The Key to Bootstrapping Your Business
If there’s one thing Mompreneurs are good at, it’s being scrappy as hell.
We have to be resourceful. Unless you’ve got serious financial backing (and if you do, go girl!) there’s really no choice. What’s it mean then to be scrappy and resourceful? It means you’ve got to wear ALL the hats when just getting started and, if we’re being totally real, maybe for a good while after that.
The key to bootstrapping is your willingness to learn.
To seek information. To be a self-starter. It’s not that that woman with the successful biz is smarter than you or more capable. It’s just that she decided to go for it and figure it out along the way. In the wise words of Marie Forleo “everything is figureoutable.”
Yes, there will absolutely come a time when you can (and should) outsource all the roles you’re filling that aren’t in your Genius Zone. Someday you’ll hire a social media manager to keep your presence active and your audience engaged. Once you’re up and running (and paying yourself) you’ll get yourself that V.A. to manage your Inbox. You can have someone else creating your Facebook ads, and blog post graphics, and split testing your email campaigns, etc., etc., etc. But until then you’ll need to know the ins-and-outs, or at least the basics, of social media, email marketing, branding, copywriting, and all those moving parts that go into a purposeful business.
I’ve learned over the years working with some seriously badass mamas starting their businesses that the ones who make it work are the ones who don’t know how to do something but take the time and effort to learn it. They find books, free webinars, blog posts, Facebook groups and whatever else it takes to get the knowledge they need. The mamas who don’t do so well? They’re the ones who say “I don’t know how to do that” and instead of saying, “let me go find out how” just throw up their hands and say, “oh, well. guess I won’t do that after all.”
Pretty big difference, don’t you think?
Listen. I started my very first business when I was 16 and things were, ummm, a little different back then. Many years later I started another business, built it to profitability, and then sold it. Guess what happened next? I opened another biz that I quickly closed, at a loss, when it wasn’t viable. So I’ve had success and I’ve had “failure” (it’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it, right?) and I’ve bootstrapped every time. I get it. I get the needing to know how to get shit done but not having the time to figure it out. But you can do it, I promise!