Ronii Bartles

I’ve been seeing people's New Year’s resolutions all over social media. We’ve seen them all from loose weight to be more grateful. Allen even made a resolution this year! Like, that’s a Christmas miracle in and of itself. He is striving to be more positive this year. The other morning before he left for work he said to me, ‘I know I’m supposed to be more positive, but this day is gonna suck.’ You gotta start somewhere.

We all make hot + heavy New Years resolutions and after a few weeks those resolutions fizzle out like your high school summer romance. Although some of us are committed enough to keep going, because you know what they say? {cue the cliché} What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I don’t know about you but 2016 has been heavy. Heavy in emotion, heavy in energy, heavy to carry. I’ve just kinda been going through the motions of writing blogs + sending emails because that’s what one is supposed to do. I’ve been a terrible friend to you for that. That’s not helping you or me. I’m not going to go into all the gory details about the year but to sum it up… it’s been heavy.

But always the optimist that I am, I felt a shift recently. A shift in momentum. Finally, I feel more focused + want to work on projects that excite me rather than going through the motions. That’s why my word for 2017 is Famous.

Pivoting sometimes sucks. But the beauty of being an entrepreneur is that we are nimble + flexible and can pivot our business quickly + easily. Embrace it! After you wallow for a hot minute of course.

I know this is a controversial statement I just made because we are taught to be encouraging + find our passion to be happy. BUT, hear me out before you tar + feather me over this. There are all these cliches about passion; lack of passion is fatal, follow your passion, do what you love + you’ll never work a day in your life, etc. I’m not disputing these are not true but research has proven that passion alone does not make you happy {or make you money}. I think that when we are chasing the "follow your passion" dream what we really are looking for is happiness + fulfillment. I’m very passionate about looking through the dollar bins at Target for their cute pens {which, everyone seems to be snatching these days} but that’s not providing me an income + most of the time not really making me happy, just frustrated when I can't find them.

Adulting is hard. Like really hard. And that elusive work/life thing doesn't always balance out in the life of an entrepreneur. Danielle LaPorte writes, 'I no sooner want to be balanced than I want to be a “good” girl. “Balance” is not something I want to live down to.' There are all kinds of articles out on the interwebs telling people how they can achieve work/life balance by just doing this one thing. Tips for work/life balance make for really good SEO because people always wants tips + tricks. But many would argue that work/life balance is bullshit {me included}. Balance assumes that all things are equal. All things are not equal. And never will be. There is only flow. Going with the flow of your life + how you want to look + feel.

Entrepreneurs are an interesting breed. We work ALL the time. Ideas are floating around in our heads all the time. I just had one yesterday while walking Lucy. We plot + plan + stress about how many followers we have on Instagram. Totally an arbitrary number, we do actually know this, but our brains are always on the ‘please like me’ mode so the number is important and the world will end if someone unfollows us. We have day planners {sometimes multiples}, notebooks, sticky notes + monitors cluttering our desk with post-its sticking out everywhere and week old coffee mugs next to our laptops. We have laptops because you know, we’re entrepreneurs and we can work from anywhere in the world we want. Except we never move from the little corner of our home that is our ‘office.’

Do you ever suffer from what I like to call Squirrel Syndrome? No? You don't loose focus? You already have, haven't you? If you're like me there is so much jammed packed into my schedule that I get overwhelmed, which in turn distracks my attention constantly. And its easy to get distracts by, say...

OHHH... SPARKLY!

Sorry. Focus, Ronii. You are writing a blog post. Squirrel.

Set it + forget about it! I totally said that in a Jersey accent in my head. We do this for dinner all the time. But what about doing it for the marketing in our businesses? Most of us find marketing to be hard + spend 90% of our time doing what we think is marketing our business.

But imagine a world where you don’t have to do that + the time you just reclaimed can be spent doing your favorite work, loving on your clients, making dinner, drinking wine with your friends, watching football, the list is endless. That is where the marketing system comes in. My definition of a marketing system is where you design a path for a potential customer to come into your world and engage with your work. It’s organized + automated and your marketing job is now to evaluate the system and make tweaks as you see things working or not working or new trends among your audience. I think it’s pretty obvious why it is important - to take your life back.

Customer avatar. Customer profile. Persona. It’s all Greek to me. This is one of the hardest pieces of the marketing puzzle for entrepreneurs. We can’t seem to figure out who our ideal customers are. We are so stuck on how we can help everyone but know we need to narrow it down to one person and that’s just… hard.

This is the one thing I see that makes businesses either soar to the top fast, or keep spinning their wheels to make ends meet. The businesses that figure this out are successful because they make products + services specifically for their ideal clients. They talk the same talk of their clients, walk the same walk as their clients and in return their clients spend a shit ton of money.

A few months ago I had a dentist appointment. I’m one of those very few people that loves going to the dentist. That’s probably because I don’t have any cavities and haven’t had any major dental work so all I ever get is a cleaning. I was chatting with the hygienist while she cleaned and when the dentist came in she asked the same question that most people ask, “How’s it going?” I gave my standard answer that I have been giving for awhile, “Good. Busy. You?"