As business owners, sometimes it's hard to remember to block out free time for ourselves and just RELAX. To figure out how to solve this problem, I sat down with Joy Evanns, the "Say No Like A Pro" mentor.Joy Evanns is the author of Saying YES to LESS.  A recovering perfectionist, Joy travels the world to support high achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. She helps them discover where to find time for long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their families.  By learning to set boundaries and say YES to LESS in her own life and in her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike & Adidas, she eliminated resent from her relationships, increased her income, and healed chronic asthma and back pain.  She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve MORE by saying YES to LESS, is due out November, 2017. 

Listen in as Joy & Bella delve into how business owners can carve out more free time for themselves by discussing:

What it means to say YES to LESS & NO like a PRO

The importance of setting boundaries, and how you can stick to them

How business owners can take vacations and not feel guilty!

 

 

Get your free gift From Joy: "5 Strategies for HOW to Achieve MORE By Saying YES to LESS"  To get this, Text the word STRATEGIES to 444999. Follow the instructions and the strategies will be sent to you via email.

Learn more about Joy on her website: joyevanns.com

Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 73 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, your host, and today I have Joy Evanns, author of Saying Yes to Less. She's admittedly a recovering perfectionist. Joy travels the world to support high-achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. Can I get an amen from some of our listeners right now? She helps people discover where to find their long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their friends and family. By learning to set boundaries and saying yes to less in her own life and her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike and Adidas, she eliminated resentment from her relationships, increased her income, and healed—this is important, you guys, for anyone listening—chronic asthma and back pain. She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve More by Saying Yes, is due out in November. Welcome to the show, Joy.

Joy:Thank you, Bella, for having me.

Bella:Fantastic. Why don't you go ahead and fill in those gaps for me? How did you become who you are today?

Joy:So I grew up in a family of achievers. My dad started out as a psychologist and eventually through his career was a CEO of several multimillion-dollar companies. My mom started out as a school teacher and worked her way up to being a superintendent of schools. My sister used to be this little bratty girl who I now fortunately like a lot more, who’s now a doctor of chiropractic and she has a couple of offices with a bunch of people that work for her. Why am I telling you this? It's because who we are is kind of defined by the environment that we grow up in. And so no surprise, I was an achiever too. I was the president of student council by the time I was in fifth grade kind of thing. The pressure to perform underneath that expectation was really difficult and challenging for me though. So I was highly critical of myself. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do more, to be more, to have more. And no surprise that I took that into my career as a graphic designer. I took clients that weren't a fit for me. I did a lot of things that wound up leaving me drained. I said yes to last-minute requests, yes to rush work without getting paid for it,

Did you know that your MINDSET is one of the biggest determiners of success in your business? The way you approach problems and work towards solutions can be the deciding factor between successfully remedying a problem versus making it 10x worse.

So what type of mindset should you have and what strategies can you use to be successful? To answer this question, Bella sat down with Awilda Rivera, a results-oriented success coach that helps entrepreneurs, business owners, and career professionals achieve the success they desire. Bella & Awilda talk about:

Awilda's success story in building her business and brand

Laying down a foundation by believing in yourself

The idea that what you focus on is what you will act on

Why it's important to have a WHY

Why spirituality & faith should play a part in your business

 

 

Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 72 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. This is Bella Vasta from Jump Consulting, and today I have a peer along with me here. I have Awilda Rivera, who is a results-oriented success coach and she helps entrepreneurs, business owners, and career professionals achieve the success they desire. Welcome to the show.

Awilda:Thanks for having me, Bella. Really excited to be here.

Bella:For sure. I love just chatting it up, and that's exactly what we're going to do today because I have a feeling you and I are both of the right mindset—together. Not right, but similar, I guess, is what I'm saying. Why don't you give our audience a little bit more of a background? Where are you coming to us from today? How did you get to where you're at? Give us a little background.

Awilda:Sure. In just a few sentences, right now I'm coming to you guys from Atlanta. I'm originally from New York. I have a background in law, graduated from law school in 2009, and started this business at www.awildarivera.com in its first iteration about three and a half years ago. I found that the brand was able to expand into some different areas and have been doing this now ever since.

Bella:That is so cool. How did you make that pivot from—you know, going into law is a real commitment. So going from that into this success coaching, how did you make that mindset shift?

Awilda:Yeah, I think for me there was just a lack of alignment between my heart and my mind, and I really wanted to do something that would allow that to be aligned. I got really honest with myself and tried to listen really closely and let my heart do some of the leading for a bit and was able to organically come to what I'm doing now.

Bella:That's incredible. And for our listeners, I imagine this wasn't an overnight process. This wasn't like you just woke up one day and said, “My heart's aligned.” It was a struggle, right?

Awilda:Yeah, absolutely. It definitely was not an overnight process. I had to not just let myself heal from the experience of deciding to make such a big change, but I also had to kind of let my family heal and let the people around me heal because, just to give you a tad bit of context, I don't come from a lot of wealth. I grew up in New York City in Brooklyn and was the first in my family to graduate from college and from graduate school.

Bella:Wow.

Awilda:So there were a lot of—I don’t want to say expectations—but there were a lot of dreams perhaps that they wanted for me that I had to allow for them to mourn so that they could get on board and support me in what I'm currently doing. And you know, everyone seems to be on the same page now.

Bella:I love how you're bringing in the experience of others because so many people have expectations of us, and when we want to make that life pivot or decide we’re going to be a pet sitter or a dog walker, sometimes people look down on us,

As pet sitting business owners, difficult clients are inevitable. However, the way you as a business owner chooses to react to the situation is what truly defines you and your business. Liana Sanders of Wet Noses Pet Sitting in Fort Collins, Colorado, expertly handled a major customer service issue in her business, so I decided to bring her on the show to discuss how she remedied the problem.

Listen in as Liana tells her tale and offers up some expert advice on handling difficult clients and providing top notch customer service. Some of Liana's tips and topics include:

The importance of using phrases such as "This is my understanding of what happened" & "I'm sorry about the stress this situation has caused."

Why business owners MUST have good phone and email followup as well as offering to appear in person to talk through the problem.

The reason why business owners should make their employees feel like they have their backs by 'shielding' them.

Why pet sitting business owners should not offer any resolutions or remedies until they fully understand the situation

How businesses thrive when they utilize a 'separation of power' as well as giving situations TIME!

You can learn more about Liana on her website and on her blog.

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Transcript:

This is episode 71 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready—Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. This is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have one of our own with us.

Liana Sanders is here with us from Wet Nose Pet Sitting and Dog Walking. I am so excited to have her on because she is in one of my Facebook groups and we had a debacle. Now you guys have got to understand that I have a lot of people in my Facebook groups and unfortunately sometimes people just come in there to vent or complain. I was really impressed with the situation that Liana had and how she handled it. I wanted to put her on a pedestal—I know this is probably embarrassing—but I wanted other people to hear about this scenario because we all have these kinds of situations in our businesses. I wanted them to hear about the steps that she took, not only for her own sanity but also to de-escalate the problem, back up her team, and still make the client become a raving fan. This is stuff we learn but hardly ever see implemented. So without further ado, welcome to the show.

Thank you. For those of the listeners who might not know you, can you tell us where you are, the background of your company, how many people are working for you, just kind of an understanding of where you're at?

Sure. I have a pet sitting and dog walking company in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is about an hour north of Denver for anybody who knows Colorado. We’ve been in business for about seven years now. I have a full-time manager and staff that runs anywhere between about eight sitters to fifteen at any given time, depending on how many are full-time and how many are part-time. Our business is mostly pet sitting. Dog walking isn’t as big here in our area, so we do a little bit of everything and we really specialize in high-needs houses and high-needs pets—a lot of very ill animals and a lot of households where the humans have health problems. We do a very high-end service for people that have really high needs.

Which must make it interesting as the business owner.

I do. I have a whole other business. My pet sitting manager actually handles the majority of our normal stuff for our pet sitting company. She handles most of the training, day-to-day operations, and scheduling with our clients. I give kudos to our manager—she’s fantastic. She’s been with us for many years, first as a pet sitter and now as the manager. I pretty much step in and handle the end of hiring, management of any situations that go wrong,

Have you heard about Facebook Bots yet? If not, now's your chance. It's a brand new feature that has come to Facebook in order to help market your business, while reducing the amount of time you're spending online! On this episode Bella speaks with Surbhi Sinha from PerfectingProfit.com. They discuss the in's and out's of this new technology including:

What are bots?

How can pet sitters use Facebook bots to their advantage?

Surbhi Sinha - PerfectingProfit.com

What happens to your bots if nobody messages your business's Facebook page?

What is the success rate of Facebook bots?

Why is it important that I implement bots NOW?

How did this all start? Bella wanted a bot for the Jump Consulting Facebook page, so she searched her network and found Surbhi. She was able to create "Jumpy Bot" on the Jump Consulting Facebook page (go there now and test it out!), and got incredible responses from those who experienced it. So she thought she would have Surbhi on the show!

 

Surbhi Sinha is the owner of PerfectingProfit.com She provides done-for-you bots for online and offline entrepreneurs.

DOWNLOADABLE OFFER:

Check out Surbhi's free guide to increase your email open rate by SEVEN TIMES using bots in your funnel: http://perfectingprofit.com/bot-guide-2/

Little Extra:

What you are seeing here is a broadcast I did to my network of subscribers on my Facebook bot. Within one hour, I had a 75% open ratio and a lot of them replied back to me. Bots can be so powerful in your business.

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Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 70 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready—Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I've got something really interesting for you, something that we've never had on the podcast before. And I'm so excited because I used it and it was amazing. But let me back up a little bit. I found myself at this amazing conference you may have heard me talk about before called Social Media Marketing World. And because of that, I loved them so much, became a member of their secret society, to which I posed a question about a month ago and I said, who knows about this bot thing? And how can it help me? And the incredible Amanda Bond reached out to me. If you don't know Amanda Bond, you should go Google her right now—she’s incredible, unbelievable. And she said, Bella, I have someone that might be the solution to your question. And I met my now awesome friend here, Serby.

Serby:Thank you, Bella. Thank you so much.

Bella:So I originally came to you a little bit doubting and not really understanding this whole bot thing. You know, I think it gets a bad connotation. You probably hear it all the time like, well, I don't want some automated thing and no one understands that. I checked out your blog that you did and I was laughing out loud. And we all know that people have to know, like, and trust us, and what a better way to do that than bots. Then you showed me all of these open rates and how they're like blowing email out of the water and all of this stuff. And I was just like, you have to come on my show and explain it to people. So let's start from the very beginning. Can you tell me, how did you get into it and start all of this? How long have you been doing it for?

Serby:Okay, so it might come as a surprise to you. I started with the online business just about five months back, and I started with Messenger Bot. I have been in technology for about 10 years, working as a corporate consultant with multiple multinational companies. I had a lot of background in technology, but then somewhere down the road I had this daughter.

Bella:That’s, I think, 50% of online stories—it starts with a kid.

Serby:Exactly. I had a consulting job and I was like,

Are you thinking about buying a pet sitting business? Then you NEED to hear what Crystal Hammond has to say. She's been through the process a number of times, and is an expert in making deals. Listen as Crystal & Bella to discuss:

Crystal Hammond - Sitter

For Your Critter

WHY people sell their businesses

The 3 things you MUST know about a business prior to purchasing

HOW to transition the businesses clients to the change in management

Crystal Hammond has been in the pet sitting industry for almost 10 years. She started her first pet sitting business, Sitter for your Critter, back in 2008 with a handful of clients and have since grown her operations to service over 4,000 clients. She’s acquired several of  our competitors companies over the years and started new pet sitting businesses to expand our service areas.  Last but not least she’s the proud mama of an 80 pound adorable English Bulldog named Capone.

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Transcript:

This is episode 69 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready—Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, and today I have Crystal Hammond with me. Crystal's been in the pet sitting industry for almost 10 years. She started her pet sitting business, Sitter for Your Critter, back in 2008 with just a handful of clients, and since then, she’s grown it to over 4,000 clients. She’s bought five companies and she just keeps going. Like, there is nothing that can stop this girl. And not only that, but she has become literally like my sister from another mister. Crystal and I have become very close this year, and I am just so excited by her. I’ve been begging her to come on this podcast because you guys, your tails are going to be wagging. You're in for a treat.

Crystal says she’s so excited to be here. Bella says she’s excited to have her and explains that buying and selling a pet sitting company is something that’s seldom talked about. While Bella has a class on everything you need to know about buying and selling a pet sitting company, Crystal has actually bought other companies—not once, not twice, but five times. Bella says she’s never heard of anyone else buying that many pet sitting companies, and Crystal laughs. Bella says she’s not some major investor or retired corporate person with all this money. She’s an average person. Crystal says she’s 34. Bella says, “There you go, you’re 34 and you bought five businesses and built your own.” She asks Crystal to take her back to the very first opportunity that came for her to buy a company—what it looked like, what intrigued her, and what scared her about it.

Crystal explains she started her business back in 2008. The first time she was approached was about a year and a half in, by someone she’d known for a while. The woman was moving to Florida because her husband had a job opportunity and asked if Crystal wanted to take over her business. Crystal said yes but had no idea what it would look like. The first one she did, she actually didn’t pay for. The woman was just so excited to have someone to refer her clients to because in this business, as pet sitters, it’s so intimate. They become close with the pets and the clients. Bella adds that she wants business owners to understand that every day they work in their business, they’re building an asset—it’s like building a house. If you just walk away, you lose something valuable.

Crystal continues that the second business came from a couple she knew in her network who had broken up. They wanted to get rid of the business they started together, so they approached her. She knew a little more by then—it was her second acquisition. She knew she’d need to hire someone, and that went well overall. She learned that clients are not guaranteed to stay. When you buy a pet sitting business,

"Stop dreaming and start doing."

When it comes to using social media to explode your business, that's Perri Collins' mantra. But, it's hard to stop dreaming until you actually know WHAT you need to be doing. That's where Perri comes in. Listen in as Bella & Perri discuss:

What Perri loves most about social media

Perri Collins

Similarities & differences between doing social media for a university versus small businesses

The benefits and struggles of working with millenials

What is the COPE method?

How can you save time and resources in social media marketing?

Perri Collins designed her first website in 1999 and hasn't stopped playing in the digital world since then. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. She has a degree in journalism and is currently a social media specialist at Arizona State University.

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Transcript:

This is episode 68 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have Perri Collins here. Perri Collins had designed her first website in 1999 and hasn't stopped playing in the digital world since. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. But most excitingly, and where she is today, I think, Perri is working with Arizona State, my alumni, and I've known Perri online forever, but it wasn't until recently I saw her face to face. And you guys are in for a real treat today, because Perri is an excitable, funny, bubbly, awesome person, and prepare to be excited.

Perri, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Bella. Thank you for the kind words. For sure. You're like one of my favorite people. You always make me smile. And like, I know that our listeners are going to hear your smile in everything that you say. You're just the happiest person. I adore you. Thank you. So why don't you fill in the gaps there for us? Tell us what that website was for in 1999 and kind of how did you go from that to running the social media, I mean the social media specialist at ASU. Well, like most teenagers, I had a lot of angst. And when I discovered that you can start up a website on the internet and start posting things, I got excited. So I would see all my favorite poets and writers and musicians. And I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it. So I learned how to make a website and I posted like all this terrible teenage poetry and things about how horrible life is as an 18 year old. So pretty typical.

I'm also an alum of Arizona State University. I have a degree in journalism and when they had an opening, I thought, hey, why not apply and see where this goes? And I have to say, it's definitely one of the best decisions I've ever made. It is super fun working with young people. Arizona State University, for those that don't know, is the largest four-year public university in the United States. We have over 88,000 students. Yes, it's insane, it's massive, but it's so lively. It's its own little city and it's just full of amazing people, whether it's students or researchers or professors or people in the community. There's a lot of ties in and there's a lot of really great things going on. And it's so easy to share that on social media. I love it. And I'm sure content abound, endless amounts of content. Too much sometimes.

So before we dive deep into ASU and what you're currently doing, you were once telling me a story about growing up on a ranch and how that kind of helped shape you or whatnot. Do you want to tell us more about that? Sure. So I grew up in the smack dab middle of Texas in a little town call...

Being a business owner can be STRESSFUL. So this week, we took a step back to discuss how business owners can manage their stress through meditation and mindfulness. Listen in as Bella and Dr. Kathy Gruver discuss:

The definition and warning signs of stress

What meditation is and what other coping mechanisms are for stress

The definition of mindfulness and how it can improve our health

How to combat the "negative tape recorder" in your head

Dr. Kathy Gruver

 

Dr. Kathy Gruver is a motivational speaker, award-winning author of 7 books on health and wellness, a massage therapist, hypnotherapist and trapeze artist. Her passion is to educate people, inspire them to live the fullest life they can, and to let them know that they have choices! She’s appeared on over 250 radio and TV shows, am a frequently quoted expert in magazines and newspapers, hosted her own TV show, and created a stress-reduction program for the military. I'm a hip hop dancer and do trapeze to relax.

As a special gift to our audience, Dr. Gruver is offering a free downloadable meditation. Claim it here

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Transcript:

This is episode 67 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, your host, and today I have a hip hop dancer, a trapeze artist, and an award-winning author of seven books on health and wellness. And you know what she's here to talk to us about today? Motivation. So without further ado, Dr. Kathy Gruver, how are you today?

I'm so great. How are you?

I am wonderful. I am just so enthralled by your biography here. It says that you're a motivational speaker, you have written seven books on health and wellness, you're a massage therapist, a hypnotherapist, a trapeze artist, and you like to do exactly what I like to do, which is inspire and motivate people, which is awesome. So why don't you give us a background, fill in the details, and tell us a little bit about how all of this became you.

Yeah, you know, it is funny because you read all that and you go, how the heck did anybody put all that together? It's a conglomeration of just sort of my entire life. I grew up dancing and acting, so performing was always really natural to me. In fact, I was a theater major. I thought my path was going to be standing in front of people and performing—and it is—but it's what I say: same stage, different outfit, different accent. So now I get to go around the world and motivate people and teach them about health and wellness. Stress is one of my huge topics; that’s just such a huge issue right now. I started out as a massage therapist, very accidentally during my time as a theater major. A woman showed up to our school; she would massage the actors for free, and I didn’t have anything particular to do. So I observed her and I accidentally apprenticed with her for a couple summers and realized I was really good at it and I just sort of instinctively knew what I was doing. So that was always this parallel path—healing on one trail and acting on another trail. And I've been privileged enough to combine those two paths into quite a road and written seven books and lectured around the world, and it's been pretty phenomenal.

I have so much respect for you. That's exactly where I want to take the next career path in my life. And what you just said is so indicative, I think, of a lot of our listeners, because a lot of them didn’t just start in their 20s being pet sitters or dog walkers. They've come from many different backgrounds. And I think that's what's so fascinating about the world these days—that we can continuously reinvent ourselves or add to ourselves so long as we have the basic foundation principles in place. And I imagine managing stress. So let's talk about that.

On this episode of Bella In Your Business, Bella talks with Javier and Shauna Lee from Geek Ghost, LLC and Tampa Pet Sitters on all things website hosting and Wordpress! Listen in as they dissect:

What is a virtual private server and who needs one?

Biggest mistakes business owners make when web hosting

Why is Wordpress a better alternative than Wix?

Companies to consider hosting your website Shauna & Javier Lee

Back in 2011, two Techs and a graphic designer walked into a bar. The blueprints for what will become GeekGhost were laid out and the Lee's start offering Web Hosting to a few select design clients.

Over the next few years, they expanded to include clients from over 50 countries and across two continents, having launched servers in the EU as well as the US. GeekGhost's objective is to provide Web hosting on par with the bigger providers in terms of reliability and technology while offering a small host feel in terms of support and customer service.  Shauna & Javier have been doing this a while and genuinely enjoy what they do. They're happy to help in any way they can!

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Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 66 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. This is Bella Vasta. And today I have a very unique topic for you. I'm so excited, and I think I need to tell you the backstory on this.

So Shauna Lee is actually the owner of Tampa Pet Sitters in Tampa, Florida. She approached me on Facebook one day after one of those threads popped up—you know, those threads where people are just ready to pull their hair out because something happened with their website or their server or their host or their domain. I don’t even understand what all that stuff means. So Shauna reached out to me and said it’s driving her crazy. She sees this happen in all of the groups where people are having a hard time with it, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there.

So Shauna is here with her tech husband. They actually own this company called Geek Ghost, and they’re here to lay it all out and help us understand this whole big thing called websites. Without further ado, welcome, Shauna.

Shauna:Hi, how are you?

Bella:Good! So why don’t you expand on that for me and explain how the pet sitting world met the geek world. How did this start?

Shauna:I actually have a background in web and graphic design, and my husband has been a tech for years. We started the web hosting company together, and our running joke was that he makes everything work and I make it pretty. After a while, it took off, but I got kind of crazy being in front of a computer all day working from home. I’ve always loved animals—I grew up on a farm—and I had a friend who owned a dog walking business. I started working for her just to get out of the house, and it snowballed. I ended up buying the business and growing it to where it is now.

Bella:And that’s what you do daily now while Geek Ghost keeps growing. What drew me to this and made me want to get you on the podcast was when you said you wanted to help educate people and steer them clear of bad experiences or companies that don’t support their users.

So I do want to break it down with you and Javier today. Perhaps we’ll bring him on, and he can get into all the geeky stuff. Maybe you can start and he can finish.

Shauna:Yeah, I wanted to bring him because while I have a good understanding of how this works from my background, when it comes to explaining things, I sometimes have difficulty finding the right words. It makes sense in my head, but he explains it better.

Bella:Perfect. I always equate a website to a house. You have your plot of land, your address, you live in a city and state, and you need security. And with SEO and keeping people on your website,

On this episode, Bella spends time with Bruce Irving from SmartPizzaMarketing.com.

Bruce Irving is the marketing visionary behind SmartPizzaMarketing.com and host of the weekly Smart Pizza Marketing podcast. On his podcasts, he interviews the leading minds of the pizza restaurant industry. You can listen to his Smart Pizza Marketing podcast at www.smartpizzamarketing.com. In addition, Bruce speaks at conferences about how to better use social media in your restaurant or small business.

Listen in as they dissect several tips to maximize local marketing on different social media channels such as Facebook & Instagram. They discuss important topics such as:

Tips for micromarketing

What's better - Instagram or Facebook?

How FAST does FB advertising impact businesses?

Pros & Cons of digital marketing vs. face-to-face

Biggest mistakes marketers make on Instagram & Facebook

How important is VIDEO on social media?

What are your top tips for micro marketing?

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Transcript:

This is episode 65 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. This is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have a special treat for you. I have Bruce Irving with me, and guys, I was listening to another podcast, the Social Media Marketing Podcast, which you know I love, and Bruce was on it. Bruce, I remember I was meal prepping, listening to you. I was so excited because I was like, this man is talking about the pet industry. You guys are in for a treat today because Bruce actually helps pizzerias or pizza restaurants all around the country do exactly what we're looking to do, which is to saturate the markets. Bruce is the visionary behind smartpizzamarketing.com and the host of another podcast, which you should totally go check out, called Smart Pizza Marketing Podcast. On his podcast, he interviews the leading minds in the pizza industry, but you guys can learn so much from this. It's global lessons. You can listen to Smart Pizza Marketing Podcast at smartpizzamarketing.com. Bruce is also a speaker, and he teaches us how to use social media better in our restaurant or small businesses.

Bella: Thanks so much for having me, Belle. I'm excited to be here today.

Bruce: I know it's crazy. I was in the pizza industry my whole life, and I always tell stories on our podcast of how people got into the pizza industry specifically because it's always a unique story. Either their parents owned it, or they went to school for something else, or they thought it would be fun to open a pizzeria—and it's not that much fun, they come to find out. I was the same way. I started off in high school working for a local pizzeria here that’s a well-known brand. I loved it. I wasn’t great at school or testing, so I knew business had to be my way out. Pizza is just what I grew up with and what I knew. That’s how I got started in the business. As I grew older and built businesses in the pizza industry, people would ask what we were doing for marketing. We had a successful restaurant, and that turned into the podcast. Now that’s turned into our agency where we help pizzerias and restaurants use today’s marketing to grow their local business.

Bella: I love it. It’s so organic, and I can totally relate. When someone comes to you, they’re probably looking to get more clients, right? What are they doing wrong that you turn around and fix?

Bruce: The problem with the restaurants and pizzerias we deal with is they’re busy. Times change quickly, especially over the last five to eight years—way quicker than you think. They may have a successful business that’s grown organically over 10–20 years, but the things they were doing aren’t working today. Direct mail is expensive—it works, but you need a large budget.

SEO, or "search engine optimization," is an extremely important aspect of your business in terms of gaining new clients. Why? Because it dictates how your website will show up on Google results!

So how can you improve your SEO and how will you know if your efforts are working? Bethanie Nonami of Marley Nonami has the answers.

Bethanie Nonami

Bethanie is an avid reader (and Audible & podcast listener), movie goer, foodie and loves super fast & loud cars. She helps people grow and scale their businesses by giving you access to your data and understanding the why behind your customers, leads and sales.   Bethanie's insight changes the way you sell. Bethanie loves fixing broken marketing systems and business processes to increase your revenues so you get back to doing what you loved enough to start your business in the first place!

Listen in as Bella & Bethanie discuss these important questions regarding SEO and analytics:

Whether or not your business needs to have a blog

The most important aspects to understand about SEO and analytics

What a "sales funnel" is and why you need one

As a special gift, Bethanie is offering a SEO Masterclass exclusively for Bella In Your Business listeners! Claim it here: http://marleynonami.com/bella/

Subscribe To The Show:

Transcript:

This is episode 64 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to another episode of Bella in Your Business. I'm Bella from Jump Consulting, and today I am here with Bethany Nonami. Did I say that right? No, not me. My gosh, I'm so sorry. I even practiced before we came on. I am bringing Bethany to all of the listeners today because she is a wealth of knowledge. She is a moviegoer, a foodie, she loves super fast and loud cars, but more importantly, she helps people grow and scale their businesses by giving people access to the data and understanding the why behind the sales that our customers buy from us. Bethany's insight changes the way we sell our positioning in the market, and she loves fixing broken marketing systems and businesses to increase people's revenues so that they can get doing what they love to do, which for most of us, it's pet sitters, dog walkers, hanging out with the pets, right? So a lot of us say we don't mind marketing, but anytime, Bethany, I ask my clients—I just did it an hour ago—I go, “So how are you marketing?” They go, “Well, we're baking goodies for the vet.” I go, “And how much revenue has that brought in for you?” She goes, “I don't know.” And I'm like, “I need the numbers to back it up.”

So, Bethany, without further ado, fill in the gaps from what I did and explain to our listeners what’s about to come and what you do. Oftentimes, people come to us and they're like, “I need SEO for my website.” We look at their website and it's kind of clear what they do, but it's not really clear. So one of the things that everybody needs to do is they have to understand that you are competing for attention. You are competing against many crappy websites and some awesome websites. The average person sees four to ten thousand ads a day, which is what we would see in a month twenty years ago. Not only do you have to compete with your competitors or compete with them just not hiring you as a dog walker and paying the neighbor kid, you have to be very clear, or they’re going to be distracted in five seconds.

Understanding the value of what you bring—because everybody probably has something unique. If you wash the dogs once a week after you walk them, you're like, “I wash dogs once a week.” Something that you can take, the convenience factor, and save your client time or money—that's a differentiator. People shouldn’t have to work with you to learn those differentiations. You should be able to clearly articulate that in three to five secon...