Lifting the lid on what it actually looks like to set up a service business [Weekly Roundup #1]

Im always really struck by how many people tell me they don’t have what it takes to start their own thing.

There’s a myth that you need some set of magical skills; that there’s a small set of people who ‘can’ and a much bigger set of people who ‘can’t’.

One of the things I’m keen to do is lift the lid on what it actually looks like to set up a service business, and I’ll start by doing a weekly roundup.

The point of this is to show that it’s not rocket science and all of us can do these things. If you’ve ever talked yourself out of running your own little biz, I hope these roundups will help.

If you have 6 minutes, I recorded a roundup from my car while camping out from the rain. 👉 Here's the link to the video

If you’re in a rush, here’s a TL;DR:

1️⃣ Obvious one to start with: I launched Lazy Sundays 🎉

2️⃣ SALES: I Began a more conscious sales process this week, which involved:

• creating a sales deck;
• emailing people in my network who I think LS could be relevant for;
• setting things up to do a cold outreach campaign in Instantly (I’ll write more on cold outreach in a separate post)
• We also got our first big client yas! 🤭

3️⃣ OPERATIONS: I set up the back end processes that make it possible to deliver a service business at scale.

• I set a client portal in Kitchen.co.
• I mapped out the whole customer flow from brief to delivery and automated as much as I could with Zapier
• side note: Didn’t do this this week, but I also documented which tools we use, where and why in Notion - this is the start of our internal knowledge hub (or SOPs for anyone who likes acronyms)

4️⃣ BUILDING OUT THE DESIGN TEAM: In the short term, we’re going to work with a network of amazing freelance designers to deliver the visual design elements of each project. This week has been all about interviewing and selecting those people.

5️⃣ Not in the video but should have been: I’ve been spending all my non- work time being mum to my brilliant son, who this week got spontaneously said ‘I love you mum’ for the first and nearly burst my heart in two. Granted it was because he was fishing for chocolate, but I’ll take it.