The time/money investment balance is real. Especially in a brand new business that isn't making money (yet). In this episode, I'm sharing my thought process behind how and where I plan to invest my time and my money to grow this new business.
The time/money investment balance is real. Especially in a brand new business that isn't making money (yet). In this episode, I'm sharing my thought process behind how and where I plan to invest my time and my money to grow this new business.
Speaker 0:
So when it comes to how I was going to approach building this new TPT business, I kind of had to ask myself do I want to do this scrappy or do I want to do this smart? And I want to kind of make the distinction between the two of those things for you guys before I dive into this, because I think that you can do both, and scrappy and smart look different in different stages of your business, or should I say that scrappy always looks scrappy but smart looks different in different stages of your business. So I'm obviously in a much different position building a TPT store this go round than I was the first time. So the first time, you know, I was single. I had a lot more time on my hands, even though I was still full time in the classroom. I was living in this tiny little one bedroom apartment and I didn't have a lot of money. I was living on a very, very small teacher salary.
Speaker 0:
And this go round it's a lot different. I am doing my business full time, working from home, but I also have, you know, a three month old. I have a toddler and I have less time now than I did when I was working full time and single. So this stage of life looks different for me. I also have multiple other businesses that I'm running, so spending all of my time focusing or spending all of my business time focusing on this one business venture does not seem smart, especially when all the other ones are actually making me money. So time-wise, I have less time to invest, but money-wise, I have a lot more money that I could throw at this. But then it's like it comes down to okay, how scrappy do I want to be in order to save money, but how smart do I want to be in terms of making my money, make me money right. So, like trying to find that balance between I don't want to just throw money at something and throw money at a business that's not making money yet, but I also don't want to spend a lot of my time trying to be scrappy when I have the resources to do other things right. So a couple of choices that I've made in terms of like how I'm going to spend my money with this business has been number one with doing things smart with my money.
Speaker 0:
I've gone ahead initially and I've invested in, you know, purchasing my domain for, I think, five years. So that was a little chunk of an investment. I'm also having my VA help me create these resources. So as I create the template, I send it on to her and say like hey, here's where all this clip art is gonna go, here's how you're gonna arrange the pages, like I might do the letter A for her and like you do B through Z, right. So I've done the bulk of the planning, the designing and all of that, but the actual execution is done by somebody else. So that is a little bit of an investment, a monetary investment, where if I was going to be scrappy I would just do it all myself. But if I'm going to be smart, then I have to realize that my time really has to go into the things that are making me money currently, right, so spending my time elsewhere.
Speaker 0:
So I've made some smart investments in the actual product creation, getting things up and running. I paid for some of my branding upfront. That I didn't do the first time. So let's just kind of break that down just a little bit. Some of the things that I've spent money on so far have been the domain, the email attached to that domain.
Speaker 0:
I've spent money on getting the Shopify up and running. I've spent a few hundred dollars on branding, both for my Shopify, like just for the whole business. Like Shopify, I did buy like a kit off of Etsy, and so it was like one of those pre-branded kind of things and then you just sort of change it up a little bit to fit your business. So I did that to make everything go a whole lot quicker, versus trying to create all of my own branding, all of my own logos and everything for Shopify like from scratch. And then I've also heavily invested in clip art, which my first go around, I did not also, on this, like trying to be smarter but also costing me more money has been that I intend to take most of my resources that I'm creating and make print on demand workbooks for Amazon as well. So, going into it with that in mind, I've had to choose clip art from clip artists who have extended licenses available so that I can use their clip art in these print on demand workbooks. So some of those those are some of the things that I've spent money on that I definitely did not spend money on the first go round, but I see the value in them this time around.
Speaker 0:
In terms of being scrappy, though, and trying to like a smart, scrappy, right, like I don't want to spend a whole lot of time doing something that's not going to give me a high return on investment. So there are some things that I don't want to pay for. A few of those things would be and most of those things fall into the categories of not wanting to hire out experts yet, like I don't want to hire social media managers, I don't want to hire blog writers, I don't want to hire Pinterest experts. Those are things that I could really see later on down the line hiring out, but at this really early stage in my business, that's not something that I want to spend money on. But then I also want to make sure that getting a good return on my time investment in terms of if I'm writing a blog post, I want to make sure people are actually seeing it. And if I don't have a lot of traffic on Pinterest and I'm brand new and I'm kind of, you know, still figuring out email marketing and how all that's going to look, still trying to grow that audience I want to make sure that I'm getting a return on investment for writing those blogs. And I know that some things just take time right, like Pinterest blogging, a lot of those things organic, more organic forms of traffic. Those things are going to take time, right, like Pinterest, blogging, a lot of those things organic, more organic forms of traffic. Those things are going to take time, and I'm fine with that, but at the same time, if I'm trying to get the business off the ground and I've already invested money into it then I want to start to see a return on investment a little bit more quickly. With that in mind, trying to get the blog out there, get it off the ground, get some back links going for that blog.
Speaker 0:
One of the scrappy things that I've done is I've set up a little blog hop, and I intend to do a few of those over the next six months. Can I see how the first one goes? I'm sure, though, that it's a long game, right, so I'm doing this first one before summer starts, and then the goal is to do a few more between now and the end of back to school season or before we get into the holidays, so to do a couple more of those really helping to get my domain being linked to from other reputable websites and, of course, linking back to them. So that's something that I'm doing. That's scrappy. Other collaborations that I intend to do are that I've found a couple of Facebook groups that will allow you to post your free resource inside of the group, and so I've attempted to join a couple of those so that I can post my freebie to TPT. They don't let you, like, collect leads or anything like that, but they will let you post inside of there. So I'm going to try to post in a couple of groups.
Speaker 0:
I'm not at a place where I'm ready to just post on my personal Facebook page or, like try to appeal to people in that way, although I'm not against that. I think that's really scrappy and a really smart way to do it to ask your friends and family to share with their friends and family, but I'm not there. And then eventually I would like to do an email collaboration where I partner with four or five other sellers and we all link to each other's email opt-ins and share that within our email list and on social media. I'm not quite at a place where I'm ready to do that yet, just because used to once upon a time. You know you're bringing, you're doing the bulk of the organizing, and it's a lot of work, and I think that I really want to make sure that I'm partnering with people who have an established list to make sure that it's worth it. But in order to really make that happen, I want to make sure that my list is a little bit more established, especially with still establishing my sender reputation from this new domain. I want to make sure that I've got a good sender reputation and that I'm not just automatically starting to send out emails to several hundred or over a thousand people with a non-established sender reputation. If you're like, what is she talking about With sender reputation?
Speaker 0:
There's actually a podcast with Melissa Se Seideman in my main podcast episode that you should check out. You should check out. Check out that episode if you're not quite sure what I'm talking about there. But doing something scrappy. And then I'm also trying to just be smart smart with my time, smart with my money, invest in the things that are important, and that's where I'm at with that. The next episode, I'm going to give you guys an update on where things are and a very kind of more detailed plan of what I'm going to be doing within the next couple of months and the three things that I intend to focus on with growing this business. So stay tuned for the next episode.
Speaker 0:
This is just kind of a little check-in and kind of a honestly a little bit of a brain dump for me with I wanted to kind of share with you guys what it looks like to work through the logistics of your business and to try to make choices that are going to be best for your business, and hopefully it'll kind of help explain some of the choices that I'm going to make later on and why some of the choices that I'm making now are not the same as what I would have made when I was starting my very first TPT store and aren't necessarily the things that I would always recommend for someone who's starting their very first TPT store.
Speaker 0:
But it is really powerful when you start to see an experience in your business, how one income stream can help you leverage growth in another business, and you start to kind of see how all of your hard work over time starts to kind of compound and I wanted to share that with you guys because I think that I didn't. That was one of the things when I first started that I didn't realize was going to be possible. I thought building and adding additional revenue streams it was going to be working from the ground up every single time, and that's not the case. Starting this TPT store has been way easier for me than, obviously, starting the first one, but the growth has been a