Signature offers, growing a team, landing big clients, proprietary methods, taking care of legal, and more. This interview with Kathleen Shannon and Tara Street of Braid Creative will give you a behind-the-scenes peek into growing a successful graphic design and branding agency, and how a contract helped them feel confident enough to stick to their guns to work with Brené Brown.

The only thing worse than not protecting your business at all is putting legal protections in place -- but not following through so that they’re actually effective.

You probably know by now that I think contracts are the simplest, best way to protect your online business. But if you don’t get them signed, they won’t do you any good if you run into an issue.

As much as we don’t want to think about things going wrong in our business, calculating risk is part of being a responsible business owner.

So how can you set up your business when you’re just getting started to make sure your personal home, car, bank accounts, and other assets are protected if something happens later? What role does insurance play in managing risk and do you even need to form a corporate entity at all?

For many business owners, arriving at the point of needing to hire someone because you have more work than you can handle is an absolute dream come true. 

But loose hiring practices can lead you to make some extremely costly mistakes -- like hiring an independent contractor who really should be classified as an employee, or not using a contract to make sure you and your worker are on the same page.

The online space is its own unique ecosystem - no other industry does things quite the way we do them here. And never has that been more evident than over the last weeks and days as we have seen the outcry about the death of George Floyd unfold and the subsequent flood of activity calling out racism and police brutality (and each other) in online forums.

DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) consultant Erica Courdae joins this episode to share best practices for facilitating difficult conversations in places like Facebook groups and other online communities. We are grateful to Erica for lending her voice to help educate us and our listeners and to continue invaluable conversations like this one.

If you applied for a PPP loan, you need to know about the "Flex Act" that was signed into law on June 5, 2020. Watch to learn about changes in rules about when you need to spend your PPP loan, rehiring rules, and more.

You’ve started your business, created your products, and maybe even made a few sales.

Think you’re ready to scale? Not so fast…

Messaging and marketing expert Lisa Princic joins the podcast to talk about the importance of nailing down value proposition BEFORE you scale, the most common marketing mistakes she sees businesses make, and more.

Building a beautiful website and creating compelling content takes time and resources (financial or otherwise). And when you’re just getting started, you may be short on both. 

It’s tempting to just “borrow” a bit here and there and hope no one notices. 

But the consequences can be severe… not to mention potentially devastating to your business.

You’ve made the plans to take your business online, and decided on the basics we covered in part 1 of this series. Now what? 

Part of the beauty of starting an online business is that you can get up and running quickly, but there are still a few more things you need to tackle before you open your virtual doors.