Small Business Saturday Advice From Other Small Business Owners

Vivian:
Today we are actually going to be sharing some real life advice from real life small business owners. This is not advice that Chelsea and I have, but this is advice from some of our friends who happen to be small business owners. We are just excited to be able to share what they think is their best advice for Small Business Saturday. Chelsea, just as a refresher, when is Small Business Saturday this year?

Chelsea:
So Small Business Saturday this year is November 30th. It is the day after Black Friday. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. I think we all know. Before you say, "Vivian, Chelsea, it's way too early to start thinking about this." First off, we're at the end of October. So no, it is not too early to be thinking about this. If anything, you should already have a good idea of what you're going to be doing for Small Business Saturday. Don't leave this to the last second.

Vivian:
Yes, 100 % we want to encourage you guys, the sooner that you start planning for this, the less stress you are going to have whenever these dates sneak up on you as they have a good tendency of doing. But where should we start Chelsea?

Chelsea:
Okay, well, I have a piece of advice from our wonderful friend, Bre', over at Sweet Rose Waxing Company. I think this is the perfect opener for this conversation because she said, "you do not have to participate". You don't have to do it. If the idea of planning out sales and doing a big to do for Small Business Saturday is just going to give you extra stress and you don't really feel like it's a good fit or it will benefit your small business. You don't have to do it. You became a small business owner because you wanted the freedom to do what you want. So just do what you want. You don't have to participate.

Vivian:
Great reminder that peer pressure does exist, because I think that is why she decided to have that be her piece of advice. So many small business owners do feel pressured to participate in these big holiday shopping days, right? So whether that be for Thanksgiving, Small Business Saturday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday: there are a gajillion days now that everybody wants to pitch a sale or increase sales. If it's not right for your small business or if you just don't have the bandwidth, that's fine. The thing is, if you are a solopreneur, if you are going about this and you're a one man show, one woman show, and you just don't have the bandwidth or the wherewithal to be able to do every single shopping day out there. You don't have to and you shouldn't feel pressured to have to do that.

Chelsea:
If you hear me on social media saying, "y'all, you need to figure out your small business Saturday. You need to figure out your holiday marketing plans, all of this right now." I'm trying to be helpful. I want to make sure that you guys don't feel stressed about leaving it to the last minute. But you can tell me in your mind, "Chelsea, I'm just not going to do it. So leave me alone."

Before I move on, I also want to say your business might not be the right business for Small Business Saturday. Like, yes, you're a small business, but let's think about this from Bre's perspective. She's owns a salon, right? She's a waxing salon. Yes, there are ways that she could incorporate Small Business Saturday, but she's probably going to have to get real creative with it.

Also that's just not a business that would come to mind specifically for Small Business Saturday. So I can completely understand why she's not even going to worry about it. She doesn't feel like getting creative and giving herself the extra stress of having to come up with a way to make this work. So also think if you are a business that Small Business Saturday might be a little more difficult for you and you're already at the end of your bandwidth. Just take a second and really consider, do I even want to consider this?

Vivian:
Weigh out the advantages and disadvantages and figure out if I don't participate in small business Saturday, can I use my time in a different area of my business? Can I instead use that time to plan out my Christmas? Right? I mean as it relates to your sales for your business. Maybe your time is better spent focusing on something else as opposed to just a flash in the pan small business Saturday deal.

Chelsea:
So Jessica from Southern Curiosities, she says, don't be afraid to keep it small. You don't have to go all out for the holidays, doing something small like offering free shipping for online orders. That's enough. There are no rules and you can do what you want and what you can. I think this is a really good piece of advice.

I think this is a brilliant example. So let's think about Jessica and her career. It's fun whimsical taxidermy, right? All of her pieces are a little pricier. She's not going to do a big discount on them. That's hours, days of work. She cannot reasonably discount her products. Doing free shipping for Small Business Saturday, that's her little bit, and that's completely reasonable.

Vivian:
I also think that sometimes we kind of get strong-armed into thinking that we have to keep up with the Joneses and the Joneses in this case is going to be the big box businesses because they are discounting so heavily and they are promoting so much. As a small business owner, you have a different set of resources than those larger companies. They can definitely absorb a heftier discount, their margins are different. Jessica, she knows her numbers very, very well, and she's priced her products to be a reflection of the amount of time and care and attention that she's actually put into it. I do think that's where it varies a little more. I love that she is saying, you know, get creative with it and it doesn't necessarily have to be a discount on the product or the service. It can be an added bonus, an added value in a different way. We have a client that's an elderberry company. Sometimes what she'll do is she looks at the bundles that she's putting out there, right? So maybe she'll change the bundle up. Maybe she'll do a buy one, get one free or express shipping but it's got to hit like a certain amount. You have to buy like $40 worth of product in order for you to get free shipping or whatnot. There are various different ways that you can incorporate this into your small business.

Chelsea:
I'm really glad that you brought up the fact that small business owners, you're not competing with those big box brand stores. It's like comparing apples to oranges. You guys are so different. What you provide to your consumer, it's something more personal. You're providing, maybe it's a handmade product. You're providing a story, a different feel. So don't be afraid to stand up for yourself and say, I'm not going to be able to do a 75% discount for small business Saturday, but you know what? I can provide you with a beautiful handmade product.

Vivian:
One of the things that is most often overlooked too is the fact that, and I don't mean this derogatory when I say this, okay. You train your customers. What I mean by that is: let's say that this Small Business Saturday, you want to go all out and you're doing 75% off of your product. What do you think that customer is going to expect come 2025 Small Business Saturday? All right. Think of it in the container of you want to be not just on brand. You don't want to be competing with everybody. You want to make the decisions that are right for you and your small business. Be sure that those decisions are going to be decisions that you carry with you potentially into next year. So not to say that you can't run different sales or do different things year to year, you absolutely can. And we encourage you to do that, to try things out and experiment. However, if you are heavily discounting one year and then the next year you decide to forgo it, I think it kind of sometimes gets people a little, I don't know, it kind of gets their panties in a wad. Just be sure that you're cognizant of that. How do you want to train your customers to expect or what do you want to train them to expect in these holiday seasonal promotions?

Chelsea:
Yeah. Jessica was also very nice and she provided us with some general advice for small business owners just starting out that I would love to share. So she says general advice, stay consistent and use your free resources. Stay consistent with your branding as well because being consistent with showing up and branding is going to help you become recognizable for your audience. Such a good piece of advice.

Vivian:
Great, great tips. I love all of that. I mean, spoken like a true marketer, especially with the free resources. I think a lot of times there's this weird association with something being free and something not being good. So people always say, you get what you paid for. Absolutely. There are circumstances where that absolutely rings true...

Chelsea:
Yeah, like gas station sushi.

Vivian:
I was going to say, don't be coming for my gas station nachos. You know I love those things.

I do think that because of where we're at with social media and just the internet in 2024, there are a lot of great free resources out there. I hope that as a small business owner, you guys know where you can find free resources for your particular industry, for your particular product or service that can help you either cut down the amount of time that you're trying to figure something out or it can introduce a new tool for you to be able to use to help you save time in one area of your daily business operations.

Chelsea:
Yeah. Also, can we come back to branding? I recently shared a reel on our Instagram (@TheSeasonedMarketer) from Palmetto Pup Co. She was talking about how important it is for her to add a label/tag with her logo on it because that just gives you that extra bit of validity.

Vivian:
So the next piece of advice we have is from Erin over at Paper Daisy Press. She said, "don't be afraid to take risks and make mistakes. You'll never grow if you never reach for something. And try to remember to be kind to yourself. I think a lot of small business owners, myself included, put a ton of pressure on themselves and it can be really detrimental not only to their business, but to our creativity." Can we just give her a round of applause for that one?

Erin, we agree with everything that you said. Here's the thing, and I'm saying this as a fellow small business owner, you guys, okay? I get it. It is hard and it is uncomfortable to lose money. Okay? We all shield ourselves in some way and that's what kind of keeps us stuck in this little rut, because we're not willing to try new things. We don't want to make those mistakes because those mistakes are often tied to some type of money, right? Or it's tied to us spending a ton of time doing something that then doesn't benefit us and doesn't move the needle forward. Then we feel bad because we're like, man, I just spent a whole day doing something when I could have been doing something else, right? I get it, but the truth is that if you're not experimenting and if you're not able to kind of check some of that stuff off the list, then you're not really able to try new things when it comes to your marketing.

Chelsea:
Yeah, and we talked about this a little bit last week with analysis paralysis. If you never take the risk and if you never try to do something, it'll never work because you've just never done anything.

Vivian:
Yeah, that's true. I do think it helps to shift your mindset a little bit. The thing is we do put a lot of pressure on ourselves. If you're one of those people that feels like when you make a mistake, you just mole on it quite a bit. I'm a little guilty of that. I think, if I had just made a different decision, right? Or if I just handled that a little differently or if I had just pulled out sooner, you know, I wouldn't have wasted as much resources. The thing is, the best shift that you can make in your thinking is to just consider it all data. Success is data. Failure is data, right?

At every point, anything that you were trying or that you were doing, you are getting some form of data back to you and your responsibility as a small business owner is to look at it for what it is and then decide moving forward, do want to continue doing this? The only blessing in making a big, big, big mistake is that you know for a fact you're not going to do it again, right? You're like, ooh, that's not ever happening to me again. I learned the hard way. It's all information that you can use to move forward in your business.

Chelsea:
Y'all, I'm going to be real honest with you guys. Before I came on with The Seasoned Marketer, I had a corporate marketing gig in healthcare and I was miserable. I also had undiagnosed anxiety at the time and I would really put too much pressure on myself. All of that pressure really impacted the type of content that I was creating. Now that I'm here at The Seasoned Marketer, I am way more creative. I have creative freedom for one, but two, I've given myself the opportunity to allow myself to make mistakes. We tend to be our hardest critics.

Vivian:
We are our toughest critics.

If you maybe have been feeling lately like you are not inspired to show up, right? Or some of the things that used to really get you excited but right now you're just kind of #overit, then maybe that's a sign. Maybe it's a sign for you to take a closer look at "what am I doing to beat myself up?" Where am I critiquing myself and where am I not giving myself enough grace to just let go of some of the business mistakes I made in 2024.

It's not so much that you make mistakes. It's maybe that you beat yourself up for not being further down the road. Okay, because I have a tendency to over glamorize how quickly I can grow something or do something. Mom and I had this conversation the other day. Mom was talking about how small businesses typically take anywhere from 7 to 10 years to really get in their zone of genius. Think about that. You could be working on a business for 10 years and feel like you are just in the growth stage of that business.

Chelsea:
So our wonderful friend, Rae from The Design Demon, who we've had multiple times now on the podcast and we'll bring her back again because she is so fun and she has so much knowledge to share with us. She has two tips that she'd like to share for small business owners getting ready for Small Business Saturday. The first one I think relates to the conversation we just had with Erin's piece of advice. Rae said, if you don't make any sales, it's okay. Your success is not measured to how well a single sale does. I think that is a huge tip because, Black Friday is a big event. Small business Saturday is a big event. Let's say you do the big event and you don't get any sales. I understand that that could hurt, but like she said, that's one single event.

Vivian:
Right. It's all, what do we say? Data. It's all data, right? Then you can look and see why didn't it work. Did I not start promoting it early enough? Was it just a promotion that people really weren't into? There could be various reasons for it not going off without a hitch. But I do think the other part of it is, we often overlook the fact that we're playing a game of percentages. Depending on where you are in your small business, a small business Saturday promotion could go extremely well if you've built up an audience and you have a solid email list and you've been showing up for that community for the entire year. You have a product that they are looking forward to it being slightly discounted or whatever that promotion looks like. That experience for those small business owners could be very different than the experience of a small business owner that literally just started their business, let's say September 1st. Their timeframe for growing an audience is very different than the other person who's been nurturing that community for a while.

Chelsea:
So Rae actually also gave us a practical tip as well, since she has a couple of these under her belt and everything. She specifically focuses on stocking stuffers for Small Business Saturday because they're easier to assemble, they take less material, and they sell at a cheaper price. So it's just a little bit easier to move that kind of product, specifically for her.

Vivian:
I love it. I love that she's figured out what works well for her. The only way she probably has done that is through experimenting. So if you need another reason to experiment, there you go. Let Rae be your example. She probably has experimented with this stuff and she's now come to the conclusion that she knows exactly what works for her customers, what they are excited to purchase during that timeframe and something that is seasonal and relates to the upcoming holiday season.

Vivian:
Alright Chelsea, what is the next piece of advice?

Chelsea:
This one's from the Quarry Shoppe. She does vintage rings and stuff like that. Love her. This isn't specific to small business Saturday, but she said your attitude has a huge impact on your business. Adopting a can do attitude, allowing yourself the grace to figure stuff out and getting your feet wet in all aspects of your business. There's nothing wrong with asking for help and using your resources, but make sure that you can handle things on your own as well if need be. I love that little last bit because yes, we want you guys to use your resources. We want you guys to ask for help when you need it. You also kind of need to be able to do it on your own. It's kind of like changing a tire. If I can have Tim change my tire, perfect, because I don't want to change my tire. But I still need to be able to change my tire on my own if he's not there to help me.

Vivian:
I think there's also a practical side to it. A little bit of tough love y'all. If you're a small business owner and you are employing people or utilizing resources to help you with some type of function in your business, but you are not familiar with that function, then you don't know how in the world to appropriately gauge whether you are getting your values worth out of a position or out of a particular consultant or whatever you're utilizing. I mean, it's smart from her perspective. I love that she also included that in there because at the end of the day, let's say you hire a social media manager and your social media manager quits. Does that mean you are just not going to show up on social media?

Hopefully the answer is no, because you need to be able to get by and be able to do this stuff. The other thing is, how do you gauge when you have a good social media manager and when you have a bad one? It's only if you know what duties and responsibilities they should be doing and how they should be doing that effectively. So I agree with everything she said. I agree with you too that it's exactly like changing a tire. If you own a car, you should be responsible and know how to change a tire on the off chance that Tim is not around and you have to do it on your own.

Chelsea:
I'm also really glad that she brings up attitude because attitude is so important.

Vivian:
I do think attitude is extremely important. My thing is my attitude is the one choice that I have every day when I wake up. I would rather not choose to be freaking miserable and sit there and run through all of the negative things that could possibly be happening in my small business. I choose to focus on the good, the headway that I've made, and also optimistically look forward to the goals that I'll be reaching within the next 6 months, 12 months. I'll dare say it, but if you're a small business owner, I kind of feel like to some extent you guys have to have your head in the clouds. I just feel like you have to be optimistic in those ways.

Chelsea:
What I try to do is I just say it out loud. I'll figure it out. Because then you're, one, you're speaking it and two, you're kind of forcing yourself to be like, calm down, whatever's wrong, you'll figure it out.

Vivian:
I will say this, whenever I'm upset about something or I feel like I'm in a little bit of a pickle, I allow myself time to moan about it. I feel like that's very therapeutic and cathartic for me. If I'm upset about something, I give myself 10 minutes to be mad about it, cry about it, get upset about it, and then I'm done with it. I'm like, okay, you've allowed yourself to express that emotion, and it's a valid emotion, but now move on. Now is the part where you're like, I'm feeling like a little sad sack of potatoes. I've allowed myself to do it. Now it's the get to work part. I have problem. How am I going to fix it?

Chelsea:
Yeah, absolutely. I really loved all of the responses that we got when we asked, small business owners, give us advice. Give us things that you wish you had heard when you first started out, when you did your first Small Business Saturday. I thought these were great. If you are listening to this and you have a piece of advice that you didn't hear, share it with us. Send us an email. Comment on YouTube. Comment on the Spotify. Send us a DM. Share with us your piece of advice. We can get it out there in front of other small business owners. We want to harbor a community of learning.

Vivian:
Notice that all of the advice that we got, none of it was, "get on Instagram five times a day and promote your small business Saturday". Right? I think the thing that I most specifically loved about everything is the fact that a lot of it had to do with long-term. It wasn't just small business Saturday, but it's advice that they've learned over the years. It's not as serious as you think, right? You don't make as many sales as you thought you were. That's fine. It's life goes on. Life as a small business owner moves on. Okay. Hey, you're feeling like your small business Saturday wasn't as successful? It's okay. Change your mindset. It's a learning opportunity.

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