Is your business feeling a little bit messy?

Rewind back to May of ‘22 and Sherose was steadily growing and serving our clients well. But there were some things that just felt a bit off and ‘out of alignment’ if you will. I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I looked inward and did an audit of Sherose to figure out what wasn’t working and what needed to be refined. When you read this you’ll be experiencing the main result of our forward-facing audit – our elevated branding and new website! 

 

Within the audit, I looked at several different business components.

Those included: 

• Branding and Positioning
• Offer and Service Profitability
• Client Experience

 

This has taken a lot of time and energy, and truthfully, I’m still not done updating everything. Take this as your reminder that not everything has to happen all at once, in order to eat an elephant you need to take small bites.

Let’s get to the point, I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes look into our internal business audit and share exactly what we did in order to get to where we are now, 6 months later.

 

Step One: Branding and Positioning

I built this brand for the long-term. I have a lot of things that I want to expand into underneath the Sherose brand that I have yet to do. Because of this, I knew that this brand was my home and will be for years to come. However, after sitting down and reflecting on our branding, positioning, messaging and how that comes across through our digital storefront – I knew that we had some things to elevate.

 

Telltale signs that we needed to elevate our brand: 

• I wanted to be taken seriously and work with powerful companies
• I felt too girly and cutesy with the bright pink everywhere
• I realized our services had outgrown the website copy we launched the rebrand with in 2021

 

Some questions I asked myself during this process: 

1. What’s do I feel out of alignment with?
2. Does our brand attract our ideal client?
3. Am I outgrowing my brand?
4. Does our brand represent the image I’m trying to portray?

 

After asking myself these questions, I knew that I had some work to do. In order to attract the right clients we needed to update our brand visuals and overhaul our website. Not only that, but it was time to optimize and refresh our content strategy to make sure we were portraying the image I wanted for our company online.

 

What that’s looked like in practice? 

• Connecting with our brand designer to update the color palette, typogrpahy and graphics that we share on social media
• Redefining our messaging by identifying our mission, purpose and values and taking time to deeply research and understand our ideal client 
• Hiring a copywriter to utilize our messaging standards to write our website copy
• Securing a brand photographer in New York to take updated photos for our website and social media
• Hiring a website designer to bring our elevated brand guidelines, website copy and photos to life through a gorgeous website

 

Curious about the total cost of this? The investment in our brand elevation is around $9500, and doesn’t include the transportation and lodging to NY for our photoshoot or time spent on the project itself.

In order to bring this elevation to life, I had to let go of the old identity. This is easier said than done, so I want to remind you that it’s okay if your brand evolves over time. As you grow, so will your brand! It would be concerning if your brand stayed exactly the same for years and years because that would lead me to believe that you’re not really growing.

 

Step Two: Offer and Service Profitability

A scary fact that I realized as I was going through this internal audit was the fact I hadn’t ever audited our time for dollars with the services we deliver to our clients. Another scary fact was that I hadn’t increased my prices since I started my company… the proposals that I was sending out to prospects had very similar pricing to what I was charging back in 2018. Yikes! 

It’s no secret that women are notorious for undercharging and having a hard time raising their prices… so here I am being the poster child of pricing impostor syndrome.

We’ve grown leaps and bounds since 2018 including hiring a full-time employee, hiring a part-time employee and contracting out various things to incredible service providers. Not to mention, I am just 2 months shy of having my Masters degree in Business Marketing. All of this to say that it was definitely time to increase our prices to ensure our overhead was covered and that they reflected the value we provide.

 

Here’s what I did to begin this process:

• Time tracking for the entire team to see what we were spending on each client project
• Added time per task into a spreadsheet to measure the profitability of each client

Then, I asked myself these questions: 

1. Do my offers align with where our company is going?
2. Do I need to shift in order to support the long-term vision of the brand?
3. Is my pricing accurate with the current state of my business?

 

With these questions and after chatting with my team, I uncovered that we needed to streamline our sales process and have specific packages that fit the majority of our prospective clients. Customizing each package was not only time consuming for me, but also convoluted our monthly content creation process for our team because each client had something different and unique that we did for them. Making things more straightforward and systemitized allows our team to provide an even better experience.

Figuring out what goes in each of our packages was one thing, tracking time and identifying our value for the packages was another. If you’re a service provider, you know how challenging it can be to attach your value or “worth” to packages after calculating the time spent. Part of you feels guilty, but part of you knows you deserve to get paid the amount you tie to your offers. Tracking our time spent for each of the tasks within a certain package allowed me to figure out the base cost of the package. From there, I added in a profit margin along with the “value” aspect that can be so hard to quantify.

 

Here’s a simple formula that you can follow to figure out your pricing:

• Your hourly rate x amount of time it takes to complete the project
• Multiply the above by a 40%-60% profit margin
• Add your “value” to the profitable price if it feels too low

There’s not a black and white way to do this as a service provider, so start with that formula and move forward with a price that you feel good about presenting to your clients!

 

Step Three: Client Experience

Have you ever heard of being a ‘Nordy girl’? I am from the Pacific Northwest, and am the true definition of a Nordy girl. Being a Nordy girl means that you live, breathe and shop almost exclusively at Nordstrom. Kidding, kind of. Nordstrom is a department store that was started in downtown Seattle, Washington and it was lifes dream to work at Nordstrom. And I did, right out of college I interned at Store 1 (aka the first store Nordstrom opened in Downtown Seattle). That is the very first time that I heard of the phrase “surprise and delight”. This is one of Nordstroms pillars of operation, they want to surprise and delight every guest that walks through the door. This phrase clicked with me because I felt that when I shopped at Nordstrom. I felt special and I just loved being there.

When I started my business, I wanted to bring this aspect into it. One of my favorite parts of owning a business is the clients that we get to work with. I truly love them and think they are so special. It’s always been really important that I make them feel equally as special and let them know how much I am here for them and appreciate them.

In the audit process, I looked at our client experience because I wanted to make it even more elevated. We send out welcome gifts and holiday gifts, but I wanted to take it up a notch.

 

Questions I asked myself to elevate our client experience: 

1. What’s working well? 
2. How can I enhance our client experience? 

I realized that it isn’t just about the gifts, creating more touch points with our clients to make sure they are feeling supported is just as important, if not more. 

 

Here’s what this has looked like in practice: 

• Improving our onboarding process when we get a new client to make sure things are smooth and seamless
• Creating a “capabilities” video for prospective clients to see what we can do and a “welcome” video for new clients to meet the team
• Integrating more marketing offers like email, launch planning, consulting, brand elevation, additional social media platforms and more so that we can help our clients get even better results
• Identifying birthdays, fun holidays and special events to celebrate and send random gifts to our clients when they least expect it
• Creating a welcome packet for our new clients so they know exactly what to expect when working with us

 

This is honestly just the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot of work that goes into all of this, plus whenever you start implementing new things, you realize that you want to tweak it just a little bit.

What’s next for Sherose? We are working on our internal systems for task management and also supporting our team with everything they need.

We are going on a team retreat in October to really invest into our team and move into 2023 feeling badass and in control of the goals we have. We started doing lunch and learns to provide additional training on topics the team is interested in learning about. 

There is a lot of fun and exciting things on the horizon for Sherose, so keep your eyes peeled for our new offers and ways to work with us! If you’re feeling like you need to do a business audit, I’d love to help you through the process! This is something we can do when you partner with me as your business consultant. Inquire about this here!