obviously not sharing about anywhere. I'm not talking about. Well, I am I'll talk about that in a second. You know, opening the brick and mortar store was all over social media. I'm not putting on social media, what our search engine optimization efforts have been right. So these are really the behind the scenes things that we are working on that is, that's the inner workings of the big flashy things that is you know, opening a brick and mortar and all the things that we're doing there. So four big ones, I chose these because they are really important for the phase that we're currently in and know that I have been sharing along the way all kinds of things on the secret Making a Business podcast so I know some old old Being Boss fans may remember two episodes of a podcast called Making a Business you can search for it wherever you listen to podcast and find two seasons of a show that Kathleen and I did together as I was starting Almanac Supply Co. And only those two seasons are available to the public. Since then I have done monthly episodes to the Being Boss Clubhouse. And these are private episodes where I'm really getting into some nitty gritty things of what it is that we're doing being very vulnerable. I mean, most of the folks in there like, I know a lot of them. So it's like just updating my friends on what's happening in Almanac. If you are interested in any of that content, you can find that in the Being Boss Clubhouse at beingboss.club/community, you can sign up for the clubhouse tier. And you will get access to the Making a Business podcast, which I think as of this month, goes into, I think its sixth season, which is crazy to think about, or I'm sharing all kinds of things that we're doing at Almanac on the regular. Whereas here on this show, I'm only coming in once every six months and really updating you on what it is that we're doing. So if you are interested in hearing more of those things, head over to the clubhouse sign up, binge the show for all it's worth. And you will have really the full update on all kinds of things that are happening at Almanac and I'm continuing that show into this year as well. So the four things, as I mentioned, it's a little bit sort of internal processes. There are some marketing here, I'm going to be starting with one that feels maybe the most obvious apart from the brick and mortar store. And that is team growth. We did a lot of hiring in 2022. And because it was such a part of what I was experiencing. And not only that, but as I run sessions in the Being Boss clubhouse, or as I continue with the C-suite mastermind group that I'm still continuing forward with. We talk a lot about team growth, about hiring and not just your first hire, though we talk about that often. Is it going to be an employee? Is it going to be a contract? Or what does it look like to do to have an intern. All these things, sometimes it's the first hire or sometimes it's your like 15th hire, and it's doing things differently and better or you're hiring for a different role or whatever it may be. So hiring is something that I talk about all the time, both internally, but also with you with the Being Boss audience, those of you who are engaged and hanging out, we talk about hiring a whole lot. And so a lot of those episodes came through the Being Boss feed this year, there are four that I want to know in case these are of any interest to you. First was episode number 313, which is called Creating a new hire, Wow, can I say that correctly? Maybe let me try again, creating a new hire onboarding process. Follow that up with number 314. This was a sort of two parter that I did with Corey. 314 was how to plan for new team member success. And then a couple episodes later, I came in with an episode with my friend Dana Kaye, number 323, growing your team to scale your business. And then I brought Dana back again, for a number 333 to do better hiring strategies for your small business. So there's been a lot of hiring and a lot of onboarding and making sure I'm getting the right team in place. But it also hasn't just been hiring. It's been building culture and policies. And honestly my own skill set as a leader and as a manager, I will admit that the hardest thing for me has been really stepping into the leadership role. And not even stepping into it, but systemising it in a way that I'm not forgetting to do reviews, right? Or I'm not forgetting to do all of the training that I need to do whatever it may be. And all honesty, I'm used to working with professionals, I'm used to working with other bosses, either, you know, bringing them into my team or contracting with them or whatever it may be. So this has been a very different experience for me to have a whole team of sort of up and coming folks, right people who are not completely entry level like this is not their first job though I've had a couple of those as well. But these are young college age folks who need a lot of guidance. And it has been a challenge, an ongoing challenge for me to step into a place where I am as, I can be as attentive and guide and all of the ways that I want to guide them so that they are happy in their roles and so that the company benefits from their presence because with this sort of group of folks, if I overlook things, things can fall apart very quickly. And not just, you know, from a sort of day to day standpoint, but they are literally the face of the company, to a vast majority of our customers. So I'm talking about sales associates on the sales floor. In particular, these are the folks who, who are the face of the company when someone walks in. So there has been a lot of me in a managerial and leadership role in a way that I have never had to be before. And that has been, there's been some mindset shifts to even get me into a place where I'm accepting of that role. And that all sounds very dramatic. But anytime there's a transition, there's always a little bit of like, Oh, I gotta do this thing, or Oh, I didn't realize it was going to feel like that. And so I'm here and I'm ready. And I'm doing it. But it has also been a process for me to sort of maneuver myself into that sort of mindset and practice, of being that kind of manager in the business. And there are some things that I've done along the way to help support me in that role. One of the biggest ones was creating an employee handbook. In all honesty, I'm not even ashamed to say it, in all these years, I've never had an employee handbook, because I tend to work with people who don't need, I am hearing my lawyer right now in my ear going Emily don't say these things outloud. You need an employee handbook, you cannot. You cannot wing this one. Okay. And I really knew that before opening the store before bringing in a team like this that I had to. So as we were opening this door, I was like spending my nights at my laptop in my living room putting together my first employee handbook. I cobbled it together from lots of sources, as I have done most of my entrepreneurial career, doing some deep Google's having some really great friends who were sharing of their own. All of these things and pulled together a employee handbook that defined everything from our dress code to the benefits and disciplinary procedures. I hated it, I hated putting it together. I hate making rules. It is not, it is not in me to want to do that to other people. However, in general, I understand the importance. And in particular, a short lived hire from 2021 showed me that this would be a non negotiable moving forward. So before I made a single new hire for this new store, I made sure this was buttoned up and in place, and I am so glad that I have it. Do I like the rules? I didn't like making them but I like them being there so that whenever people tow them because people are always going to tow them, it's easy for me to be like, refer to the employee handbook. And it makes doing my job as the leader and manager significantly more easy when all of those things are simply defined. If I were to do it, again, I'd probably hire a professional not going to lie, I spent a whole lot of time doing it when I could have just paid someone to do it. And now that I'm going through my first review process of the employee handbook, a sort of New Year New everybody task on my to do list, I'm really seeing where a professional set of eyes would be advantageous and I'm not above moving in that direction, even now, a year later, so cobbled together now as you need, if you can't afford someone to do it for you all the way, then know that you can come back in a couple of years and totally redo it as needed. So an employee handbook was a really important part of this process took a lot of my time, continues to take a lot of my time, but is incredibly important. It takes a lot of my time but it also saves me a ton of time and general grief. And I'm totally down for that. The next thing that I have invested a lot of my time and energy in this year around team growth is training. So building out training processes, it is an ongoing process. I actually haven't had to train anyone in a hot minute knock on wood, which has been nice. I haven't been able to like test and review and change it in quite the way that I was this summer when we were bringing on lots of people at a time. We have really amazing team retention, which is something that I am not going to lie. I am legitimately proud of, especially in a retail setting the way that we have been able to retain almost every single one of our No actually, with the exception of one hire who moved away for college. We have retained every hire that we made in hires. 2022. How about that? That is, I'm impressed with myself, and with just the whole team like everything, but I'm impressed. But really building out training processes, updating them, I started really simple with my training and processes, it's going to get a little more complex and sort of long tailed. Instead of training sales associates, in particular, in one day or two days, I want to do it over the course of two or three weeks, so that it's easier for folks to retain information. It is a system that I look forward to overhauling in a couple of months, I do see the need to make another hire or two in the next quarter or so. So it's something that is just an ongoing thing, and I think will be an ongoing thing. But in all honesty didn't really exist in the same way before. So it was something that we've had to build out this year, as well as performance reviews. As of recording this, the performance reviews for the year are currently underway. It's been, it was a q4 project for me to build out that process, it was a little slow going because you know, I have months to do this, then as the year was winding down, and we're busier than ever, I'm like, Okay, I have to buckle down and make this do and now that we're into January things have been delivered, things have been scheduled. And we're officially doing our first round of performance reviews. With the entire Almanac team. My intention is that this will happen twice a year, but also within with new employees, we'll have them at 30, 60 and 90 days. All of these are processes that have to be built out, right I need reminders for new employees, I need the structure, I need the the ranking systems like I need all of these things in place. And we've been building all of that out over the last quarter, and is currently in play. And I'm so excited for how this singular process is going to help us improve and grow as a team, it's going to give me the context to address several things on a regular basis, that will continue creating the kind of team that is going to help us tackle the growth ahead because I ain't done yet. Not even a little bit. And then we've also been building out some other things too, like fleshing out HR files and personnel files and getting communication squared away, there's been a lot of things within this team growth piece that has taken up a lot of time and energy. In fact, I think I would have to say that hiring and managing this team has likely been one of the things is taken up the most amount of my time IN 2022. But the joy of getting in and making things happen and building the processes is that I can start off boarding some of these things this year as well, which also feels amazing. And even as we've built up a really great What I did not plan on was both me and David needing to be working in the shop on that level. So a little bit team this year, we were still understaffed during the holidays, for sure I was working in that shop a good bit more than I wanted to. And actually, that's not even true. I've mentioned that. I don't think there's actually even on understaffed. That can be easily remedied. And I'm putting the steps into making that happen soon. But otherwise, now Making a Business. I've mentioned that I did intend to work a good bit in the store during the holidays, because I needed to see firsthand all the things that were going to happen so that I could better plan for the next year. that the holidays are over, I'm not working in the shop. I have not worked in the shop since. I mean honestly I think since Christmas Eve. Yes, I worked Christmas Eve that was on purpose, I needed to see what it was going to be like so that I could better plan for next year. I don't think I've worked in the shop since Christmas Eve and I am not on the schedule for the foreseeable future. In fact, I literally might not work at all, unless an emergency comes up. And the goal is to staff up a bit more so that I am not the person who deals with emergencies. So building team has been a big Number two is different. Don't want to say less fun. I think it might be more fun, but I think I'm just weird. So let's thing. That employee handbook is currently getting updated. And I know what I need to know to move into the year ahead. remove fun from the equation altogether. It has been updating a key process at the store. And that is our receiving process. What I'm talking about whenever I say that is literally the process of the UPS person walks in or So that has been a huge one. This sort of HR know, like human resources, building out the Human Resources side of FedEx there, none of these companies sponsor us. USPS perhaps. No doesn't sponsor, but it could have been the USPS person walks in the door with a package, hands it to whoever is, you know, has their hands out? What happens next? I'm this company and more so than just like you know, the stuffy HR office, but really thinking about the people we have in the, I was the problem. It was me. I 100% was the problem. There was one day during, may have, who knows, this fall, the time that they're giving us that we are paying without giving it that we're they're trading us for money, right some time. Something came in, it got tucked in the back room, I and it was opened, tucked in the back room, and I got it out and just put it on the floor. I was so excited. These things that I ordered, were finally here, let's put them on the floor. Our product inventory manager comes in knowing that package was supposed to be arriving that day. thinking about that resource and making sure it's managed and optimized has been my biggest task of the year. She's like, where's the whatever it was? And I said, Oh, you mean, those beautiful things on the floor, like on the sales floor. And she was like, yeah, those aren't in the system yet. And I was like, I'm the problem. Me, it's me. And that was the day that I realized that our receiving process wasn't working. If I didn't even know what was happening. And there was no one there to stop me, there was nothing there to stop me. And there's nothing there to stop anyone else either. And we needed to fix a very big problem. And this probably happened, that it's happened this summer, it was a summer thing, because once fall hit, I knew it was time to update this process. And I put members of the team together to fix it. So three to four months were spent working through this singular receiving process, there was a lot of talking through, a lot of testing out, a lot of building tools. So that the singular process of someone walks in with a package, all the way through this stuff is ready to be put onto the sales floor just happened in exactly the way that it needed to every single time. It ended up taking a lot more time and effort because it ended up being a much more sort of advanced and not even advanced and much more integral process than I had originally anticipated. Because once we fix that sort of piece of the process, it made us realize that Well, that's wonderful. But what about all of the other connected processes to this singular one? So though, we were relatively quickly able to fix that sort of that one piece of the receiving process, we are now working on the things that bookend it, right? So thinking about updates for when I'm ordering things, how are those things getting communicated to the product and inventory manager, both for the purpose of receiving it for selling on the sales floor, but also for it being added to the website. And then like just, it's complex, it's really complex. And at almost every piece of this puzzle, I am the problem. So I'm here fixing, I can't fix the problem, I'm still probably going to be a problem. But I can fix the process so that I'm not a problem in this process. So it started out as a seemingly minor process that is actually it actually has ties into the entire business. So we're focusing on getting it right, we were able to fix that. And it literally was as simple as whenever someone receives a package, take it downstairs and put a put it on the new receiving table that is labeled as such. So these are unopened boxes that are set on this receiving table. And then a Slack message is sent to our product and inventory manager to let them know that a package has arrived. Right? So that's relatively easy. But then what happens next, and that y'all is the key question and updating or otherwise building processes, and then what Growing a business can feel like the wild west but there's a better CRM in town HubSpot. HubSpot CRM keeps all your teams happens next or really more correctly, and then what needs to happen next, and then what needs to happen next, over and over until you build a solution that gets you from point A to point B and as easy a journey as possible. That's where we are. So we're going to continue working on sort of the bookended parts of that process. But that one was weirdly a large one and it was again one that started pretty small all ended up being pretty big. And also isn't that just the lesson in business is that few things are ever going to really be as easy as you think they're going to be. So for this one, anyone who feels any friction in your business, right if there is a process that is just grinding your gears or it's grinding its own gears because it is not a well oiled machine. What needs to happen next to get you from point A to point B? on the same page. So you can spend less time managing your software and more time connecting with your customers. When you hitch your wagon to HubSpot CRM, your marketing, sales, operations, and service teams all have access to the same data. Sales teams won't miss out on qualified leads and marketing teams know where best to promote their offers. That's how the Wild West is won, learn more and hubspot.com. HubSpot grow better. All right, I have two more big things that I want to share. Both of these are marketing things, which I know bosses just I'm going to be doing that workshop in March. So upcoming, if you're watching this or listening to this relatively get so excited about. But let me tell you neither of these have to do with social media. So calm down, calm down, or don't actually don't calm down, get excited, because search engine optimization is now significantly more exciting to me than social media has ever been. How about that? So number three is SEO, search engine optimization. You've likely heard me talk about this a good bit over the past couple of months because it is so where my brain is at both Being Boss and at Almanac. If I'm being quite honest, and clubhouse members and my C-suite members, we've really dove into this a couple of times, or with clubhouse a little more lightly, some more like top level conversations. C-suite has seen my full process for what it is that we're doing. And everyone gets so excited every single time. So I'm going to give you a quick spiel on it. But also know that as I've done all of my reviews, and I see that this has been one of the most one of the most fruitful investments of 2022. That I'm doing a workshop on it, like I want to show bosses exactly what it is that we're doing so that you can either replicate or make your own process, whatever it may look like and do this for yourself in a way that doesn't feel like a bunch of like tech gobbledygook. live, it's going to happen in March to the Being Boss clubhouse. So to be free to the clubhouse clubhouse to our members of the Being Boss community, you can join it beingboss.club/community. Clubhouse tier, join the clubhouse. And I mean, we're going to be doing a workshop where I'm literally going to show you my spreadsheets and all the tools that we're using and all of these things. I'm going to give you a brief rundown of this now so that if you're interested, this will peek it a bit further. I hope it'll give you a bit of an inside look. I made this process up more or less, pulling from lots of resources as I do. So you can do this yourself. I think there's going to be enough information here for you to more or less get it done. But if you do want to see exactly what it is that we're doing, beingboss.club/community joine the clubhouse tier. Workshop coming in March and there will be a replay. So if you are listening to this later, there will be a replay of this workshop available to all clubhouse members for the life of atheclubhouse. But let me sort of paint a picture for you here. Back in December 2021. We got a big hit on our blog, which I host our site on Shopify, they do not sponsor us. I use the blogging feature on Shopify for our blog. And before December 2021, I was posting sporadically at best. I mean, there was, you know, a year where I posted 6, 7, 8. A year were probably 2, right I was not doing a whole lot of content creation and I wasn't doing it with any kind of search engine optimization in mind at all. What I would do is for any because I run a seasonal business like not even seasonal and the way most people think of seasonal. But my business deals with the seasons of the planet. I would go in often and update old blog posts and then republish them because they were still relevant for that time of year. So I'll update any links I would have you know, given them a copy edit, I would add anything, you know, whatever. So nothing crazy going on with my blog post creation at all. If anything, I was using it as fodder to get people from my newsletter to my website. So you know, go read this post, I was not thinking about it for search engine optimization purposes. So I was doing this, I was updating, you know, a couple blog posts a quarter. So they were being published again at the right time of year. And in December 2021, I got a big hit on a blog post that I had been sort of republishing for the past year or two. So it was an old blog post, not incredibly well written for the purposes of search engine optimization. It just was relevant for the time. And I was impressed. And by impressed at that point, I think it maybe got like 1500 hits in a day or two. And I was like, Whoa, that is incredible. Let's see if we can do it again. So I got this inkling that I wanted to, to try to actually update a post based on what I knew about search engine optimization, and see if it would do anything. So I picked, I picked a relatively arbitrary one. Actually, no, it wasn't arbitrary. It's actually pretty core to our are pretty important to our core offerings. There is a blog post on creating crystal grid kits. Nope, it wasn't it was a, I'm gonna get this right, I swear. It was a blog post on how to do crystal grids. So I went in and the using some SEO tools that I knew I could use for this, I updated it with all of the SEO goodness. So I added, you know, headers, and I made sure it had keywords in it and all of those things on like a, on a very pretty elementary level of what this should look like. And then I started updating it, or then I started checking in with the stats. And I checked the stats for two or three months. And I saw the growth happening. Now about actually less than a year later, that one blog post that has not been revisited since I gave it the elementary go in February ish of last year, that one blog post now accounts for 10% of our inbound organic traffic. Now, when I originally wrote that blog post, like four or five years ago, and it just sort of lived on the site, and then I updated it, not even the best update it could ever have. And it now accounts for 10% of our inbound organic traffic. That's kind of cool. Well, a year later, 10% is amazing. But the immediate numbers that I saw, made me want to do more of this, but better. So in the spring of 2022, I sat down and I created a plan for investing in Almanacs, AlmanacSupplyCo.com, right and the website's search engine optimization. And it is the it may be the only but really the marketing endeavor of 2022 that I felt actually paid off. Which is quite something to say. So this is more than is is more than and across both businesses. This is more than Instagram. This is more than Twitter, this is more than LinkedIn. This is more than we even did some, some mailers and things like that, like, you know, you feel a little things from everything. But SEO is actually a snowball rolling down a hill. And even though it's still relatively small, it's just gonna grow. It is just gonna grow in a way that nothing else really grows these days. Right? So broad strokes, here's what we did. First, I started researching. First of all, I will say that I have a like, I already have a pretty great working knowledge of search engine optimization. I did some SEO writing, literally, maybe 20 years ago, like early early stuff, y'all don't even know about that. That's like a weird little side job I had in college that I haven't even talked about literally openly ever. I did some travel writing for a website that's probably been dead for about 15 years. And I did a lot of SEO writing. So I was just infusing content with keywords, basically, also built websites for eight years. So I have, again, that working knowledge of SEO. And then I've collaborated with companies on articles and, you know, core content pages and those sorts of things where I've experienced, they're working sort of systems with search engine optimization. So I have, I think I have more experience than most enough to get me going not enough to know that I'm absolutely doing it right until the numbers start rolling in. So I already have a pretty good knowledge but I also did a lot of research and most importantly, I paid someone that I've worked with in the past to do some consulting with me. So I literally like paid him for an hour and a half of his time for him to sit on a zoom with me and answer all of my questions and walk me through all of the tools he used and why you uses them and how they could work for me, he did no work for me, it was just a consulting call and it was worth every single penny. So I did some research, I gathered everything that I needed. And then I sat down and I chose my keywords. And whenever I chose my keywords, I tackled it in two different ways. And I had been presented with solutions for this before that made no sense to me, like here, here are your keywords. But like, half of these don't make sense half of these, like I would never choose, some things are missing. Like, it never made sense in my head until I did this. I sat down to a Google spreadsheet and I created two tabs in this Google Spreadsheet. One Tab was all of my core keywords, these are keywords that I should just be ranking for, or that are simply so core to what it is that that that I offer that they just they're they're my keywords, they are the core keywords for Almanac and these are things like Almanac Supply Co, obviously as a core keyword to Almanac Supply Co. Yes. Also candles, I may never rank for candles. But is it not a core keyword, and then fleshing it out a little bit more crystal shops in Chattanooga. That one is absolutely attainable, and absolutely a core keyword. So I created one spreadsheet, that was a list of the core keywords that are simply imperative for the business that we run. The second sheet was goal keywords, these are peripheral, right? These are things that that are not necessarily core, but definitely related to products that we have, or whatever it may be, or to our general sort of mission as a company. So things like how to build a crystal grid, right. So I literally pulled from some of our old really great posts and created this goal key worksheet that was a little more peripheral, but things that I wanted to be working on. And peripherally, the opportunities are endless. So the goals were really just here's what we're going to work on for the foreseeable future. And I created about six buckets of key words that were all like, each bucket was a theme or a topic. And then underneath that bucket was you know, 10 to 15 key words related to that topic that I wanted us to rank for. And I did lots of research into their search difficulty and what their search volume was in a month and all of these things. But the basis of this was giving me the keywords that we would be working for. And then I onboard of the team and we got to work. So we started doing we started tackling the blog, I really the site from three different places. One is how do we update general pages to help us better rank for these core keywords that we wanted. So there was lots of pages that got updated for SEO friendliness using a couple of tools. And then we went through those blog posts, and one chose old blog posts that we wanted to update to help us reach these key keywords, and then also created new content that would help us reach some of these keywords, as well as monthly reviews of our rankings. And y'all we're winning, that's all gonna say we're winning it, we're doing it, it feels great. It feels great in a way that social media marketing has not felt great and a long time. There's a couple of keywords sets from the our goal keywords that I just moved to a third part of this Google Sheet, a third tab that says winning, because that we just were top, top 20 of all of the words on that list. And honestly, because of the world we're playing in crystals, it's kind of easy. Like we've chosen a really easy place to play the SEO game, which has been really nice. But it is also a lot of work. But we're seeing it pay off. We're getting organic traffic sales on the website every single week, which makes me so happy. I can see where they're coming from, what they're searching, how they're landing there. And it's just people who are finding us by searching the things that we are literally working on. Of course, the goal is to be getting the sales daily. But at the moment, getting organic traffic sales every week makes me totally happy. And we have very purposefully pulled out of social media, not entirely. I think there's still a little bit of like a purpose there. But pulled out a majority of our efforts from social media to focus here, because it's a longer game. It I think builds our audience better than social media does these days. And though the gratification is not instant, because I know it will last longer. It is more gratifying, in general, in general. So SEO really has me jazz and it's like it's kind of my pet project like I'm the one who's doing the monthly reviews because I want to see how all this stuff is gone. My fingers are very much so in it. And I am loving it. I'm loving seeing it happen. And I want more of us to be working as much on SEO as you are on social media, if not more so. So again, if you do want to join a workshop where I will be taking everyone literally through our entire process and giving you some good prompts to help you along the way, I'll be doing that in March in the being boss clubhouse you can join at beingboss.club/community that is the clubhouse tier of the community. So that's number three. Finally, there's Number Four Four is a project that had been on my list almost from the beginning, probably literally from the beginning. And every year that I look through my CEO days, like the opportunities or the goals, this one is always on the list. And it never happened until this year, until this past year. And that is a zine. For years, I have wanted to create a seasonal zine for Almanac and this year we made it do. It almost didn't happen. Right as the right as we were getting ready for, you know, q4 marketing, it was kind of time to sort of make a final call. I even think we made the final call not to do it. We were like, uh, we'll just wait till spring, it'll be fine. Well, we have so many things on our plate right now. Let's just, you know, focus on what we need to focus on. And then I came into a meeting one day, and I'm like, No, y'all, I finally see it, I finally figured it out. And we were making it harder than it had to be. And once I like once I made it less complex, once I made it less of a thing, it was actually able to be a thing. And so we pulled together the content again, super easily. And in a way that we knew it would be easily replicated for future seasons. And we published printed a physical zine for the Winter Solstice, it came out just before the winter solstice, it was a collection of blog posts and blog posts snippets. And my goal was to make a more immersive experience. So we're putting them in the bags of everyone who are every order that goes sort of out the door. They're getting one and so they can read more about the makers, they can discover more about the products, and they have ways to find more information on our website, because that's really, really the goal is to get folks who come in our store, onto our website. And I think it's genius. It's just as little five and a half by eight, eight and a half, you know, like small size. And it's only eight ish pages. It is adorable. I love it so much. It's also really funny because I see the marketing genius in it. Some of my sales associates are like, what's a zine, if I'm like, is too cool for you. But read it, follow the links, dive in and immerse yourself in the world that is Almanac. It feels amazing to have this thing not only out in the world once, but we are already producing our Spring one and will be something that we do ongoing and it is a beautiful link. We are creating a bridge between our online and our offline experiences with this zine that that feels a little bit genius. And is it something that you know, I think everyone could do? Yes, no, maybe you know, it's interesting. I talk a lot to product businesses that have a hard time creating content for their business because their product businesses. And I feel like this is a great example. And it ties mostly to blog content. So it's stuff that's already getting created. But it is possible to have an immersive sort of content driven brand, even if you're dealing with product. And we're learning a ton of things along the way. So we're learning about QR codes, which are, I'm so glad that the pandemic made those a thing. I've been using QR codes for, you know, 15 ish years. And they weren't widely used until we all had to scan them to access menus. And now everyone knows how to use a QR code. And I'm very happy about that. We've also been working with UTM tracking so we can really gauge where traffic and sales are coming from. And we're putting all of this sort of print product into the world. And it's also helping us learn what content our foot traffic is interested in as opposed to, you know, our Instagram crowd or whatever it may be. Our foot traffic is very different. We have a whole different line of customers that are the tourists who just pop into the shop. And so we're learning about this new audience as much as we possibly can and then also effectively bridging the gap between online and offline with this thing that starts offline. So there's my four things. It's been quite a year it's been a lot of fun, a lot of new things. And this is why I'm here, right? Being able to do business in this way to be innovative with how it is that we are connecting things together to sort of build and nurture a team that is finding purpose in their work, and also supporting a larger organization. Like these are all the things that I am absolutely here to do. And with crystals in my pocket, like any and every pocket, and then others that I can't fit in my pockets. This is, this is the dream. And it's really crazy to me, again, to think that this time a year ago, I didn't think any of this was going to happen. And we probably would have done that we probably would have done the zine significantly earlier in the year. Honestly, if the shop hadn't happened, but it would not have had the same audience. If the shop hadn't happened. I am so impressed with the store, what it has accomplished with this business, with the team that we have built and honestly with myself, that I've been able to even hold all of this and it has it's grown so quickly. Do I feel tired? Absolutely. I have some time scheduled off in February to to take a breather, because I do feel like you know a year of hustling in this way, has taken its toll and I need a nap. But I can also look at what we've done and feel so much like my efforts have been worth every bit of effort of it. It feels great. And those are the four big things that I feel really defined this year. Apart from the big one being that we opened the new brick and mortar store all together. I can't even I'm like I'm not even making plans for this year. I'm just again, I'm just here to ride the wave of what the store is I have some inklings. I'm not like putting any eggs into any baskets at the moment. There are some things that I want to do. There are some things we're going to hit off really fast, we're actually going to be diving into what it is that I'm best at. Or what it is that I have the most experience at very soon. We're gonna do a full website audit and do a whole bunch of upgrades there, which I'm very excited about. Oh my god, I built a new website in January of last year. Oh, I forgot about that. Well, that was a whole thing. January February of 2022 was also creating a new website for Almanac before we ended up going like getting the shop that is insane. Okay, I need to quit this recording now and probably go take a nap. I hope that you will got a nugget that you can take into your business from this episode today. Thank you so much for coming and spending this time with me. And if you ever get the chance to come Chattanooga come check out Almanac Supply Co. and know that there are so much happening behind the scenes of that cute little rock shop in North Shore Chattanooga. All right, boss because you're here I know you want to be a better creative business owner, which means I've got something for you. Each week the team at Being Boss is scouring the news, the best entrepreneurial publications and updates and releases of the apps and tools that run our businesses and is curating it all into a weekly email that delivers the must know tips and tactics in the realms of mindset, money and productivity. This email is called Brewed. We brew it up for you each week to give you the insight you need to make decisions and move forward in your creative business. Check it out now and sign up for yourself at beingboss.club/brewed that's beingboss.club/brewed now until next time, do the work. Be boss.