Do Weekly Podcast

Last week’s challenge: Get Your Assets Together

Last week’s challenge we challenged you all to get your business’s brand assets together, to make sure that you have access to them in one easy-to-find place. Why? Simple! One day you may engage a designer to create brand materials for your business, like billboard signage, new business cards or more. Natalie noted that she’s struggled to get logos and designs from clients time and time again. Don’t be those clients! Be the biz owner who has their sh*t together!

A Blast from the Past

Another unexpected benefit to all this work is that you get to travel back in time and see how your branding used to look. And let me tell you, Nat and I FUCKING LOVED IT!!!

Back in the day, when Natalie used to peddle e-cigs and mountains of kombucha, her former business partner came up with the logo ideas below. That first mark on the upper left? Yeah, that definitely looks like if Pikachu took another route and started wearing diapers and suffering the consequences of absolute zero sleep for ten years.

How about that upper-right-hand logo treatment? Y’all didn’t know Natalie was a tattoo artist did you? Well, she was and she got this tattooed on her right shoulder blade. Ask her about it some time!

My own business branding has undergone several changes over the years. Here are but a few of them below.

These images represent the first logo and site design for DigiSavvy. You can also see our brand guidelines here, too.

This week’s challenge: Apply to Speak at an Event

Although it’s not discussed nearly enough in the blogs and articles I read, speaking is a powerful marketing tool available to you. By simply standing up in front of an audience and sharing your story,  your expertise, your passion, you not only have command of the audience you’re speaking to but you also establish yourself as an authority to many people at once.

Perhaps you think no one wants to hear what you have to say or that your talk would be boring. I’m here to tell you that you couldn’t be more wrong. People connect with stories, people looking for answers will look at your answers and likely integrate what they learned into their life and business.

Personally, my personal speaking appearances have helped raise my visibility within the communities that I serve and have opened up opportunities I’d otherwise have no access to. Some of my favorite projects have come from those who have seen me speak at events.

Maybe you’re afraid of public speaking and that’s totally fine. In fact, fear of public speaking, unlike American politics, is a unifying topic for many people. Getting in front of an audience and delivering a talk isn’t easy and it requires preparation but if you put in the effort you’re going to deliver the goods.

I can’t tell you how to overcome those fears definitively. What I would tell you, however, is to be objective an ask yourself: Is my fear really valid? Is this all in my head? So what if I fail? What’s the worst that could happen? Is it the worst thing that will ever happen to me? Overcoming the fear isn’t easy but there is help out there.

Where to find places to speak?

That’s always the trick, isn’t it? It’s hard to find places accepting speakers. A quick Google Search may unearth upcoming opportunities.

Consider checking in with your local chamber of commerce to see what th...

Last week’s challenge: Be the Boss of Your Email

Email, it sucks and has been destroying peoples’ productivity for decades! But with Nat’s challenge, I get a handle on my emails. For me, the first day was pretty rough, it’s hard to break old habits and I still don’t have all my bad habits licked.

With Natalie, she observed

I committed to checking email three times a day: once in the morning, once after lunch, and once at the end of the day.

Tips for telling your inbox who’s the boss

* Close your email client or browser tab when you’re not using email.

* Turn off notifications for your client, browser, and mobile device. There’s likely no need for you to be instantly notified of emails.

* Limit your email checking to three times or less a day and make it a part of your daily routine to check at only those times. Or use your mobile devices priority notification settings (Android users).

* Don’t look at emails if you have no intention of answering your emails.

* Focus on being process oriented with emails.

* If an email takes only a few minutes to take care of handle it right away; if it takes longer than a few minutes, make it a to-do to handle later.

This week’s challenge: Organize Your Branding and Get Your Ass(ets) together.

Natalie and I have had a lot of issues with clients not having necessary branding assets that we require for the design phase of projects. It happens time and time again.

The business owner doesn’t know where the logos are; the graphic designer who created the assets moved to Mars and can’t be reached for comment, or they have a picture of an image of their logo. Sometimes, the business owner has several versions of the logo but none of them are right or current. It happens a lot. All of it!

So this week, your challenge is to get your assets in order. That is, get your brand assets in order. What does that mean and why is it important?

Your brand assets may consist of any piece of collateral (business cards, flyers, image logos etc.) where it displays your business’s brand logos.

* Get your business cards together

* Get any hard brand asset such as flyers or catalogs

* Locate any digital image assets like jpeg files, png, illustrator etc.

Take the above assets and put them in a central place that is easy for you to recall. Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox work well. And when you’re ready to share these assets with your team or with a new designer you can simply provide a link to them to whoever needs them.

A Blast from the Past

Another unexpected benefit to all this work is that you get to travel back in time and see how your branding used to look. And let me tell you, Nat and I FUCKING LOVED IT!!!

Back in the day, when Natalie used to peddle e-cigs and mountains of kombucha, her former business partner came up with the logo ideas below. That first mark on the upper left? Yeah, that definitely looks like if Pikachu took another route and started wearing diapers and suffering the consequences of absolute zero sleep for ten years.

How about that upper-right-hand logo treatment? Y’all didn’t know Natalie was a tattoo artist did you? Well, she was and she got this tattooed on her right shoulder blade. Ask her about it some time!

My own business branding has undergone several changes over the years. Here are but a few of them below.

Show Notes:

* 01:45 — Alex demands that Natalie love him as he is! She capitulates and relented. But also they talk about last week’s challenge, Being the Boss of Your Email.

* 19:10 — Natalie and Alex finally get it together and start talking about next week’s challenge,

Last week’s challenge: Ask for Referrals

Last week we invited our second podcast guest, Jay Gibb of CloudSponge, a referral marketing engine, and platform that allows users to share their address book to easily share deals and products with their friends.

The thing we each did was try to be more active in asking for a review for our businesses from those clients and customers who asked for support. Since Natalie and I both run businesses with a client-base who commonly submits support tickets it provides an ample opportunity to ask for a review right away, once we resolve the customer’s issue. Natalie did get a review and I did not. I wasn’t discouraged though, eventually, someone will leave that review or make that referral.

Another thing we discuss is automating that referral/review asking process. That is, find a way in your sales cycle to automate asking for that referral or review. I typically do this at the end of a project.

For local brick and mortar businesses, we do recommend asking for reviews on Yelp and Google My Business each are essential for trying to rank well in local search results.

More than anything, Nat and I learned that asking for help is a good thing and to not fight the urge to ask people for help. You’d be surprised how many folks who enjoy working with you are happy to help you out and recommend your business.

This week’s challenge: Be the Boss of Your Email

Email. I hate the fucking thing. Email, if it were up to me, would be burned alive and sacrificed to the asshole DigiGod, Elmer the Hard Drive Warrior, who destroys all tech-related things that hinder personal productivity. Yes, I have very strong feelings about email. Email pulls you out of your work day, demands your attention, and saps your productivity. However, my brilliant co-host does not share my frustrations with email and she shares some of her tips in this week’s challenge.

I try to be clever with my emails, you see. I use and love MixMax, which is a sales dev tool that allows you to schedule emails, bounce emails back into your inbox, set reply templates etc. I use the tool to send delayed replies to people because I don’t want to engage in an exchange right away.

Natalie suggests limiting how often you check email each day. Natalie only checks emails once per day. If the email has a task associated with it, Natalie will leave that email in her inbox until she’s ready to resolve that task. In a way, she keeps her emails around as a hodge-podge to-do list (she also makes a note of those email related tasks on her daily task planner).

Email can cause anxiety if the email is timely and related to a stressful project and mess up your concentration, Natalie says.

Natalie also recommends not checking email if you don’t intend to reply.

We unconsciously set expectations when we reply to emails right away. People who “build their businesses” on be at-the-ready available set that sort of expectation on their time and their clients will no doubt take advantage. So it’s important to set the right expectations and to limit your availability to focus on your work.

I commit to going forward with the week and checking emails only three times a day; once first thing in the morning, then the afternoon, and once at the close of the business day. I have an SLA (Service Level Agreement) with my clients that I respond to emails on weekdays within four hours, so this should be easy peasy. I’m skeptical but I think I can become the boss-level character I need to be in order to vanquish my emails once and for all (kinda).

Resources for this challenge

Level up your email and sales development tools using MixMax

Show Notes:

Last week’s challenge: Get MOAR Sleep!

Natalie and Alex discuss getting enough sleep from last week’s challenge. These two have been neglecting their sleep and they have been getting into bad habits. Adults need about seven to nine hours of sleep per day.

Natalie tried to be conscientious about having less screen time and set a hard sleep time and created a routine around getting to bed. It helped her get more sleep time, mentally shutting down and waking up more rested.

For myself (Alex), I had a client who worked on a documentary about the harm that our mobile devices cause which freaked me the eff out. That said, I made a policy of no screens in the bedroom. But also, like Natalie, I created a routine around going to bed. My bedtime would be 10:30 pm. I use the Philips Hue lights and have them set to begin dimming around 10 pm. Mentally, I think this helps me “check out” and get in the right mental state to go to bed.

This week’s challenge: Ask for Referrals!

This week we welcome our second guest for the challenge! Jay Gibb is a friend of the podcast and also the founder of CloudSponge. CloudSponge is a service that allows users to share their address book with a product or service to increase referrals, shared promotions which ultimately generates more leads and sales.

Jay Gibb had a simple, yet often overlooked challenge for us this week: Ask for a referral. Jay notes that people, service providers in particular, just don’t ask for referrals from folks they’ve done work for in the past. The act of asking for a small favor can generate anxiety, Jay notes. But more often than not a former or current customer is happy to help you out!

* One of the ways Gibb suggests that we can ask a favor from a client is to ask them for a write-up or blog post for how your service benefitted them.

* Ask for a review on a popular platform like Yelp, Google My Business, Clutch, or LinkedIn.

* Next, Jay suggests creating a system around asking for a referral. And there are a couple of approaches for that. For one, you can create automated email sequences (using something like ActiveCampaign) whenever you complete a project to ask people for a referral and take action on the appropriate networks. Or, if you do support requests, you can ask for people for a review right away by responding to tickets upon resolution and asking for that referral or testimonial.

Resources for this challenge

Power your lead generation through referral marketing with CloudSponge.

Check out ActiveCampaign for email marketing and automation.

Local review sites your small business should be using

Show Notes:

* 02:45 — Alex gets cozied up to talk with Natalie about last week’s challenge of getting more sleep. They get sleepy AF!

* 12:10 — Natalie and Alex welcome Jay Gibb, of CloudSponge to the podcast to discuss next week’s challenge.

As always, don’t forget to leave us that gushy 5-star review on iTunes and what not. And remember, kids, keep it simple and most importantly Keep it Doable!

Welcome back to the Do Weekly Podcast! Won’t you stay a bit and join us for episode 12? There’s a little bit of failure here, but it makes everything else taste like success! Er, maybe not but you should continue reading along.

Last week’s challenge: Make an Educational Product Based on Your Extensive Experiences and Knowledge.

Okay. Look, we might have gotten a little overzealous for last week’s challenge. No big deal, we’ll just create an educational product in a week. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Natalie and I kinda fell on our faces with this challenge. Yep, we didn’t complete the challenge. I guess we both get cookies now!

So what’s a person to do? And more importantly, what happened???

Well, it turns out that building an educational product takes a lot of planning, thinking, and executing. In fact, it takes way more time than either of us bargained for.

Natalie decided to create a resource to help her prospective clients/leads in their next web development project. It includes questionnaires and other content that helps people make informed decisions by arming them with crucial information and questions to ask potential service providers.

Alex outlined an email course series based off of a series of blog posts he did a year ago. He plans to make them into a drip-email course aimed at existing clients and also as a content magnet to help increase subscriptions.

This week’s challenge: Get MOAR SLEEP!

via GIPHY

According to the Institute for Preventing Zombie Apocalypses (aka the Centers for Disease Control), they state that roughly 35% of people in the U.S. do not get enough sleep. A lack of sleep has all kinds of adverse side effects. A lack of sleep can affect your weight, your attitude, and overall outlook on life. That’s not good, and it’s something that, for many people, is well within their control to change.

I have a personal story. Several years ago I was around 320lbs. I knew I needed to lose weight. So I was looking for things to change. The first thing I changed, I kid you not, was how much sleep I was getting. I got maybe four to five hours of sleep every day. I naively thought that if I broke up my sleep patterns that I could be more productive every day because I had more time to get things done. Turns out that’s about as dumb as lighting a firecracker and tossing it in your friend’s boxer shorts. I resolved to get seven to eight hours of sleep per day. Within 30 days, I was down ten pounds. No joke. I lost weight just by getting sleep and letting my body recover. There’s truth that power lies in getting enough sleep.

Going to bed earlier can also propel you to have more productive mornings. You may find that you have more energy and for longer stretches than your night owl counterparts have. More sleep can help you increase performance in your chosen physical activities, whatever they might be.

Some of the things Natalie and I discussed were some tips on how to get ready for getting that sweet, sweet shut-eye.

Habits matter! Having a nightly routine that you follow is key to ensuring that you get enough sleep.

Here are a few suggestions that we have that have helped us:

* Commit to a bedtime AND STICK TO IT! Pick a realistic time that you’ll go to bed and stick to it. Again be realistic, but strive for an earlier than usual bedtime an give yourself about eight hours.

* Don’t take tech to bed with you. Eliminate any possible distractions from your room. That means removing phones, iPads, or anything that makes a noise in your room. The exception to this is your furry family members. Dog and cat snuggles are the best.

If you’re looking at this post and wondering: “Wait, Natalie still hasn’t stuffed Alex into her car’s trunk and driven it off a cliff!??” then you’re asking just the right question, like everybody else!

On Episode 11 of the Do Weekly Podcast, we discuss taking the massive amounts of data filed away in that huge noggin’ of yours and turning it into an educational product or resource. Pretty smart, right? Does the Pope wear a funny hat? Oh yeah, you betcha!

Last week’s challenge: Become the Quitter You Always Never Thought You Wouldn’t Get to Be

Last week we talked about quitting a thing. You might think that I would never quit anything, that I’ve never quit a thing in my life!! If you thought that, you’d be right. Once, I was bitten on the face by Sharktopus and I didn’t quit! One time I got into a fight with the lunch lady over cold mashed potatoes and I didn’t give up, not even twice! Lastly, my Mother asked me if I would quit my job so that I could earn a living wage not working at a sweatshop factory. I told her “Nah, I like not making money but also I like making douchey Ed Hardy shirts on the cheap.” What’s douchier than making Ed Hardy shirts? Having a dating blog. I operate a high-traffic dating blog called the Urban Dater and I’ve decided to quit it; I plan to sell it off. While I’ll be maintaining the website still, to retain its quality and frequency of updates, I am looking to sell. So if you want a website with a built-in audience, talk to me.

Natalie decided on letting go of her social accounts on Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, and pulled back on Facebook. If you use a tool like Rescue Time, you’ll find it’s super easy to lose a lot of time to your social media accounts and that was Nat’s main frustration. She, like many of us, felt that if she put her time into creating thoughtful answers that it would lead her to more work or warmer leads. Neither scenario happened. She knew that her time spent on these social outlets was a waste and thus she decided to cut ties with those platforms.

The prevailing thought, even now, is that you must exist and participate in all social media platforms. The truth is that you don’t—simply choose the social media platforms that you enjoy and that add value to your business. Sadly, many folks who use social media engage in mainly one or two-word responses. They “mail it in” if you will but if you’re on a platform you enjoy then you will find it much easier to join the conversation and add your own voice!

This week’s challenge: Create an Educational Product

You’re a business owner. There’s a reason you got into the business and during the time you’ve run your business you’ve learned a thing or two that might be valuable to someone. That’s what we discuss for this week’s challenge, Creating an Educational product.

You can use your experience to develop a tutorial on how to use your products and make it something people can download from your website. Another idea is creating an email marketing course and since you created a newsletter, you have a list of folks you can notify about it!

One thing I’ve used for a lot of projects is LearnDash, which is a WordPress plugin that lets you manage and set up a Learning Management System (LMS)—it’s a tool that helps you create online lessons.

 

Show Notes:

* 04:07 — Prior to talking about Last Week’s Challenge,

We’re back once again, doing a thing for the tenth freakin’ time! Oh yeah, it’s the do weekly podcast mofos! Alex is back to saying insane shit and Natalie is back to slaying the Patriarchy one poor Alex Vasquez at a time. This week, we talk about quitting something and how cool it is to be a quitter. Doesn’t that just sound lovely? I think so!

So let’s jump right into it!

Last week’s challenge: Outsource Yo’Life Suckas!

Last week we had our very first guest, Nathan Hirsch of Freee Up, a marketplace matching awesome, top one-percenter, freelancers with yokels just like you and me. We talked about the challenge that was, which was to delegate 10hrs of your life.

Natalie and Alex managed to do the challenge but didn’t quite hit the ten-hour mark, but they are still pretty darn close. They share their thoughts and frustrations with onboarding new people to your business.

Overall, the thought is that you can’t grow your business and build a structure without getting help with your business and what you do.

The best thing to do, I feel, is to go back and inventory your day and see where you find opportunities to get unstuck and add some help to get you going and your business growing.

This week’s challenge: Quit Something

People say “quitters suck,” I say that quitters are bad ass! If you’re a millennial or you don’t give a shit about boxing then you won’t remember the famous plea of “No mas!” from legendary Panamanian pugilist, Roberto Duran. He was taking “Sugar” Ray Leonard’s furious fists to the face when he was like, Bruh, please stop with the aggro-punchy stuff. That’s a prime example of quitting something that’s not productive. What about that other quitter, his name was Edward, King Edward the VIII to be precise! He quit the throne because of love; he did so and caused quite the fracas in the process. He gave the proverbial middle-finger to society and those who spend too much time obsessing over silly hats and royal weddings (I have no idea about any of those things…I lie, I totes do!). My last example is Sarah Palin, the gun-loving governor of Alaska, who amid her party’s pressure to unseat the popular Barack Obama, was thrust into the John McCain presidential campaign. Palin said, “peace out, Alaska, I’mma be over here winning a presidential campaign but do keep a watch on Alaska, why don’tcha.” While Sarah Palin’s place on the McCain ticket caused the military hero great grief and regret it lead to possibly some of the best moments in politics to date! She quit being Governor to chase fame and it worked like a charm. Who hasn’t laughed at a clip of Sarah Palin?

The point is folks, quitting something is good for you, especially when it’s for the right reasons which is what we’re talking about this week.

As business owners, we are called on to juggle everything and wear a lot of hats. We’re the accountant, the salesperson, the janitor and more. And then there are our personal lives. I’m active in a lot of things, probably overactive! Certainly, I can reclaim some of that precious time. Time is the most precious thing we have people. So let’s be intentional with how we spend it.

I read a book from Seth Godin The Dip and that’s when I really understood the b...

Howdy-ho folks! Natalie and Alex are back and at it again with this week’s Do Weekly Podcast! Are you ready? Because Natty Em and Vasqueez-y are ready AF to lay down the goods.

Still not convinced??? Then consider the following:

Last week’s challenge: Attend a Networking Event

Natalie took a break from herding abandoned and socially awkward fluffy kittens to hang out with a bunch of women whom she didn’t know. We also call this networking, but also, in some circles, we call it wine, women, and technology or something like that. Look, whatever it was that Natalie attended sounded so fucking dope; all we know is it involved all women, wine, and gab. I mean, pretty cool, right? Alex was naturally flustered and complained, “they don’t have that shit for guys!” Natalie cruelly and gleefully replied, “The patriarchy can s**k it…muahahaha haha aaa.” Alex was left despondent and hopeless as Natalie drank wine, made connections and won at life.

Meanwhile, back at Newgothamland, Alex and his butler, a chicken named Mr. Pickles, discussed a variety of networking events that a male of great awesomeness could attend. Mr. Pickles came up with: The Pasadena Men’s League of Men; but Alex instantly scoffed at the idea. Then Alex remembered he had an open invitation to the Mustachioed Brotherhood of Pomona Heights, but Mr. Pickles thought the group wasn’t the right fit since Alex had to shave his mustache after his horrific trimming accident. Finally, Mr. Pickles came up with the idea that was well worth its weight in down feathers: Attend a meetup that Alex has already attended. While underwhelming concerning its overall lack of ingenuity, it would server its purpose: not to lose to Natalie. Mission accomplished!

Natalie and Alex are not fans of cotton or networking events. After attending a pair of networking events they found, however, that the connections they made at networking events lead to business partnerships, collaboration, incarceration, black-outs and a whole lot more.

Their conclusion was: attend a networking event but probably lay-off meth and excessive boozing.

Editor’s note: Alex J. Vasquez wrote the above description. Why is he so weird? Natalie is the glue here, folks. Listen to what she says because Alex is always eating edibles and writing weird stuff.

 

This week’s challenge: Delegate the sh*t out of your life!

Based on true events: Scaling. It’s not just for douche bag bros or boring SaaS-based product companies anymore. No! You get to scale, you get to scale, and you, over there, you get to scale too! F@ck yes!

We came away from this episode with a single and vital nugget: If you can’t manage to add someone to help you with your workload and you otherwise cannot automate, then you’re not going to grow.

With that in mind, we welcomed the Do Weekly Podcast’s very first guest: Nathan (don’t you dare call him Harold) Hirsch of Freee Up. Freee Up is a service that connects businesses to top 1% freelance experts in a variety of digital fields.

In addition to having an imposing laugh-smile going on, Nate has a lot of energy and a lot to say about automating and delegating many aspects of your life. Nate has delegated so much of his life that he now, in fact, has delegated his existence to a team of tireless freelancers who have managed to build a presence for him on a PTA board, a board member of a chewing gum company, a business owner of 9000 businesses and as a board chairman of the board of board slab manufacturing startup called Bœrd. It’s awe-inspiring!

Nate breaks down his fantastic story as a college student and eventually building a seven figure business and lessons he learned along the way. It’s indeed an impressive feat that will surely inspire you while also ma...

This week’s challenge: Attend a Networking Event

Surprisingly, Natalie and I are both people who dislike networking events. I approach networking events with the worst possible attitude.

While we view networking events with a lot of skepticism they are essential to growing our networking and social circles, building up contacts and be inspired by other business owners. Also, depending on the event there are a number of things to learn from one another. In essence, networking events are essential to personal and business growth.

We suggest attending a networking event where you may not know people, while not required, it can certainly broaden your horizons professionally.

Not everyone will have the same access to networking event opportunities as us, given our proximity to Los Angeles and our population-dense surroundings. However, the internet does help us connect and find networking opportunities and communities where we can connect and share.

Last week’s challenge: Declutter Your Business

Natalie managed to save $1765.95 when she audited her monthly subscription payments. And I managed to get rid of some old office junk that had been lingering for far too long (big thanks to Facebook’s Marketplace).

Resources for completing this week’s challenge:

* Lifehacker has an article they recently published on their top five small business communities for business owers to join and connect on: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/work/top-online-communities-for-small-business.html

* Take to Meetup.com and look up Small Business Networking Events. Be sure to click on ‘More Local Meetups’ button.

* While I’m not a fan of referral networking groups, I have colleagues and friends who swear by them! BNI is one of the most widely known and respected organizations who facilitate networking communities across the US. Find a local chapter near you!

Show Notes:

* 01:48 — We recap last week’s challenge and discuss tips to declutter our businesses and lives.

* 11:15 — We kick off the discussion about this week’s challenge: Attend a Networking Event.

As always, don’t forget to leave us that gushy 5-star review on iTunes and what not. And remember, kids, keep it simple and most importantly Keep it Doable!

Last week’s challenge: Schedule a Distraction-Free Vacation

Natalie and I discuss the ins and outs of booking a vacation for yourself, one that is distraction-free! Natalie shares some of her top tips for getting out of town while ensuring your business doesn’t burn down in the process. She advocates communicating well ahead of your vacation to let your clients and customers know what to expect while you’re gone.

Personally, I had a really hard time with this. Not so much the booking of a vacation but all the worrying about how things are going to play out while I’m away. Although I didn’t mention this on the podcast, because I just did this recently, I reached out to a project manager I’ve worked with previously and asked her to step in and manage things while I’m away. While I’m away I’ll be creating documentation around important processes that will help other people while I’m away.

This week’s challenge: Declutter Your Business

If you’re a neat freak then this episode is totally NOT for you. If you’re a little disorganized like Natalie and me then you should check out our episode this week where we talk decluttering your business.

Decluttering your business doesn’t mean only the physical stuff n’ junk, it can be virtual, and it can be mental too. Sound confusing? Nah, Natalie and I take you through a few top tips to get you going. I recommend you start with the low-hanging fruit, things that have been sitting around that you can easily knock out and rack up some easy wins. I have a couple desks and a chair I want to discard. I’m going to put them on Facebook’s Marketplace or on Craigslist. We’ll see how that all goes.

We discuss different things that you can declutter in your business from your office and workspace to clearing up all of those paid service subscriptions and making sure to cancel the ones you may not need any longer or even downgrading the ones you don’t need.

Simple living is the absence of excess. Many consider minimalism and simple living to be focused on possessions. While that is a very practical starting point, the decision to eliminate excess will naturally spill over into other areas of life. Eliminating excess possessions leads to a decluttered home. — From the Domino Effect

Additionally, I make a bet with Natalie regarding how much money she might save from canceling her subscriptions. I guess that she saves $250…total, which is embarrassingly low in hindsight.

Resources for completing this challenge:

* 21 Ways to Declutter Your Business by Minette Riordan, PhD (pay particular attention to creating a manual for your business, such a great tip).

* Decluttering Your Business and How to Keep it Clean by Josh Cohen

* Utilize Facebook’s Marketplace to offload your miscellaneous junk.

Show Notes:

* 03:00 — Natalie and I discuss last week’s challenge on how we scheduled our distraction-free vacation.

* 11:08 — We discuss this week’s challenge where we tackle decluttering your business.

As always, don’t forget to leave us that gushy 5-star review on iTunes and what not. And remember, kids, keep it simple and most importantly Keep it Doable!