How I Pivoted our Business During a Scary Time

 Transcript from this episode:Welcome to Monday Musings with Kissa, where I share what the heck happened last week, what I have planned for this week, and a story time, not in that particular order. This is the Audio companion to my Substack newsletter that I send out every Thursday. All right y'all. What the heck happened last week? I could barely remember. I think the theme was though, the theme was easing our way back into school life. Last week was the first official week of school. Micah started kindergarten and Angelie started preschool, and it still felt really hectic because of short days, squeezing in meetings while the kids are at school, and getting back into kids' classes on the weekends. So it felt really hectic.The theme of this week is to get ahead. This week is different from last week in the sense that regular school schedule is now in full effect, no half days, full days of school, and I'm looking forward to that regular routine. Once you're in summer mode, things kind of change and you have to adapt, but when school starts, there's this sense of normalcy, regularity, and I'm actually really looking forward to it.Unfortunately, I had a small injury yesterday. I sprained my big toe guys. Ugh. We were swimming. I had to catch jelly before she fell into the pool without a floaty, and I thought I just stubbed my toe, but it turns out I sprained it. And so now I am limping around, but at least it's not any worse than that and it's already getting better. It's only been a day and it, I'm able to put some more weight on it, so I can't complain. But I do have to work this week with a small injury. Ugh. So the week's business projects are number one, website migration. So we have a new website platform that we're going to be migrating our online store to, and our goal is to have it launched and ready by September 13th. There's a lot of work on our end moving products over. We're looking for a product photographer to take some professional photos and really make our website come to life. It hasn't been where we've wanted it to be for quite some time now. So this website migration is the perfect catalyst to be able to revamp our website, give it some life again, and really make it stand out.Another thing that we're going to be working on is consulting work and then also the launch plan for our Uber spread on Amazon. So we're going to be sending some units in, and once it's all checked in, we're going to do an official launch for our Amazon store with a new product. And then lastly is to get ahead of content. Ever since I left for vacation, I have just not been able to get ahead of my content plan. So my goal for this week is to really focus on that and get things. Ahead of schedule like it was before we went on vacation. On the personal side of the goals, my main goal this week is to change our entire family's eating habits.When we went to church yesterday, part of the church sermon was. Talking about how we treat our bodies as an act of worship, and that was the mindset shift. I personally needed to feel convicted to finally make a change again. So Charlie and I had a discussion about it, and our goal is to start eating more raw foods where we have to do more meal prep, but it'll be worth it in the end because we know what ingredients are going into our food and making sure that it aligns with more of a healthy lifestyle instead of frozen or prepacked meals. And there's nothing wrong with that. Don't get me wrong, we're still going to have those things. But to have less of it is our focus. Now for a story time. I wanna talk about when the pandemic hit and how it affected our restaurant in 2020. Y'all remember? Or don't remember because we all wanna block out that time of our life.The COVID-19 pandemic. Micah was just three weeks old when our restaurant had to shut down due to the pandemic. I had prepped and trained my staff for months prior to giving birth so that I could take a maternity leave and take three months off, but. Because of unprecedented times, plans changed because of the shutdowns, adjusting to changing protocols, keeping our staff and family safe. We just had to figure it out and figure out how to survive well while we were shut down. There were days where we didn't even make $30 for the entire day. But customers were still commenting on our social media about how much they missed our pancakes.So we had to think quick and we had to figure out how we were going to make money. So we decided to bag our mix that we used to use at the restaurant and sell it in our online store and ship the mix to our customers so that they could make it at home. And I share this because my takeaway from that time of our life, though it was traumatic, it was scary, and it was just so unprecedented, my biggest takeaway was that in every phase of life and business, we can't stay stagnant for too long. I'm so grateful that we had the foresight to say, “Okay, people can't come into our restaurant, so let's bring our food to them.” And we live in a time where information and products are changing at lightning speed compared to the past. As entrepreneurs, part of a healthy business is to learn and adapt. And I know that's not the easiest thing to do, especially when you feel like things are fine the way that they are. But what worked 10 years ago, five years ago, or even a year ago, doesn't necessarily work today. And let's face it, things will continue to evolve whether we like it or not.So the question is, what are you gonna do about it? I'm not saying that we need to uproot who we are or sell out to stay relevant, but the thing that I really took away and am reminding myself is mm-hmm. We need to dig deep, think outside the box to figure out how we can evolve and change, but still stay true to our values and core beliefs.Thank you guys so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed this audio edition, and if you did, please share it with a friend. For the full Monday musings experience, subscribe to my substack at justkissa.substack.com. And until next time, remember, you are a blessing and I'm so glad you're here.Bye friends. Get full access to Kissa - the Notion Mama at justkissa.substack.com/subscribe