June 20, 2019

7 Tips for Work-Life Balance When You Own Your Own Business (With Family)

Name: JSL Marketing & Web Design - Dallas Office
Address: 2121 N Pearl St. Floor 3,, Dallas, TX, 75201, US
Telephone: 877.514.0276
Price range: $$$

Work-life balance is something you hear a lot about in our culture. Whether it be because working from home is becoming increasingly common, or because Americans tend to put work above all else, this balance is a delicate and difficult thing – especially when you own a startup with family.

Not only do you feel like you have to put in 16 hours a day 6 days a week due to starting your own business, but you also have the pressures of working and living with the same group, which can muddy the lines between work hours and ‘life’.

Let’s check out my top 7 tips for how I keep my sanity, relationship, and work healthy!

Play to Your Strengths

Everyone has strengths, and those strengths can help or hurt you depending on the situation. For example, one of my strengths is that I am very driven – this is great for being an entrepreneur but can be a weakness if I let it get out of control when it comes to family and life balance.

Understanding that your strengths are also your weaknesses, and then playing to the advantages (not the disadvantages) is important.

Plan Personal Time & Protect it

Here is where the ‘balance’ part of work-life balance comes in – you need to balance your work hours with your personal hours. This doesn’t mean you have to have 8 work hours and 8 personal hours, but it does mean you have to plan. This is unfortunate if scheduling isn’t your thing, but it’s still necessary.

Make sure you not only plan for personal time but protect it as well – just like you would your scheduled work hours. You wouldn’t skip a meeting with a client for the gym, so don’t skip scheduled family time for work emails either.

Priorities (in Work & in Life)

Make sure you know where your priorities are and communicate them with your family. That way – if they start to sway in the wrong direction, you have others who can hold you accountable as well.

My priorities are always family first, then work second, but sometimes when things get hectic this can be hard to remember. It is nice having another advocate for your priorities, in my case, my wife and co-founder of JSL Marketing & Web Design (she’s the ‘S’).

Have a Workspace

Even if you work from home as we do, make sure your entire home isn’t your office. You need a workspace both for productivities sake, but also so you can shut the door and be done with it after your work-hours are over.

If you have a ‘home office’ but its where you always handout, you need to reevaluate so that your work and your life have some separation, even in the same home.

Make Time for Health (Mental, Physical, & Emotional)

Your health (whether you work from home, in an office, or not at all) is important and should be treated so. Your mental health, physical health, and emotional health all need to be nourished and taken care of.

Making time for your health isn’t a wish, it’s a need. And the best work-life balance is one that gives you ample time for physical health, mental health, and to recharge your emotional might.

Make Work Hours & Stick to Them

Yes, just like with personal time and health, this has to deal with scheduling. I find it helpful to make a schedule each week and stick to it as close as possible. I don’t have a ‘master schedule’ for every week, as things often change in my line of work or things come up – but those are important to schedule for too!

Give yourself wiggle room and plan for the unexpected. For example, if you think a meeting will take 30 minutes, put it in your schedule for 45 minutes – that way you won’t feel pressured, but still be using your time efficiently.

Be Realistic in Your Goals, Time, & Needs

This feeds directly from your work hours and schedule above – make sure you give yourself adequate time to meet your deadlines, goals, and needs. There is no point in trying to cram too much in, then realizing you can’t meet the deadlines or goals you’ve set for yourself, getting overly stressed, overly worked, and letting your work hours bleed over into your family or health time.

Being realistic might sound easy, but when you are ambitious, you will often think things can be done faster or sooner than they really can. Make sure you temper your excitement and drive and bring in a healthy dose of skepticism.

Think that project will take 2 weeks? Maybe write it in for 3. Think you can grow by 10% this quarter? Maybe have scaled goals – saying that growth by 10% is an A, but growth by 8% is still a B+, and so on.

Having realistic goals is where many falter, because if you don’t reach for large goals – you aren’t doing all that you can for your business. But if you reach too far, then your family and work-life balance will suffer.

Make sure you take both pitfalls into consideration and communicate with your work (and family) to keep that teeter-totter as balanced as possible.

Are You Feeling Prepared to Win the Work-Life Battle?

It’s okay if you don’t always nail it, in fact, a big part of work-life balance is knowing that you won’t be perfect in either, and working with that, growing through that, and continuing to improve and try.

Sometimes, the work-life teeter-totter will get grounded, but that’s where you reevaluate, pick yourself back up, and try again.

If you find yourself needing help in business more than in life, then contact me to learn about my digital services, business consulting, sales coaching, or speaking engagements. I’d love to connect.

And stay tuned, my own site – JamesLeff.com – is launching soon! Check back in a week for my next article.

June 06, 2019

The Single Most Important Rule in Business (And it Has Nothing to Do with Your Customers)

No, the customer is not always right (especially in digital marketing and sales coaching, trust me), and no, there aren’t magical words that will make your sales skyrocket, or some step-by-step template that will guarantee your business becomes a success.

But there is a lot of sage business advice out there. In fact, here are a few of my favorite business quotes:

Are you sensing a theme yet? Yes, my single most important rule in business isn’t about your customers nearly as much as it is about your management. After all, management is the driver of the bus, the captain of the ship, and the pilot of the plane, right?

But if my business rule is about management, but isn’t about customers – then what is it about?

Let me say this again just to make sure it truly sinks in – treat your employees how you want them to treat your customers.

The JSL management team truly believes that if we treat our employees with respect, listen to them, engage with them, and educate them, then they will do the same for our clients. And because managers cannot be everywhere with every client in every meeting at all times, we need to be able to delegate to our team and trust that they are treating our clients as well as we would.

How do we do that? Now, here is a subject that can be broken down into a simple step-by-step template.

Educate Your Employees (So They Will Educate Your Clients)

If you actively encourage your employees to seek out knowledge, to be forever learners in their field, and to have ‘fail-spaces’ where they can try new things (AKA learning spaces instead of only performing spaces) then you will have a workforce that can explain the value of your business’ services to potential clients, answer questions to current clients, and learn from mistakes with past clients.

Now, you can educate your employees in a number of ways – from compensating them for continued education classes or even new degrees, to encouraging them to have training seminars and hours set aside in their quarterly, monthly, or weekly schedules. But it is also important to cultivate a culture of learning, growing, trying, and adapting.

When you learn something new in your field, share it with your team (and encourage them to do the same with you and others). We should all be sharing our new discoveries in our fields or areas of expertise, because if we’re constantly learning, then we’ll constantly be able to improve our practices and services – which directly helps our customers, reputation, and therefore, sales.

Listen to Your Employees (So They Will Listen to Your Clients)

This one is big – listen to your employees.

Maybe they are on the ground floor and you are in a high-rise. Maybe they deal day-to-day with clients and you haven’t had a meeting with a client in years. Maybe they know the pitfalls of the product because they work in customer service, and you rarely use the product, if at all. All these scenarios mean that your employees know better than you do in certain areas.

But even if they don’t know better, listening doesn’t hurt. Listening shows them, first, that they can share their opinions, and second, that they are valued.

Now, do you want an employee who feels undervalued helping your client through the sales flywheel, or do you want one who feels heard, valued, and appreciated helping that client? It’s an easy choice, and an easy solution.

If you treat your team with respect, they will treat your clients with respect. If you listen to your team, you might learn something – and you will, in turn, teach them to listen to your clients. And, lastly, if you make your team feel valued and heard, then they will make your clients feel valued and heard.

Lead by example, but not just the example of how to treat your clients – lead by treating your team how you want to be treated, how they want to be treated, and how your clients want to be treated.

It Really Isn’t Rocket Science, Is It?

Sometimes your employees need a little help, whether that be with scheduling, practice, education, or something else related to their skills. And helping your employees is good for your entire business in the long run. It might take some of your time now, and I know that management’s time is scarce and valuable – but think of the message it sends your workforce when you listen to them or when you make time in meetings for someone to share what they’ve learned.

In management, you want to motivate your company and your employees to always try to be better, to provide better services, better products, or better customer care. One of the best ways I’ve found to do this is by encouraging your team to always reach, learn, try, and speak.

In some ways, this goes back to the JSL company culture, but in other ways, it speaks to a new kind of management style. And that is a management style where you lead by example and show your workforce exactly how they should treat clients, regardless of how much contact you actually have with the clients.

Whether you are a team of 6 or 600, this business rule stands true – treat your employees how you want them to treat your customers; educate them, listen to them, and then let them improve your business and care for your clients with the confidence and skills you’ve given them.

May 25, 2019

Starting a Startup from Scratch [The 3-Step Startup]

This article isn’t about giving a detailed look at each and every legal and strategic step you need to follow in order to start a small business, because frankly, there are enough of those guides out there (like here or here) and they’ve done a great job.

Instead, this post will look at how my wife and I started JSL Marketing, how we built our team, and how we made it a success – all in three simple steps (with a few sub-steps sprinkled throughout).

Not to oversimplify the process of creating a business or starting a startup, as a lot goes into it, but instead, I want to highlight some of the problematic areas that people often get hung up on, along with common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Just Start | Just Sell Something | Just Jump

Take a note from our beautiful coffee mugs – and just start!

What is your passion, your skill set, or your product idea? You could spend 15 years honing it, or you could go for it now. There are plenty of inspirational quotes out there that tell you in 101 ways to just try, to just keep going, or to just start. But this is actually completely true!

If we had dragged our feet when we finally decided to go from ‘part-time freelance’ to ‘all-in-digital-marketing-firm’ it would have taken us years longer and lost a lot of the momentum we had gained in the industry.

Sometimes it can be scary to jump into something, and I don’t think you should go for an idea that is only half-baked, but you need to understand that if you keep waiting for the stars to align and all the pieces to fall into place, you’ll be sitting on your startup idea until the day you die.

Starting a startup isn’t always smooth sailing, but it does teach you to think on your feet, be flexible, and brave. Sarah and I were brave when we started JSL – and though our company still took a lot of planning, when we felt unsure if we were ready to jump or not, we pulled the trigger and dove headfirst into the business.

Even if you gain nothing else from this post – understand this: your startup has a 0% chance of succeeding if it never starts. No matter what you do, you raise those odds when you do it.

Build Your Team of Wizards

As surprising as this might be to some, you can’t do everything yourself. In fact, you shouldn’t even try. If you want your startup to be a success, you need to work with people who have skills that are different, experiences that are different, and minds that are different.

Take JSL for example, our team consists of a group of creatives who each have unique skills they bring to the table. From ad creation and implementation masters, email marketing and CRM software specialists, digital design and print professionals, SEO and audit experts, all the way to content creation gurus and hard-coding geniuses – we have a team that rivals The Avengers.

Yes, when we started out, it was just Sarah and me, but we quickly had too much work to handle, especially while trying to elevate and grow our business

We needed help.

So, we went out looking for people who were teachable, passionate, ambitious, loyal, honest, and fit with the company culture we wanted to create. We took the hunt seriously and started out on a ‘trial-period’ with each of our new members, but as they grew with the company, as they continued to learn and try new things, we saw that we had created something invaluable – a team of professionals who were truly dedicated to making JSL a success.

We didn’t hire experts from the very beginning, instead, we hired the type of people who were hungry to learn and hone their skills. Those who were passionate about their area or field and wanted to improve it each and every week.

Ultimately, we decided to work with people who wanted to become the best in their field – and wanted their company to be right alongside them.

Market Like Your Business’s Life Depends on It (Because It Probably Does)

Here is something the team at JSL knows about twofold – marketing is king.

How do we know this? Well first, our company is built on the facts (and statistics) that say you need to market yourself (and market yourself well) if you want to succeed in today’s instant-information, online age. And second, we experienced the need for marketing firsthand when we started a Digital Marketing company in Dallas at just about the same time the SEO and Digital Marketing boom hit.

Think of it like this – if you are looking to work with a call center, yet every time you call them you get a busy signal, are you going to trust them with your business? If you go to speak to an architect and their office is in an unfortunate-looking building, are you going to trust them with your build design?

This is exactly the situation that JSL wanted to avoid.

If we were going to try to be the very best web design company in Dallas, then we needed a great website. And if we were going to try to be the best digital marketing company or SEO experts in Dallas, then we had better show up in that number one spot on Google.

So, we worked hard, learning all along the way, and we made it to that top spot.

Though other forms of marketing are still viable and popular, digital marketing is overtaking them all, because no one goes to their phonebook anymore when they need to find a new service, restaurant, or product – instead, we all turn to search engines, our laptops, and our smartphones.

There is no point in daring to create a startup and staffing it with the very best team, just to let it fall through the cracks because no one knows you exist – so, after step 1 & 2, don’t forget to market like your company’s life depends on it.

Need More Tips, Inspiration, or Practical Steps for Your Business or Startup? Check Back Next Week or Contact Me for Sales Coaching, Marketing Analysis & More.

May 10, 2019

How We Made a Fun (Yet Efficient) Company Culture

As the CEO of JSL Marketing, the questions I get asked most often are usually along the lines of:

How do you manage your remote team when they are spread across the US?
How do you keep your team motivated across time zones and state lines?
How can you create a company culture when you aren’t even together most days?

And though I’ve seen lots of articles on ‘how to stay organized online’ or ‘management and productivity tips for remote work’ (in fact, JSL has written on these very topics in the past), you almost never see articles about remote-work and company culture, just company control.

And yet, if you ask any of the JSL Marketing team what it’s like to work for us, they’ll relay to you a very specific (and very fun) company culture – all while still growing, becoming more efficient, and more profitable.

How can that be? How can we be remote, have a company culture that is fun, but still work hard and provide our clients with superior service?

It’s not as hard as you might think, in fact, I bet I can sum it up into three easily digestible tips.

Recognize That Your Team is Comprised of Real People

This is easily said, more difficultly done – but almost impossible to do well and consistently unless your team is willing to be honest with you.

Why is their honesty a large part of treating them like real people and not workhorses? Because you need your team to feel comfortable telling you when something is beyond their skill level, their available time, or their available energy.

And because everyone is different, everyone has different stress points and thresholds. You cannot guess at where someone’s cutoff is – they need to communicate it. And this can only be done if you’ve encouraged your team (hopefully, from the very beginning) to be open and honest with you.

JSL started out small and grew very quickly, this means many of our team have been here since the beginning and have had to learn at a very fast rate. And I would be lying if I said it was never stressful for myself, Sarah, and our team, but realizing that your team members have other important factors in their lives besides work is a great way to remind yourself to view them first as people, and second as workers.

One way in which we do this is by asking about life-events as well as work-events during our weekly team meetings. Just this past week we had two different team members viewing homes (which is both time-consuming and stressful). Another team member is going on a short trip, while two others are doing a 24-hour road trip to Canada. Previously, one of our team members was in the middle of her graduate school exams, and another was in the middle of a cross-country move.

These events are ‘human things’ not ‘employee things’ but we still recognize them, talk about them, and plan for them in our meetings. And this is just one small way we recognize our team as people first, workers second.

Incentivize, Reward, & Treat Your Team

This can easily go with the above point, as incentivizing, rewarding or treating your team is important no matter your company culture, but I thought it deserved its own spot because of the reasoning behind it.

It actually can be broken down into a separate category for each word used: incentivize, reward, and treat.

Incentivize Your Team

I think incentivizing your team is integral because it shows that your success is their success. This means they have some ‘skin in the game’ so to speak, or, more aptly, it shows them that they are a part of this company and that their work directly matters in either growing or slowing the company.

This can also get them excited about work. After all, ‘perks make the place’, right?

Reward Your Team

No, I’m not being redundant, because a reward is different from an incentive.

An incentive is told beforehand, to motivate your team into working extra hard or trying new things. A reward is given after something great has been done.

Recognizing and rewarding your team when they do something great is a way to show you appreciate them, you notice them, and that their hard work is never going unnoticed.

In many ways, a paycheck is an incentive, but a reward is that bonus they didn’t know about. A reward is a surprise given to let your team know you notice, you care, and you’re happy with them.

Treat Your Team

Finally, treating your team is different from both incentivizing and rewarding – as both are in regard to their work. However, treating your team has nothing to do with work, it has to do with simply showing your appreciation for them, and the value you see in them ‘just because’.

An example of this could be company lunches or dinners or trips, or even company ‘swag’ which is what JSL is currently creating and distributing to our team.

Something as extravagant as a nice team dinner out, or a company box to watch FC Dallas win, or as little as a JSL tank top, pen and notebook, or some tacos on our lunch break can make all the world to your team.

In fact, the treats our JSL team regularly receive might very well be one of the largest factors in the ‘fun’ aspect of our company culture, and the incentives and rewards the largest factors in our efficiency during peak times.

Mix Business & Pleasure

As you might have noticed by reading how we view our team (and understand that life exists outside of work) and how we incentivize, reward, and treat them (in fun ways, also outside of work), we often mix work and fun.

This means even in our meetings, we’ll joke a bit, talk about life a bit, and ask for opinions on everything from our next eBook to the tagline on our company t-shirts and tank tops.

Of course, a mix of work and fun doesn’t mean all fun. So much of creating a successful business is finding that delicate balance between fun and work, life and business, and employees and friends.

Luckily, we’ve got a great team who can laugh about me eating alone (and getting caught on tape by our videographer in Klyde Warren Park) one minute, and then immediately jump into talking about their projects, deadlines, and proposals the next minute.

They can also tell me when they are having a heavy week, a light week, a stressful week, or when they want to try or learn something new.

Again, I truly think it all comes back to acknowledging that your team members are people, not just workers.

Company Culture Doesn’t Have to Be Rocket Science, You Just Have to Encourage Your Employees to Work Hard & Not Be Afraid to Have Some Fun, Too

Want to be a lifetime learner like me? Check back next week to learn my 7 go-to information hubs for all things digital marketing, SEO, web design and more.

January 12, 2019

New Year, New Digital Marketing Plan

If you’re starting off your new year with big plans for big things for your company, then you’ve probably (or hopefully) already started planning your moves for 2019.

But what about your digital marketing? Do you have a plan laid out? A strategy? Or does that simply seem too impossible to tackle? Maybe next year? Maybe never?

Instead, we want to show you how powerful having a strong marketing strategy can be for your business.

And you don’t have to start huge either. In fact, we’ve outlined below a few super simple and easy-to-adapt steps that you and your business or team can take to hone your digital marketing strategy in the new year.

4 Steps to Your New Digital Marketing Plan

Define Your Mission Before You Make It Your Mission

What is the point of your digital marketing plan? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, traffic, and rankings? Do you want more emails opened, more links clicked, or simply more sales?

These questions are extremely important because, without answers, you really are floundering.

JSL Marketing wants you to be swimming the butterfly, not doggy-paddling towards your goals. So, make sure you create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based).

Let’s take a quick look at each letter to make sure you start off your digital marketing plan and new year on the right foot, shall we?

Specific: Saying ‘be better’ is neither specific nor smart. So, make sure you choose a goal which is specific enough to be understood. After all, a goal isn’t really a goal if it’s undefined.

Measurable: Choose a goal you can measure, so you can know how close you are to reaching it. This goes hand in hand with specific goals, as something you cannot define or measure, ultimately, cannot be reached.

Attainable: Since we are talking about goals we can reach, let’s discuss reality and what is attainable. Essentially, this part of SMART just means it is realistic, but SMRRT didn’t sound as catchy.

Relevant: Making goals has to do with where you want your business to end up, or the direction you want it to move. Keep this in mind as you make a goal. For example, if you want to gain more website traffic, a goal about additional phone calls during peak hours isn’t very helpful.

Time-Based: The last part of SMART is invaluable. You have to set a time limit for your goal. I’ll say it again for the people in the back – you have to set a time limit for your goal.

Creating a SMART goal is a great way to narrow down what you want your digital marketing plan to do for you, and therefore, gives you the direction you should be working towards.

An example of a good SMART goal is:

“In the first quarter of 2019, we want to increase our web traffic from 1,000 to 1,500 visits per week.”

This goal is specific – giving the exact numbers wanted. It is measurable – again with exact numbers, current and desired. It is attainable – we aren’t looking to go from 1,000 to 100,000. It is relevant – after all, 95% of our business comes through our website. And it is time-based – specifying only 3 months to reach the goal.

Learn From the Past to Improve the Future

One would think this would go without saying, however, all too commonly businesses ignore what they have learned in the past about marketing, trends, and their customers.

If you do not learn from history, you are bound to repeat it. And if you do not learn from your mistakes, then 2019 will be the exact same as 2018.

But we are striving for growth, for improvement, and that means you have to use all the tools in your toolbelt.

Look at what your worst months were last year and ask yourself why? Research new ideas and techniques that are up and coming and try new things this year.

Business, and especially digital marketing, is a never-ending journey and learning curve. Don’t fight it. Besides, perfection is for the gods – improvement is for us humans.

Identify the Strengths, Team & Tools Need

After making a goal and doing the necessary research and history lessons, you have to know who and what you need to make your digital marketing a success.

Think of which tools you will need for measurement, analytics, and progress. What avenues will you use? What modes or platforms?

After you have looked into relevant tools for your goal, you need to look at gaps you may have in your team or their strengths.

Will you need new materials written? Do you have a content writer? Do you have a team member who can create email templates or cohesive marketing materials?

If some of those answers were ‘no’, then you might need to hire in-house or outside of your business to find people and strengths to fill the gaps in your strategy or skillsets.

And there is no shame in this, because while your digital marketing campaign is running, you and your team still need to be running the business too.

Sometimes hiring outside of your employees can be a great way to save some time.

In All Things – Be Flexible

This is one of the most important things to remember in digital marketing planning and implementation – be flexible.

You need a plan, you need a strategy, and it doesn’t hurt to have it be organized and specific. But if that plan gets a little knocked around and changed during the year – do not worry!

This is normal, this is natural. And frankly, with all the of constant updates and changes in digital marketing, staying the same or sticking to your plan rigidly for the whole 12 months might actually hurt more than help.

Do You Need Help with Your New Digital Marketing Plan?

If so, we can help!

In fact, digital marketing is kind of one of our largest specialties.

We have even been recognized as a top Texas Digital Marketing Agency by DesignRush!

JSL Marketing wants your new year to be even more successful than last year, and we are going to do that by planning the year out, understanding your goals and unique ‘why’, and remaining flexible and able to adapt.

We can’t wait to partner with you. Call us today or fill out a contact form!