Failing Our Way To Success: 4th Time’s The Charm
Hey sassy biz babe, Norma here to pull back the curtain on all of our failures. YEP! You read that right. We’re actually proud of our failures because you have to fail your way to success babe.
Keep it Sassy - Extraordinary Branding is technically Jessica’s fourth time trying to start a business and our third time going into business together.
We’re branding and content creation experts who are OBSESSED with simplifying branding and content marketing practices so that you can focus your power on what works instead of wasting time, energy and money on doing #AllTheThings with little results.
Why? Because we wasted so much time (3+ years), energy (life that we’ll never get back), and money ($$$) on creating a logo and website before truly identifying our branding.
Luckily for us, we designed our own logo and website, so the amount of money spent wasn’t crazy, but it could have been avoided.
But our time and energy are resources that we can never get back. While we’re lucky that we had fun along the way, we don’t want you to go through the same mistakes that we did, especially if you are doing things by yourself without a biz bestie to support you! Because of THIS experience, we can’t stand seeing entrepreneurs waste time, money, and energy creating logos and websites that have zero impact on their ideal clients.
Story Time
We won’t go through all the details with you – at least not now! – because that would take too much time. But the history of Keep it Sassy goes something like this…
Jessica bought the domain name in 2017 thinking that it would become her personal blog and she’d be able to retire from the corporate world.
Business idea #1 failed.
Although Jessica took action to buy the domain name, her fears and limiting beliefs held her back from starting her blog. It took her 3 years, 1 of which was devoted to personal development, to ever muster the courage to learn how to DIY a website and press “Publish.”
Jessica’s devotion to personal development was rubbing off on me, and it reignited our desire to start a business together. So we started dreaming…
Our first joint business venture idea was to launch physical products for ambitious women. Products like planners, wall calendars (Jessica is obsessed with calendars), journals, notebooks, etc.
We met at a coffee shop to dream up what this business could look like, how we’d develop the products, and all the things we would need to learn to become a product-based business.
Business idea #2 failed. We didn’t have the time to create products with our realities of being two full-time employees, Maybe we could have started small, like one product at a time… but we couldn’t see it working at the time.
We continued to dream of how we could provide value to the world. And we realized that the skills and talents we brought to work every day could be leveraged into a side-business!
We thought about opening a Boutique Marketing Shop where we could provide services like wedding invitations, managing social media accounts, creating websites, etc. – do you see the trend? We were trying to do #allthethings without niching-down and we wasted so much time, energy and money in the process.
Business idea #3 failed. Our message of trying to offer anything to anyone wasn’t very appealing or clear. Although we had taken about 6 months to design a beautiful logo and build a functional website… we weren’t getting any leads or clients, because publishing a website doesn;t mean that people will find it.
Of course were disappointed. But we refused to give up on our dream of working together at our own company.
We did a lot of research and what we found is that successful companies have extraordinary branding. When we say branding, we mean way more than a logo and some colours. We’re talking about your brand story, mission, vision, promise, values, benefits, tagline, ideal client, and even more. We package these powerful business tools into an extraordinary Brand Guide that helps you make business decisions and informed marketing strategies.
THAT is what we were missing.
We had a logo and a website, but we didn’t have branding!
Huge lightbulb moment.
We spent another 6 months researching everything there is to do with branding. A lot of it we already knew, but we’d never put it together in a packaged way before.
We created step-by-step workbooks to identify our Ideal Client Avatar and how we wanted our brand to be expressed. Then, we both filled out those workbooks and had regular meetings with each other to discuss how we could bring both of our ideas into one brand. We also created simplified marketing plans informed by our branding so that we could market our business while leading busy lives.
The process was a little messy at first, but the results were extraordinary!
We got our first branding client through word-of-mouth and we decided to tighten up our process to test it. We wanted to create an extraordinary brand in 4-weeks.
Ambitious AF, but we weren’t afraid of a challenge.
Our first client signed up to work with us, went through our 4-week process and was absolutely amazed. She was so excited about what we created for her that she immediately signed on to do a second brand for her other business.
And that’s when everything clicked for us. We help ambitious female entrepreneurs launch and grow revenue-generating businesses they love by designing extraordinary brands and simple content marketing plans that strategically align with their unique vision to confidently share their business, step into their role as CEO, and attract ideal clients.
Business Idea #4 is working! It’s still not easy. We’re not an “overnight success,” but no one ever really is. The question is, can we survive long enough to succeed? And the answer is HELL YES.
We continue to go through the trials and tribulations of life, but our biz bestie friendship helps us stay committed to our business even on the wild roller coaster that is entrepreneurship.
If you’ve got a dream in your heart please do not give up! Don’t see failures as reasons to stop, see them as information and signs of a redirection.
For encouragement and sass, follow us on Instagram @KeepitSassy.ca
Remember, being extraordinary requires that little extra. So keep doing you and chasing your wildly extra dreams!
Always keep it sassy,
Xo, Norma
