From Becca's Desk: How We Invested in Our Business This Year + 2022 Goals
Hello from Becca!!!! It’s been a minute since I popped my head over on the pages of the Homemade Social blog, and I’m so glad you’re here. As the CEO, my day-to-day actually looks pretty different than it did this time last year. I’m now less involved in the day-to-day details of content creation and, instead, I’m getting used to steering the ship and calling the shots. I hope that this blog post will help explain some of my navigation.
Our word for 2021 was “boundaries” so a lot of what we invested in this year has to do with that, but I broke down how we invested in Homemade Social this year into four categories:
Team
Education
Boundaries
Branding
I hope this not only inspires you to make investments in your brand this year, but also opens your eyes to the (sometimes insane) risks and rewards that come with owning a business.
TEAM
Hiring
2021 was a big year for Homemade Social! We started the year with myself + 2 part time employees, and are ending the year with myself + 2 full time + 2 part time employees and a contractor. It kind of feels unreal! Growing the team was definitely the most challenging and most expensive investment we made this year. I really learned to flex our hiring (and firing...ugh) muscle this year. Finding the right candidate can be a longggg process, so the faster I could write job descriptions, get them live on job websites, and interview candidates the better.
HR Consultant
I invested in an HR Consultant to re-write our Employee Handbook, NDA, and Job Descriptions. I had some form of all three already in place, but there were many areas of compliance and detail that Shawn helped me to add to protect both Homemade Social and our employees. This also made the hiring and onboarding process a lot smoother as we grew the team.
Retirement
I was able to start a SIMPLE IRA program at the beginning of 2021 for all full-time employees. The SIMPLE or "Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees" is a retirement account that allows employees to defer income on a pre-tax basis into an invested retirement account and Homemade Social matches their contributions up to 3% of their income.
Emily Stead from Cetera Investors helped me to get this set up for our team.
Team Retreat
We did this in 2019 (and had to skip in 2020 for obvious reasons), but we got to go back to Palm Springs for a little team retreat! We stayed at an Airbnb and hired one of my photographer friends to shoot some content for two clients while we were there. We basically ate, drank, and laid by the pool the rest of the trip.
We also got to eat at couple of cute, trendy restaurants I had been wanting to try and I spoiled the team with matching SKIMS robes when we got there! So, so fun.
EDUCATION
I once read that you should invest 3% of your annual business revenue back into continuing education for your business, so I’ve tried to do that every year since.
Coach
This year, I made a *big* investment in a business coach/mastermind group to help us take Homemade Social to the next level. I had worked with coaches in the past, but never with a long-term relationship (or the price tag!) before. She really helped to navigate my headspace around business, growth, and defining my role around being the CEO.
I worked with Jessica Marx of Jessica Marx Coaching.
Therapy
Yes, I’m putting therapy in the education section!! My business coach inspired me to go back to therapy, which is something I would highly recommend for any entrepreneur. If you have any limiting beliefs about yourself, you’re going to have limiting beliefs about your business as well. Why should I expect my team and our clients to follow my lead if I’m anxious and stressed all the time? I realized that in order to allow Homemade Social to grow, I had to do the inner work first.
I found my therapist (who specializes in executive stress management) through Better Help.
SEO Consultant
In January of this year, we hired Stefanie Becker Digital to help teach us how to improve our SEO. In the first 30 days after implementing her recommended changes, we saw:
Organic traffic grew 11% MoM!
We had our highest month of traffic EVER
Conversion rate grew 54% MoM!
Between 2021 and 2020, our traffic from Organic Search sources is up 90.36%!!!
Online Courses
We also invested in some education for the team this year!
For Dominique, our Account Manager, we bought the Dot & Co course called The CAM School so that she could dive deeper into account management best practices and ensure we are providing the best, white-glove customer service possible.
For Aley, our Social Media Manager, we bought a couple of graphic design-focused courses through UDEMY so she could further improve her design skills. If you haven’t noticed, our graphics have been looking pretttyyy fire lately.
Boundaries
Ahh yes, our word for 2021. I’m SO GLAD we tackled our boundaries this year. Since social media is on 24/7, clients can expect us to be on 24/7 as well. Especially after a year like 2020, not having any boundaries was really taking a toll on my mental health. I took back our time (and our sanity!) this year by investing in the following:
Improving Our Contract
One of the first things I did this year was hire an attorney to help us re-work our proposal and contract. This ensured that we had boundaries that were clearly defined in relation to:
Office hours
Approved channels of communication (no Slacks, texts, or DMs!)
Approval deadlines
Revision requests
& more!
I used Lauren from Guide My Business to help us with our contract.
Communication Coach
Once we set the boundaries, then we had to communicate and enforce them. We worked with Jenna from Career Civility for a few months to train the team on proper client communication. You may think client communication is easy until you run into an issue when a client is either 1) non-responsive and you need something from them, 2) disrespecting a boundary or 2) disrespecting you.
These situations can be sticky, but Jenna supplied us with plenty of email hacks to improve our client communication. I would highly recommend her services if you’re in regular communication with your clients!
OpenPhone
Last but not least, I signed up for OpenPhone. It’s an app that you can install on any smartphone and for $9.99/mo you are given a new phone number that is only connected to the app on your phone.
What’s amazing about this app is that you can set do not disturb hours! So outside of M-F 9 am - 5 pm, if a client calls or texts that number, I am not notified, and they are automatically sent a text or sent to voicemail that lets them know I am not available. It has been a game-changer for allowing me to unplug outside of business hours!
You can sign up for the OpenPhone app here.
Branding
As a marketing agency, how we show up online is so important. It helps us to attract the client we want and emulates our quality of work, so I invested more in our online image this year.
Brand Photography
We were overdue for a branded team photoshoot, so in October we planned a huge, full-day shoot with Rachel Smak Photography. In addition to paying the photographer, we also had to pay for the:
Studio rental
A stylist (we used my friend at Audree Kate Studios)
Manicures for the team (obvi)
& makeup
This meant that the investment for a single day of shooting really added up (as did the stress for the day lol). However, I’m so glad we took the time to do a shoot like this and can’t wait to further incorporate these images across our brand collateral.
Website Improvements
Earlier this year, I hired Chloe Leonard to re-design & improve some pages on our website, and we’re already in talks to have her update our website & branding even more into the new year.
Goals for 2022
Our word for 2022 will be “scale”!
We are so excited to announce that we will be moving into a bigger office in January 2022, and along with that I hope to continue growing our team, roster of clients, and service offerings. While our 2021 financials haven’t closed *yet*, we’re currently looking at a 163% increase in revenue from 2020 to 2021 and I hope to smash that growth when we come out of 2022.
I have a few fun things up my sleeve for next year too!! It’s just a tiny seed of an idea right now, but I’ll be sure to share more as we get closer to a launch date (goal: fall 2022!).
Thanks so much for being here and for following along on our little journey. It means more than you know. Happy New Year!
Xx - Becca
