Fempreneur Secrets: Recent Episodes
Huda
This is Femprenur Secrets, where Business Secrets are Revealed. With your host & brand strategist, Huda and notable women entrepreneurs, you will learn about branding, marketing and business strategies from the perspective of women entrepreneurs.
In this interview with Jamie Nonis, I had an interesting insight into how you can be the captain of your industry simply by following your dreams. Especially if you're a creative entrepreneur, this episode is perfect for you.
It's not easy to differentiate sponsorship and collaboration, especially since it's not being used correctly today. With a strong reliance on social media, you'd probably encountered being asked for sponsorship or collaboration. How can you tell the difference, and which is best for your business? In this episode, I break down the truths and reality of sponsorships & collaborations so you won't have to doubt them in the future.
Here's some quick and simple tweaks you can make to your Instagram Profile that will get you better conversions.
In our interview with Wan, founder of BenchLab.Co based in Brunei, we get an insight into their business because of one belief: Just Get Started.
Female entrepreneurs are probably the busiest group of entrepreneurs because of the amount of responsibilities we have in business AND in personal lives. The question now is how can we effectively organize time for our business?
In this episode, I share my 5 secrets to organize your time for your business!
The only way to know if there's demand for your business idea is to test it out. Placing your product or service to your target customers or clients will really help you determine if you should continue or tweak your idea. This concept is a favoured one amongst many startups because you wouldn't be wasting resources working on something that nobody wants. Listen to this episode as I share with you the exact steps I took to beta test my handmade stationery business and our signature service.
At an early stage of your business, a lot of experts recommend bootstrapping your business. But, I want to focus your attention on this possibility: you can also bootstrap your business WHILE raising capital to START your business. Imagine that! This gives you ample opportunity to start your business earlier. While this isn't exactly an episode on raising capital, bootstrapping helps you manage your business finances effectively while you're starting. Listen in because this is a great business strategy to h
In this part number 3 out of 5-part series on Raising Capital, we reaffirm the notion of raising capital without loans. Specifically, we wanted you to bring out your inner Marie Kondo by living for less. Believe it or not, living for less truly helps you raise short-term business capital for your small business — especially when you're building it as you're planning to leave your full-time job. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode!
In this second part of the 5-part series on Raising Capital, I wanted to focus on how changing your lifestyle can help you to raise capital for your business. It's a simple tweak in your life that can help you push your savings into your capital pool. This episode talks about the exact step I took to raise capital for the 3 businesses I've started. I can't wait for you to tune in to this interesting episode here.
If there is one thing I need to know when I was starting out, it was this exact question: How much capital should I raise for my business, before I jump off from my full-time job?
This is a really interesting episode because we talk about how much capital to raise and where to keep the money in. I've also included a fun sheet for you to follow through, which you can get from The Secret Vault. I can't wait for you to tune in to this episode.
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the one thing business people avoid talking about — failure. There's a personal backstory on my one business failure never shared before anywhere else publicly. Every downfall in your life will lead to something greater. At the point of the downfall, you just couldn't see it yet. Once the grieving process has completed, you'll look back in retrospect and realize that THAT moment occurred to guide you to be where you are today. Eventually, all these events helped me grow my business. Welcome to Fempreneur Secrets, where business secrets are revealed. Today is going to be an interesting episode because we’re going to be talking about the one thing business people avoid talking about — failure.
Here’s 5 Ways Failure Has Helped Me Grow My Business. Let me take you back to the year 2015. I was still running my online store customizing notebooks & planners. It would have been my 8th year running it, on a part-time basis. To build this business, I sourced and commission numerous designers. I even paid a friend of mine in kind to design the templates, and had hundreds of files saved to make this business work. It was my passion as a teenager bitten by the organizing bug, so by then, I was in too deep. I had plans of building my own factory when I ended school, and I wanted to hire the low-income single-mothers in Singapore to make the notebooks. Eventually, I had plans for a social enterprise. Plans 3, 5 and even 8-years down the road.
Everything was going dandy. But soon you'll realise that even though I planned so much, there was ONE thing I forgot to plan. So one day — One happy and well-rested morning, I woke up to a nice cup of Milo (it’s like hot chocolate and available readily in South East Asia). Headed off to my working area, and turned on my laptop. If memory serves me right, I was working half-way through a new design for my client. If you’re a designer, you’d relate with me when you turn on Illustrator and click "open recent file". Graphic Designers: You'll probably be able to relate to what I'm about to share. What is the biggest fear that graphic designers have? You've guessed it. A prompt appeared which changed my life forever
“Your file couldn’t be found” As serious as it gets, I nearly dropped my mug of Milo. I tell you, this is literally the worse thing that could happen to a graphic designer. I searched for my file, and I couldn't locate even the folder that it was stored in. The whole folder of my years of hard work building the business disappeared just like that. I remembered I had a backup. As I scour through my bag looking for my external hard drive, I constantly prayed that this one design was saved. I plugged the cable into my laptop and tried once more and hoped for a miracle. Nothing. At this point, I just wanted to break down. I remembered I had a cloud backup. I opened Chrome browser, typed in the URL and tried looking for my works. Everything before 2011 was there. But this was 2015, and anything between 2011 – 2015 was not there. I cried. All my hard work... Years worth of artwork... All gone in a minute. The designs that my customers order were no longer there, and my commissioned designers (mind you, there’s at least 40 of them) required me to pay a retrieval fee. There right there was the lowest point of my business, which led to me going on a super long hiatus for this business until today. I've not resurfaced this business yet because of this loss.
So, how then did I pick myself up? I realise then that I had to start over but I had to decide soundly. Calculating all my past earnings & expenses for the year made me draw a conclusion that it wasn't profitable to stay now that I have to start over. With a heavy heart and after speaking to many business coaches, I decided to leave my business. My exit plan was to clear stock. But I couldn't because there was nothing left for me to clear. I did customized order, which means the orders come one at a time. I only had tools which I use for the business left. I kept those, hoping that others will emerge. As I cleared out my things, I found many unused notebook covers from my first pop up store. I packed them nicely and put them up for sale. I took a month to recover. After that month, I picked my camera up and thought that I could do something with it. I started exploring the ways I could easily maximise profits for myself. A business plan was developed and I began my new journey as a photographer in Blissful Studios Fast forward to today, Blissful.Asia which now owns Blissful Studios, was a result of that. With that really important back-story, there’s a lot of learning points. I’ll summarize them into these 5 Ways Failure Has Helped Me In My Business. This is as raw as it can get for me. This is a real thing that happened my business.
Some of the resources I've used to pick myself up in business are in the Secret Vault. I've created them and stored them in one location, just for you. Gain access now.
Failure has helped me to: 1. Always have a backup plan 2. Never give up 3. Be kind to people, always 4. Love myself, no matter what 5. Upgrade my skill 6. Innovate my business
Always Have A Backup Plan It wasn’t easy to admit this at first, but if I had multiple back-ups and invested in auto-sync or the Time Machine, I wouldn’t have had this problem in the first place. But it was meant to happen. The important thing in life to always have backups, and backup plans. Even when you have one backup plan, have many more just in case. They’re not there because you’re paranoid —they’re there because coming back up quickly requires swift actions. In a time of downfall, you won’t have the time to weep if you’re in deep in your business. You just have to pick up the next course of action and carry on. If you’re just starting your business, think of possible ways you can safeguard your business. If having money stashed somewhere as backup helps you, then do that. In every business plan, we need to write down an exit plan. While it helps to be positive, write down that exit plan any way. At least when shit happens, you have foreseen this and will be more prepared to face it. For you ladies who depend heavily on your digital products, please, please, PLEASE invest in cloud backups. I use Dropbox, which I backup to Box. I keep multiple copies of the critical documents like my business plan in Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and even printed it out in case. If you’re like me and you design your products, really invest in Amazon S3 if you can. If you’re using Mac, don’t skimp on getting the Time Machine installed to your laptop. Any measures possible, do it. Always have a backup and a backup plan!
Never Give Up When things push you in a situation of difficulty, hold on and don’t give up. Keep your head held up high because the next things that’s going to happen to you will be sourced from your strength. I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew that running a business is what I wanted to do. So, regardless the stumbling block I encountered with my first business, I did not stop there. Giving up is not the question when you clearly know your why. After a challenge, find all the strength in you to pick yourself back up. You need all that energy to deal with your challenge. Finding the solution is key, and you need to be in the right frame of mind and energy to do just that. Never give up. Persevere and press on.
Be Kind to People, Always Ladies, the biggest challenge to overcome during times of difficulty is your emotions. While it can be tempting to shout, scream or even give someone a hard time — just don’t. It’s not easy, but you’ve got to get your emotions together. My friend who’s a business coach tells me this a few years back. Whatever negative energy you’re feeling, gather them into a ball. Take a deep breath and imagine this ball turning into something that sparks joy like fluffy cotton candy! During this time of difficulty for me in my business, a customer turned friend came forth and suggested for me to clear my supplies. The money gained will be a great stepping stone to the next business. I listened to that advise, placed my items on Carousell and got my stock mostly cleared out. The money I earned from that wasn’t much, but it helped me finance my photography business. Be kind to people, always. You never know what’s in store for you. For all you know, this person you’re nice to happens to be your biggest customer. And that person you weren’t nice to happens to be her cousin. Things like this happen, so do your very best to be kind to people no matter what.
Love Yourself, No Matter What During times of difficulties, it’s almost normal to blame yourself for what happened. It’s hard to get out of that self-guilt, but you must do it. You owe it to yourself to love yourself. It may seem dark in that moment, but the dark clouds will pass by soon enough. Love yourself because if you don’t, no one else would. Loving yourself could be in the form of making sure you don’t miss your meals, or get plenty of rest. Ladies, we are made to be nurturers and have been designed to care about others before ourselves. At times of difficulties, especially in our business, we owe it to ourselves to celebrate the good times and learn from the bad. We owe it to ourselves to embrace our sincerity, authenticity and drive that made the business possible. And finally, we owe it to ourselves to give ourselves a break from this pain, and relax before the next moment steps into our lives. After 1 month of “mourning” over the loss of my data, I stopped everything and just headed out to the beach. I rented a bicycle and rode it out with my husband. That truly is all that mattered. Letting go of the past, and looking forward to the future.
Upgrade Your Skills We are all educated in some ways. But that education requires constant upgrading liken to our phones. Every month or so, there’s a notification to upgrade our OS to the latest ones. Why don’t we do the same to our knowledge? Upgrading your skills is critical in times of difficulty like this. I took a photography & videography course, and ended up producing videos for notable brands like Prudential and Volkswagen. I managed to build a team and still doing that now. Upgrading my skills brought me to the next chapter of my life and into my new business. Wrapping up, there’s only so much you can do when the going gets tough. But it’s how tough you are that brings you forward to the next chapter in your life. Embrace failure because it leads to something much more beautiful later on in your life. You just need to have faith.
Bonus: Innovate Your Business You owe it to yourself to see your business to fruition. You owe it also to yourself that your plans and your strategies work out the way its supposed to be. So innovating your business could be as simple as making sure that your orders goes through on time, efficiently. Innovating could be as easy as cutting down from 30 min of admin time to just 5 mins, which I've successfully done in my business as well. Before I learnt about , I was spending close to 20 minutes to generate Quotes, Invoices & Service Agreements per enquiry. I tried it out, and it turned out to be the best decision of my business life. With 17Hats, I cut down my admin time from 20 minutes average to 5 minutes. All I have to do now is to fill in the client details and then click ONE button. Everything was rolled out seamlessly because of the workflows that I can setup on 17Hats. I really believe in using 17Hats and believe that this is one way you can innovate your business. If this is something you'd like for your business, take it from me and learn from my mistakes. Then, you implement it in yours. Phew! Now that’s a real episode. Some of the things I’ve shared today hasn’t been shared at all before. I reserve my stories to only the closest and dearest to me but that’s why I created Fempreneur Secrets. These are stories you won’t hear elsewhere. These are truthful, raw secrets that are only unlocked on Fempreneur Secrets Podcast. Till the next episode, This is Huda — Empowering Women Through Business.
All other email marketing strategy won't work if no one's reading your email. In this episode, we discuss about the FIRST thing you must do to make sure your email marketing strategy works.
As the year comes to a close, I'm sharing the 18 things I've Learnt in 2018. This is a little longer than our usual episodes, so I've made it ad-free for your listening pleasure.
Brain Dump is an interesting exercise that I have been practising for awhile now. It helped me develop 21 Revenue Generating Business Ideas in under 2 hours. Tune in to find out how to exercise brain dump on your own too.
In this episode, we discuss the 5 ways to build a consistent brand. The tips shared here are often overlooked by organizations. Tune in to learn what the 5 tips are!
This is our first episode on Fempreneur Secrets podcast. We have a special episode coming up explaining the back-story on why we started Fempreneur Secrets. In this episode, Fempreneur Secrets discuss the 5 Ways to Improve Your Brand - with in-depth analysis of a few of our favourite brands.
Links Mentioned: 1. With Clarity & Purpose - 12-week Coaching Programme
Transcript: As your Brand Strategist, I get asked a lot about their brand. Is my brand okay? What's missing? How can I create a strong brand awareness?
Every brand is different and unique. No two brands are meant to be the same unless they are part of the same group of companies. If the products are different, more often than not, they are branded differently. It is all about making your brand stand out, and stay memorable. The best is when you're able to stay memorable as a household brand, like Kleenex for tissues, Clorox for clothing bleach, Vanish for cleaning agent for your clothes, Pampers for diapers, and the list goes on.
"Those are large corporations! How about me, the small business that's starting out?"
Simple. The size of the company of the years in business isn't a factor to hinder you from your brand success. It all boils down to how serious are you about creating brand awareness for your brand.
With experience working with local brands, we've identified these 5 ways to be the most effective to improve your brand -- especially when you're running your business online, and targeting people who are using the Internet as your customers or clients.
1. Go where the crowd is. Follow your consumers. When I speak to business owners who are not active on social media, don't own a website or have their business solely running on word of mouth, I tell them to wake up. That's the hard truth. To survive and thrive in today's economy, we need to constantly be on a look out of where our ideal customers are. We need to run our own research to understand their behaviours.
- Constant using their mobile phones? Sure, you will be there to follow them.
- On Instagram every 6PM? Find a way to get on that bandwagon (if you haven't already).
- If the most profitable clients search on Google daily, let's be in their search results!
Brand awareness can grow when you know where to go, and when to go. You need to follow where your ideal customers are, and change your marketing efforts to suit their behaviour. The most important of all is to know exactly when to channel your efforts.
Once you know where your ideal customers are, and how they are behaving, you will be able to then follow up with the next step.
2. Photos speak a thousand words. Videos a million. Aesthetics is always very important when building a strong brand awareness, and maintaining brand awareness. When you have a brand that looks good, you -- as the potential customer -- feel good about it. Let's use an example of what I find to be a successful brand. Take a look at The Honest Company. I always love the way they carry out their social media account, their website and their videos.
A clean feed, with consistent colours representing the brand, shows that you've put careful thought into your business and marketing efforts. Your brand philosophy naturally will show in the photos and videos that you post on your social media feed. It also shows that you care about your business and the way you want your business to be run. So, potential collaborators, business associates and partners (even investors) know if you're the right fit for them to do business with you.
Another great example is a local brand, Rugby & Co. Every time I see their photos on my Instagram feed, I feel inclined towards tapping into their account to view their whole account. Just one scroll, you'll notice that the photos on their Instagram account have a consistent look and feel. Rugby is a sport, it's rustic and cool, just because. As such, they've made a very strong brand awareness through their well-curated and created photos.
Allocate budget to hire a professional photographer and videographer to create a campaign for your social media accounts. You can also work together with a social media manager to effectively run your campaigns on social media. Lucky for you, we do all those services and even have an affordable 30-day Social Media Campaign plan for you.
3. Plan your brand strategy & marketing strategy Sometimes, it helps to get professional help for your brand awareness strategies. There are many experts and specialists who are brand strategists and marketing strategists. You need to understand that your brand image matters. It is the difference between a premium brand and a not-so-premium brand (normally known as a mass-market brand).
Having a clear plan for your brand helps, especially in the colours, theme and format of content you decide for your brand. Reference back to Honest & Co above, their brand strategy in terms of colours and theme is very clear: turquoise or light blue, white and some adorable babies using their products. It helps your followers and audience also understand how they can contribute to your content.
Having a whole view of your marketing strategy would help you and your team understand how they can create content for you. A clear marketing strategy will also help any vendors you hire, like us, understand where to position their work in your marketing efforts. The business is yours, and the direction should be set by the company holistically. A strategist helps you get to that direction, by placing their skills, knowledge and resources in that clear path.
Work with someone whom you trust, and ensure that contracts have been signed for confidentiality before commencing work.
4. Don't neglect offline marketing In today's day and age, we have resources at our fingertips through the help of the Internet. We tend to forget that there's such a thing as offline marketing. I always make it a point to ask myself this golden question every now and then to get my creative mojo going:
There was no internet in the 70s, 60s, 50s... How can there still be successful businesses running at that time? What did they do right that we can learn from today?
This golden question opened my eyes to realise that the world's marketing strategies have been divided into two: offline and online. There's plenty of resources for online marketing now, but those offline marketing lessons need to be learned. You have to pick a book (or someone's brain). Have coffee with a successful person whom you know have been running a business pre-internet era. Then you'll realise that most of the things they mention involve offline marketing.
Side topic: Word of Mouth Marketing The most common response I get as I learned about offline marketing is word of mouth marketing. It literally means to get your words spread from mouth to mouth. You must ensure that your product or service quality is at its optimal. Then, offer your product or service to one person. They love it, they'll talk about it. People love talking, and especially when they're shown as a level of authority. That's pretty much what contributed to the success of Tupperware parties. You grab some friends over, get them to see how you use the Tupperware products. They'll talk about the products, and then these friends will be inclined to purchasing some. Then, they tell other friends (be it off the street, or through an invitation to the party), and the cycle continues.
The next response I normally get about offline marketing is to have an offline presence. This means to have a pop-up store, set up a booth, rent a rack, rent a shelf, or even place adverts all over town. That's what offline presence means. How can it help your business? The downside, you cannot accurately track the ROI. Upside, you have access to traffic you'll never get from the internet. They'll see, they'll remember, and they will be curious.
I believe that the two must function together: offline and online brand awareness. We will discuss this in later blog posts.
5. You are the Brand. Be the Brand This is by far the toughest to follow, and it only applies if you're the Key Personal of Interest in the company. If you're the CEO or the Founder, this applies to you. You are the brand, so you must be the brand. What you do, say and engage with must be related to your brand. It must match your brand philosophy, vision and mission. More often than not, the brand philosophy, vision and mission are driven by your own personal philosophy, vision and mission. So that says it all. As the leader of the brand, you must be the brand.
If you haven't already, you will begin today. With effect from today, you're only going to talk and post information that relates to your brand. If you're an accountant with a heart to help your clients avoid tax penalties, you will write in your posts about the amount of money your clients can save when they file their taxes on time. If you're a makeup artist with an environmentally friendly philosophy, you're only going to share makeup and beauty tips, surrounding environmental issues. You are the brand, so you have to be the brand.
I hope these 5 tips have given you an insight as to how you can improve your brand and take it to the next level.