149 - Creativity and Scaling Your Business with Gina Mote

Welcome to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today’s guest is Gina Mote. She has started many successful businesses, most recently a virtual, at-home DIY woodworking and painting workshop called Little August Ranch. She's with us today to talk about her experiences as an entrepreneur and share her best tips for growing a small business.    Gina’s inspiration for Little August Ranch came from the intersection of her love for crafts and scrapbooking, her favorite month, and her and her family’s move from chilly Idaho to a small desert ranch in Arizona. Her passion naturally scaled into a successful business by sharing her work on social media. From there, it was craft shows and scaling.    A primary challenge Gina faced when scaling her business was physically hauling the materials to craft shows. To combat this, Gina pivoted to online selling through Etsy and her personal website, which comes with its own set of challenges. However, this allowed them to introduce a monthly subscription box, which streamlined much of their sales through the website.     Etsy originally served the purpose of running credit cards for Gina’s business, but after building her own website, she realized Etsy had many other perks that are incredibly useful for what she was doing. Etsy has already done the work of building an audience to come to your page, something you’d have to do yourself with a personal website. Because she has a robust understanding of SEO, she was able to catapult her sales. From Etsy, you can build your own website once your customer base starts to form. Building a Shopify website allows for Facebook integration, further driving leads to your product.    Now that her business is streamlined and scaled, the biggest challenge is time. She overcomes this hurdle through delegation and finding what it is she is best at, and offloading the rest. She considered what it is she wanted to spend her day doing and hired out the rest.    Gina uses skills from completely different businesses in her current work. She noticed that the world was shifting online, so she built processes around that to set herself up in the future. Plus, throughout her time scaling other jobs, she was taking training and building up her know-how. She recommends building pieces and seeking out coaches as you go.    For those who are struggling to find their creative outlet, Gina recommends listening to what people are saying, checking out Pinterest, and finding what speaks to you, what you think you could do, and what you’d enjoy creating. All it takes is the desire to create.    Key Takeaways   Moving online is a great way to scale and streamline your business.   Etsy has already done the work of building an audience to come to your page, something you’d have to do yourself with a personal website.   Find skills that will be applicable to other jobs to ease transition paralysis.