3 Mistakes I Made When Starting My Business

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTEveryone has a story. Everyone has to start somewhere. It’s important to remember that the greats in the world weren’t always that way. It’s all about growth!Sometimes, when disaster or loss happens, we have to shift our focus onto what makes us happy and fulfilled.Loss can also cause us to create our own path. My divorce led me to quit my current job out of dissatisfaction and start my own business which led me to where I am today.Be careful when choosing your business name. Using your own name could cause further consequences later on.It’s important to put thought into your business. You need to understand your goals, your services, your mission, etc. This allows you to be strategic and more fulfilled in your business. You don’t have to say yes to the things you hate to do.Think about your future. What processes or rules will you put in place for when you begin to grow? It’s easier to do this now than change your current processes in the future.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…You’ll have people who don’t understand what you’re doing. Your own family might question your decision to start your own business. Find those people who will inspire you such as mentors or those knowledgeable in the industry. Find those individuals who will be excited about what you want to do, instead of those who question your abilities.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSI never wanted to run my own business – 05:03No money, no help and no job – 11:33Mistake #1: I used my name as my business name – 13:16Mistake #2: I didn’t think about my business – 17:14Find people who inspire you and lift you up – 21:01Mistake #3: I didn’t futureproof – 23:08LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODEThe E-Myth RevisitedTranscript below Hello and welcome to Episode 34 of the social media marketing Made Simple podcast and I am your host Teresa Heath-Wareing. So tell me how is your day going. I hope it’s good and productive and you’re achieving great things. You might listen to this on a Monday which means you’re at the start the week. Or you could be through the week. But wherever you are I hope things are good for me it’s been a great week. I started off not so great if I’m honest. Monday was a little bit quiet and I didn’t really feel in the mood to do much. Do you ever feel like that and do you think you want to shake yourself and be like C’mon you’ve got stuff to get on with. But sometimes your mind just isn’t in the game. So Monday started off like that for me. However it’s Mayfair’s day and I’m feeling so much happier about it. I’ve done some great things this week. I’ve recorded a great podcast interview yesterday which is going to be out next week with Chris Strub that’s going to be read exciting. Then later on today I’m recording another interview with the amazing Brian Fanzone. So I’m super excited about that. So we’ve got some really good content coming up for you. The other thing that’s super exciting that’s just happened today is I’ve just been sent the first version of the Ted x talk I did. Oh wow. I couldn’t wait to watch it. Now normally when most people see themselves back on camera and this includes me you kind of really critique yourself and you look at yourself and you think oh god was like pulla face or do that or be like this. But actually the Ted x experience was so amazing and so exciting watching it back. All it did for me was made me think What an amazing day that was. I am so excited to get this aits you know as it stands at the moment it might be different when the podcast is life. It’s not ready to be shown to the general public. When you do at. Now I know a little bit about it. There are an awful lot of rules that the licencee and the organizer has to conform to and one of those rules is that obviously everything has to go through tax and Tadd first. So what’s going to happen as far as I’m aware is the videos are going to get approved by the speakers and then they go to Tadd and upload uploaded to Ted and hopefully fingers crossed they get put on the YouTube and the TED Web site. Now you know it’s not actually a given that your video is going to be put up. If there’s something in it that they deem isn’t true they have rules and like that there are a lot of rules which is completely understandable. But if there is something on there that they’re not overly happy with or whatever then they can actually say your video is not going up. Now as far as they know everything on mine should be absolutely fine. I’m touching a lot of words here as I’m talking to you because I would be devastated if the video didn’t go up but it is awesome. So hopefully when it does go up keeping everything crossed. I can’t wait to share that with you. I’ve been talking to lots of people over the last few weeks in terms of the interviews I’ve been doing and one of the things I’ve been asking them is to tell me their story because I don’t know about you but for me. I love listening to the stories about how people got to be where they are today and do what they’re doing today. I find it fascinating. The other reason they like hearing their stories is because so often we look at the Amy port fields of the world than the Pat flans. And we think oh my gosh that is an amazing achievement. I’m never going to get there. But the truth of it is there was a time in their career in their life that they didn’t even know they were going to get there. So for me I find it really inspirational to hear the journey there come through and the lessons they’ve learned. Because actually we’re going to learn from those lessons too. So today I thought I would do things a little bit different. And I wanted to share my story. This isn’t a story of look at how amazing my journey has been and what I’ve done. This is a story of how I got started and the mistakes I made because boy did I make some mistakes. And my thought process around this is if hopefully you listen to some of these things and think I’m not going to do that or it makes you go back and revisit a couple of things then great. And actually although I love talking about social media marketing I do also love talking about building a business running a business and how we can all succeed because some of these messages they will span over any business in any industry. So I am really hoping that you will enjoy my brief podcast interview how I got to get started and what I did wrong. So I guess the first thing I should tell you and admit to is I never actually wanted to run my own business. Never not once I had worked in marketing. For oh about 10 years I think it was I done my degree in marketing and I joke that I was a great employee. I loved working for other people. I always worked really hard. I wanted people to think that I was really good at what I did. And I worked really hard to get that respect. I often work longer hours than I needed to. I was very ambitious. I climbed the career ladder fairly quickly and moved to a lot of different jobs. If it meant that I could then get promotion or get to the next step. So it had quite a varied career in marketing. I had worked for huge companies like Landrover. I worked in their head office and I manage their corporate marketing for them and that I worked for teeny tiny companies who had hardly any budget and I used to do everything so I give them myself a really kind of rounded view of marketing and then one of my last jobs I was in a marketing agency. Now I just want to say quickly before I started this marketing agency I was a director for a care company. I started off in that care company as the marketing person. However again I got promoted through and I ended up becoming a director of a service. Now if you’ve ever worked in a care company and this is a company that has children that are in care and we used to home those children and provide them support now as you can imagine this isn’t a 9 till five five day a week job. This is completely and utterly forlorn. This is children who have a lot of challenges and a lot of things going on their lives and they are being looked after 24/7. So for me I had a young daughter she was in fact I was in that job in the marketing role when I had my daughter. So she was sort of you know 1 or 2 years old by the time I became the director. And I had this young daughter and my entire life was spent on the phone traveling working. And I was missing out on huge chunks of her life. And it kind of came to a head where I’d been working really hard for this company and I was up in Nottingham city in the UK and I was doing some training. And one of the young people we looked after had a daughter and I had to go and spend some time with that young person because the person who is meant to be seeing her was ill the person above that person should have gone next they weren’t around anyway. There was no one to do it. It fell on me. I had to do it. I ended up going to see this lovely young girl with her lovely daughter and her daughter was about the same age as my daughter and I’m sat there at 7 o’clock in the evening having promised my ex husband that I would be home having promised him I’d be home so I could put my daughter to bed. I am sat then playing with some toys with someone else’s daughter and I thought what am I doing at that point. I decided I no longer wanted to travel around the country and be gone for such a long time. Not just physically gone but mentally gone because I was so preoccupied with what was going on with these other young people that I couldn’t spend...