That's the lesson we learned this week! When you start a business - the things required of you are not always written out super clearly and there is no manual or handbook teaching you how to operate. Sometimes you just have to anticipate roadblocks and be okay with being PATIENT. It's not supposed to be easy.
This week our patience took the form of dealing with the bank..
So before we get into story time, let's run through a quick recap of our week - because not EVERYTHING about this week was frustrating and required patience!
First off, I (Jennie), went on a little sales trip to another small business in our area that deals with items related to charcuterie...well...all the items except for boards!
*Enter me seeing an opportunity to bring them a charcuterie board with their logo engraved on it*
Which is exactly what I did! I also filmed the before and after of the encounter, so check out the YouTube video above to see how it went! Essentially, I set 2 goals for myself in this visit:
- Give them a board
- Tell them about my business
That's it! I wasn't trying to sell 50 boards before I left the building. If that was my goal, there's a pretty large chance that I'd walk out disappointed and that they'd have a bad taste in their mouth regarding our business. Not to say I wouldn't be prepared to take an order of 50 boards that day! I definitely would! But that would just be a bonus on top of the 2 goals I had.
Getting to talk to another business that wasn't a Realty office was a cool change of pace, too! It offered me an opportunity to learn how to tweak the sales scripts we already had written. I noticed that there was WAY more in common with how I spoke to Realtors and small businesses than I thought!
Second, we did even more live streaming!! We finished up our furniture design for a big sale we closed last week! We're slowly getting better at live streaming and plan on doing a lot more in the future - so make sure you are subscribed and have the notifications bell turned on for our channel so that you know when we're streaming! We even did a separate live stream for the Stud Stack (our private Facebook group for makers that want to start a business). We're giving away a free sales book to everyone in the group, so we live streamed us packaging them all! It was a blast - they're such an awesome, fun group of people.
Alright. So. Let's get into the frustrating part of the week:
For the past couple months, we've been meaning to set up another business bank account - just to create a couple different pots of money. Easy enough, right?! We'll just open another account with the bank we already use. Perfect.
WRONG!!
We tried opening the account online - just like we did for the first account! But we were met with an email that said "come into your local branch to open your account". Ugh. Not ideal, but okay! So we made a trip to our local branch and asked to set up the account.
We were then told "You need all of your business paperwork." Which was perfect, because we had PLANNED AHEAD and brought it all with us!
"You need an appointment, and we're booked through next week."
Fine. We'll go home, call the number and make an appointment! So, we call the number (which is literally the number to the front desk we were JUST AT) and are told "No, we need to see all your paperwork in person at the branch to make an appointment for you."
That would have been GREAT TO KNOW when we were standing IN the branch with ALL of our PAPERWORK earlier that day!!
But you know what, that's the story of starting a business. Things are difficult and unclear pretty often. The odds are stacked against you. Even when you try to do everything the right way, you'll be stuck waiting on another person's process.
Whoever has the most patience and emotional intelligence wins every time. So we set aside the entire day to deal with the situation - expecting delays and confusion so that nothing took us by surprise.
We told ourselves - this is how it's supposed to go! The bank is supposed to be difficult to deal with! This is just a game. All business owners go through scenarios like these.
And that mindset kept us calm enough to continue to deal with the problem at hand. And you know what? We ended up finding a way to set up a new account in the bank's app! Instead of getting frustrated and emotional and arguing with bank tellers over the phone, we stayed calm enough to find another solution!
He who has the most patience and control over his emotions, wins. Every time.
So regardless of the slightly stressful bank encounter, we had a pretty awesome week! We reached out to new people and got to spend a lot of time with YOU GUYS on our live streams!
#woodworking #woodworkingbusiness #entrepreneur #farmhouse #farmhousemodern #design #Ash #furniture #furniture business #charcuterie #charcuterieboard #cuttingboard #realtor #closinggift #sales #marketing
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