Starting Out
When you're just starting out, you're creating a vision for your brand and getting a basic logo, right? Your focus should be building a functioning website with quality product photos, and finding your ideal customers and growing your email list or text club.
REMINDER:At this stage you do not need to be doing all the fancy things. (Otherwise you’ll probably go broke pretty fast.)
That's why at the beginning, DIY is a great place to start. Because you can always grow and expand on this, once you've got the money coming in.
When you’re looking at a website and branding overhaul, for a beginner, our rates for our packages are quite an investment, right? But they're actually super competitive, when you consider the quality of work that we're offering. But it will likely seem a lot to someone just starting out. And when you’re just starting out, you don’t need a $10,000 logo. Who does?!
So if you go ploughing all this money into your biz right at the beginning because someone sold you on the next best thing, you’ll never get to that next level. But if you start small and grow sustainably, then one year on, 3 years on, 5 years on… Your biz will look very different. (And by different, I mean successful). Heck, it might even be 6 months away! But if you’ve just invested too much at the beginning on this elaborate brand, and storefront signage, or boutique truck signage… This really adds up. Not many businesses can afford to do that at the beginning.
But a lot of times, starting simple with a basic $50 logo on Etsy until you are really ready to dive in further, then six months down the road, a year down the road,then you have the money to invest from your business, from your actual profit, to really grow.
So. At the beginning. DIY in what you can, getting things in place. Even if it's temporary, that's okay, you don't have to have it all figured out right from day one.
Growing
Phase two, where you're growing, you're going to want to start investing in things like brand design and photography services. You're going to want to start looking at upgrades and improvements for your website, getting better tools, both physical and digital. And you're going to want to think about using 10 to 20% of your revenue on marketing and branding.
The trick is that you're reinvesting in your business to keep growing up so you don't just stay the same.