Nicole's Corner: Creative Small Business Solutions for You!

Hi all! I've been waiting for this week...the official Darn Good Yarn husband is home! Mike normally travels to different locations for work and is gone during the week, but he's home now, at least for a few days, and it has made me grateful for the technology that allows me to work at home so I can spend more time with him. I've been enjoying Mike's company and being able to be here will all of you too...definitely the best of both worlds. Maybe you didn't know this, but the majority of Darn Good Yarn's team works from remote locations. Joie and I are the only ones that are here in Schenectady. Everyone else works from as close as Maine and North Carolina to as far away as Australia! How do we do it? Let me tell you about a few of the technologies that allow our business to be a global entity.

Darn Good Yarn could not have existed in the way that it does, even ten years ago. With the development of cloud based solutions, anyone of our team members can login to apps, documents, calendars, social media sites, our ecommerce solution along with customer service apps, and just about anything else we need to run the business. It's pretty fantastic, don't you think? Let me tell you about a few of the specific solutions that we use.

Darn Good Yarn is a big fan of all things Google. We keep our schedules synced up on Google Calendar. Our Google Drive account is full of documents and spreadsheets that we each can create and share and then edit from home as we modify ideas and data. We use Google for our e-mail. We have meetings via Google Hangout and we connect with you on Google Plus! If you're looking for a good solution to provide e-mail for your business, keep all of your documents in one place and have an amazing array of tools available to you with one login and password, Google will do it for you!

 

Shopify is our ecommerce solution of choice! We run our store (retail and wholesale) through them and they make it easy, quick, and convenient to organize our products and see our sales data at a glance. I can add multiple users to our Shopify account which makes it simple for our remote employees to login and see what's going on too. There's even a Shopify mobile app, so you can keep track of things on the go. And within Shopify are apps that help us serve customers better. Robin, is a customer service solution that brings all of our customer conversations into one place so we can stay on top of their questions and needs. And one more...Retention Grid helps us keep track of our customer base as a whole and lets us know how to serve each customer best and how to retain them. All of these can be accessed from anywhere in the world where there is internet access! It makes keeping balance between family and work life so much easier to achieve.

And how does this look in real life? It's back to school time and our team members, Maggie and Jessica both have children that are headed back to the classroom. Maggie, our Vice President, works from her home office in North Carolina and occasionally needs to comes to visit us at DGY headquarters. Working from home allows her to be there when Ember, her daughter, gets home from school and be flexible in her schedule so she can maintain a balance between career and family life. Another team member, Jessica has never even been to DGY headquarters (yet!). After an interview on Google Hangout, she was hired and keeps her eye on our social media outlets all from home, with her two boys in the background. Dora is in Canada, Karleigh in Australia, Tia in Maine, and the list goes on. We all stay connected through these technology solutions and we can all do almost everything that we have to do at any computer. This model also allows us to hire employees from anywhere! I think it's a pretty spectacular way to run a business!

What works for Darn Good Yarn might not be the exact right solution for your business, but I hope you realize that the same creative nature that helps you craft your goods and bring that craft to others is the same tool that you need to use to grow your business. Brainstorm and think of solutions that will work for you and imagine what you can make your business when think beyond the simple model of create and sell. Think big and allow those ideas to flow. Maybe it's technology solutions that you need or maybe you need to think about adding multiple streams of revenue so you can keep your business afloat when one is running a little dry...whatever it is, keep your be open to possibilities and channel your creativity to come up with solutions that will work for you!

Love, Nicole