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5 Business Mistakes You Might Be Making (And How to Avoid Them)
Hey there, fellow entrepreneurs! It's Dana here, and today I want to share some personal stories and lessons I've learned the hard way. We all make mistakes, but the key is to learn from them and keep moving forward. So, let's dive into five surprising business mistakes you might be making and how to steer clear of them.
Not Securing Your Online Presence
Picture this: I woke up one Sunday morning to a nightmare. My LinkedIn account was hacked, and someone changed my name, title, and even messaged my contacts. It was a mess! The lesson here? Always enable two-factor authentication on your business accounts. Trust me, you don't want to go through the stress I did.
Underutilizing Your Personal Social Media
Your personal Facebook profile isn't just for fun quotes and family photos. It's a powerful tool for branding. I use mine to subtly promote my business without being icky. Update your profile with your business info and let your network know what you do. It's free advertising!
Skipping the Legal Stuff
Starting a business is exciting, but don't skip the legalities. Registering as an LLC might sound daunting, but it's crucial for protecting your personal assets. I did it online for about $125, and it was worth every penny. It keeps your business and personal finances separate, which is a lifesaver. (Disclaimer - I'm not a lawyer, please see a legal professional)
Failing to Track Expenses
I'm guilty of this one. It's easy to lose track of what you spend, but those expenses can be tax write-offs. Keep a record of everything from domain registration to client meetings. Your accountant (or future accountant) will thank you, and it makes tax season a breeze.
Falling for Shiny New Tools
We've all been there—tempted by the latest AI tool or service. But before you splurge, ask yourself if you really need it. I once paid for a service that turned out to be unnecessary. Focus on what truly benefits your business and avoid the "ooh, shiny" trap.
I hope these insights help you avoid some headaches. If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my channel and share it with anyone who might benefit. Let's grow our businesses together!
Until next time, stay magical!
#BusinessMistakes #EntrepreneurTips #SmallBusinessAdvice #Branding101 #SecureYourBusiness #SocialMediaStrategy #LegalBusiness #ExpenseTracking #SmartInvestments #BusinessGrowth
Transcript
Hello, internet friends. I'm Dana, your host of The Dana Show. Imagine that. And do know what we do here? We BS about business and branding. Today, I'm bringing you five surprising mistakes you could be making in your business. And these are intended to help you not make them and maybe not go through some of the headaches that I did with some of these. So for our very first one, we're going to have a little story time.
This is something that happened to me in absolute horror. I woke up on a Sunday morning to this series of emails in my inbox. A new email address was added. Two step authentication was turned on. Here's the pin. Your password was changed. I was like, what is happening? And I go to my LinkedIn and I find out, yeah, someone
hacked into my LinkedIn account and stole it. This was in early September. I was thinking about launching my business. My unemployment was running out and I needed my LinkedIn to work. And it was so stressful. And because it was a Sunday, there wasn't anything I could do about it because it's not during normal business hours.
So someone hacked into my account. changed the name from Dana to Anna. They changed everything. They changed the title, where they worked, where they went to school. I have over 500 connections. I have to actually have over 800 connections on LinkedIn. So it's an important place for me when I'm networking and keeping in touch with people and getting clients. And to lose all of this was...
I can't, it wasn't the worst thing that course had ever happened to me, but it wasn't great. And I put in a ticket and I have to say LinkedIn was very good about taking care of it. I had to put in a thing and was like, I didn't use this. My account has been compromised. But they were like, thanks. But like, you're not going to be able to access your account to check it because
I don't have access to the account. So they like to do all their communication through LinkedIn, but I couldn't communicate to them through LinkedIn because I didn't have access to my LinkedIn account because someone else stole it and changed the password and the two-step authentication. So it was, it was a nightmare. It was a nightmare, but they restored the account. They were able to go in. However, I lost eight years, I think of posts they deleted.
eight years of posts, I lost all of my recommendations and they messaged hundreds, hundreds of my contacts saying like, hey, remind me how we met or I haven't talked to you in a while. And because I'm not a recruiter, LinkedIn wouldn't take those back. for months, this was a year ago now, I think.
nine, 10 months, a couple months ago is the last time someone actually reached out to me and was like, oh, sorry, I don't check LinkedIn often, you know, because once it changed back, it changed back to my name. So then people, first of all, some people disconnected with me. They removed the connection because they didn't know who this Anna person was and they didn't know it had been me. And then, so I lost a few.
And then people, when it did restore, thought I was reaching out to them. And I was like, no, that wasn't me. I'm sorry. I was hacked. But I just didn't have the time to go through all hundreds of them and be like, hey, sorry, hey, sorry, hey. Like that just wasn't happening. I did obviously post on my main LinkedIn post. But I don't want you to have to go through this. It was stressful.
I have been on LinkedIn since pretty early on. I don't know exactly how old LinkedIn is, but I have probably 20 years of connections on there. And the thought of losing that all and having to start over, it was not fun. I do not want you to have to go through something like this. Please turn on two-factor authentication.
You should do that anyway, but especially anything that's connected to your business, because I didn't know this was a thing. But apparently on LinkedIn, it's easier for someone to come in and steal your account to access all of your contacts. And then they spam them. And I don't know what the end goal is there. You know, probably like most scammers are trying to get money out of you. But.
It was a very unpleasant experience. I do give credit to LinkedIn for handling it quickly. Part of what is disturbing is they handled it so quickly. They have a whole department dedicated to it because that's how often it happens. So turn on, please turn on two factor authentication on anything related to your business and save yourself from this massive, massive headache.
You will thank me. You won't even know how good it is. And then, okay. So that's the first one. Our second one is not utilizing your Facebook profile. And I'm not talking about your profile for your business. That's your business page. That's your Facebook page. I'm talking about your personal profile. This is my personal profile. And so my header
advertises my business. It doesn't stay like this year round. I will occasionally change it. Like when my daughter graduated from high school, when I got married this summer, I will change this occasionally. But when I don't have something going on in my life that I really want to highlight, I put this up. This is my branded message. Build a brand as magical as you are every day with my professional headshot. And I also change this background seasonally. So this is my fall background.
right after Thanksgiving, I'll change it to like a wintery background. So also on here I have, and this is my public view. So if you were to come to my page and view this and we're not friends, this is what you would see. So in my intro, helping small businesses build a brand as magical as they are every day. It's the same message, right? And then I have my.
Credentials I am an adjunct professor at Point Park University and I am what I call a brand alchemist at Dana Schulte Communications LLC. That is my the legal name of my business I don't generally use it like publicly but that is what I legally call my business I just usually for myself as Dana Schulte brand alchemist because I think it's fun and I think it's a little magical and I like to create magic so
That's kind of my, that's a big part of my branding. And then I have my other credentials. I have a master's degree in marketing. have a bachelor's degree in communications media. And so these things are all listed right here. So if you were to come to find me on Facebook, or if you're a friend of mine, someone says, Hey, I know someone who needs branding. I know someone who's starting a business. I know someone who's ready to level up in their business. They'd be like, I think I know someone who does that.
right? And they're a friend of mine on Facebook. The information's right here for them, along with my website and my YouTube channel. Those are kind of the two big ones that I want to direct people to. So I put that all in here, right here. A lot of people don't utilize this. They put a cute quote here, which is fine. But if you're a business owner, this is free. This is a really great way.
to spread your branding out just a little bit more, to utilize the network you have on Facebook without being obnoxious about it, without doing that icky sales marketing stuff. We don't do icky marketing here. We don't do icky sales. If it feels icky, then we don't want to do it. So we're not like DMing all of our friends on Facebook, but we are...
Making sure that that is available if anyone is in a position where they know someone or they need that your services We want to make this easy for them, right? So many people are doing the same thing that you're doing in your business If you're a lawyer, there's a hundred lawyers. If you're a realtor, there's a hundred realtors You're a hairdresser a hundred hairdressers a landscaper. There's a infinite number of possibilities
So you want to make it easy for people to know what you do and how to find you and how to refer you. And this is a really, really great way to do it. That's not obnoxious that you can feel good about. And then things that I also do is whenever I publish a new episode, I post it on my page and then I post it on my my profile too, which apparently
I don't put a lot of stuff publicly. But I do do that for my friends so that they can see what I'm doing. again, without being totally obnoxious about it, I don't post about that stuff all the time. I do the once and then the rest of it stays on my business profile. But just to let people know what I'm up to, I find that to be helpful.
The next thing we, I want to talk to you about is so many people make this mistake when they first start out. And then sometimes it just never sort of happens. And that's creating a legal business. If you are making something and selling it on Etsy, you may not need to create a legal business right away, but at some point you want to do that. If you are providing a service,
where you are like a hairdresser, you're touching people. You want to be protected. If you're a landscaper, you're a lawyer, a lot of those types of professions require you to deal with people that is in a higher risk way. If you are on someone's property, you are touching their property as a landscaper is.
you have a chance of damaging something or injuring yourself or something happening that could become a legal issue. When you become a legal business entity, it takes away your personal liability from that equation. So if something happens and you have someone who goes down the road to sue you, this is like a worst case scenario, but you have to think about these things.
someone sues you, your personal assets are safe. You don't have to worry about them coming after your house, after your retirement, your savings, your vehicles, anything like that because it creates a barrier where they can only come after your business. But so many people, especially when they start, just don't want to have to deal with it. It sounds confusing. It sounds expensive.
There's all these mental barriers that people will put up to prevent them from doing that legal work. And to be honest, it's not that hard. For me, now I'm someone who I don't meet people in my home. I don't touch people like a hairdresser or a masseuse or a chiropractor. I don't go, I'm not dealing with major legal things like a lawyer. I'm not working with their property.
So I don't have those legal considerations, but what I did is I just went online to my state and I registered as an LLC and it costs like $125 or something. And then I went to the IRS page and created my EIN, my employment identification number, or employee or identification number. And that was the main things I needed to do. Now I have a business entity, I have an LLC.
You know and it protects my family And it helps me just keep everything separate and then when you do that, you can also create a separate bank account There's all these other things that come with it when you're doing Setting up payment online and you want to set up a stripe account or something or you know And you want to do a business account you have your EIN. It just makes everything go so much more smoothly So, please please
create a legal business entity if you're in business. It is so, so important.
So the next one is something that I am guilty of. I kind of maybe do the ones or twice. It's not tracking your expenses.
It's so easy to forget that, you paid for this, you paid for that, or you paid for whatever. But those things are tax write-offs, which again is why you create a business entity, a legal business entity, so that you can take advantage of those tax write-offs. So for example, your website is a tax write-off. It is considered a marketing expense. So anything related to your website from if you were to hire me, paying me as a business expense,
registering your domain name, hosting, and any other work that comes with your website, any branding, any graphic design, any setup, anything like that is all considered a marketing expense on your taxes. And so you want to make sure you're tracking that because what I end up doing is it's know, April 15th at like 330.
And I'm like, I guess I need to do my schedule C. And because I don't have a ton of expenses, I don't hire an accountant. I do recommend looking into that when you grow to that point. But I've not gotten to that point that I feel the need for an accountant. So I do it myself. But even if you have an accountant, you want to track everything. Your accountant will love you so much if you track everything.
You know, there's things that you don't even realize like this space here is my home office. It is solely used for this. So this is a write-off part, which takes part of my internet bill, my electric bill, you know, all of those things that this, my overhead is very low because I do work out of my, out of my home. I don't have a brick and mortar store, but you want to make sure you're tracking all of those things, you know, training books, conferences, travel.
know, mileage if you go and meet clients somewhere. You know, if I'm doing a video, I got to meet you in person. And so all of those things you should be tracking.
So those will help you in the end. That will make your life very easy, well, easier when you're sitting down to do your taxes or you're working with your accountant or whoever your financial professional is to do those things at the end of the year. Okay, so our last one is getting ahead of yourself and buying services that you don't need. And this might seem a little counterintuitive because
I am a service that I think you need in your business. But it is really easy to do the, shiny, ooh, shiny, look at that new thing, ooh, shiny, look at that new thing, especially as AI tools continue to grow. And I have tried a bunch of different things. I paid for AI assistance and they were helpful. I didn't love it and I didn't feel like it was worth
the cost that I put into it.
especially when a lot of that the things that I was I was doing could have been done for free. So why was I paying for something because I'm going to have it checked like my grammar and things like that. And that back I can get that accomplished for free. I found that any ideas I had generated through AI just really weren't weren't very good. And it was pretty much the same thing everyone else had. So and I
I feel like my business wasn't big enough to really need it at that point. didn't need like all of these social media assistance and all the, I just didn't really need that all. was especially because of what I do. I was able to handle those things on my own. So I also paid for a service which speaking of tracking expenses, I had a bad experience in the past with a large, well-known expense accounting.
type service that I won't name. And I had a really, really terrible experience with them years ago. And I, to the point that I called them and they're like, we'll do this and do this. I'm like, I'm doing that. It's not working. And they were like, oh, that's not supposed to work that way. And they couldn't figure out why it wasn't working for me, but it worked for everybody else. So when I was looking a year ago, right around a year ago to really
a year ago when I was getting my business up and running. And I was like, what do I need to track my expenses? It's something I'm notoriously bad at. I need to make it easy. And I found this service and they did that as well as doing invoicing and creating a portal for your new clients. And like, my God, this is amazing. So I paid for it. And literally, like two weeks later, they're like, yeah, that whole expense thing, we're not doing that anymore.
but we're partnering with this company, which was the same company that I had a problem with before. And I was like, and it was an extra expense because the partnering from the company I was paying for was free, but now I had to pay for it with the other company, which I didn't want to do, which is why I with this company in the first place. And I was like, my gosh, no. And it was very complicated and I ended up dropping them and I spent money I didn't need to spend. didn't find it useful. So.
It's really easy to get stuck in that, that the shiny-ness of new things. And I'm not opposed to, of course, trying things. Do it at the low, a low cost if you're bootstrapping, which, you know, a lot of us are, especially right now with, you know, the way the world is going. And so I want to make sure that you are making smart decisions. And this one is so easy to do where you get stuck in the shiny and you don't get into the.
I need to do work part of your business. And we want you to be in the I need to do work part of your business so you can build your business. And we want you to think carefully about where your money's going. So it's going to places that are really going to be useful and beneficial to you in the long run. And less of the ooh shiny and more of the yeah, this is going to work to help me.
So I hope those things helped you. If you'd like to support me, I am a new podcast. This is my sixth episode. do right now, I'm airing these. posting these once a week on Wednesday mornings at my change. I don't know. I'm just kind of seeing how it goes as I'm growing. I have a brand new channel. I have very few.
Followers, I would love a subscription. I would love a like on this video There's always you can support me and help me grow for free. It costs you nothing Yay, and then if you have someone that might benefit from this video share it with them Hmm, that'd be great. Thank you If you have any ideas that you are looking for for future podcasts, please let me know I love I really do enjoy doing these
And I'm always thinking of I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm like, you do it on this. And then if I don't write it down the next day, I'm like, what was that thing again? I think we all do that. Right. So I do love doing these and I love coming up with new ideas. And I really just want to help you grow in your business as I grow in my business and we can all help each other out. So until next time, bye.
