Being aware of the finances in your business is so important. It can feel overwhelming of how to step into understanding finances when you start your business, but it is worth the time.

We cover some financial questions to ask yourself as you start the year in your business. This is just the beginning of financial awareness in your business to build onto with more detail.

The idea of trusting your gut is either something you understand or something that seems strange to you. Many of us have been told it's just us overthinking things when we have a strong gut feeling.

So how do we know when to trust our gut? We share a story that has gone on for years and how we're learning from it. We give some examples of ways we've trusted our gut feelings both in our personal lives and business.

We often think big changes are the only way to have a big impact in our lives or our businesses. But really, it's the simple small changes that lead to the big impact.

We talk through a simple change we made in the last few weeks that has had a bigger impact than we imagined. It's an example of how simple and small changes can often do more than we expect.

Do you have a product or service you sell that has been successful in the past? Have you started to think you may need to adjust it?

It's slightly scary to adjust a product that has been selling well but it's important to review it each year or season to see if it is still working for your business and for you. We chat about some ways to look at your successful products and how to make decisions on how you might rethink them.

Making a decision can be hard if you're feeling a bit exhausted or busy. To make a clear decision, it's important to take some time to rest to look at things with a new view.

We chat about how we approach making decisions by taking time to rest. It's made us be able to approach decisions in a new way and to feel confident in our choices.

Social media was taking up a lot of our business time and we weren't seeing business growth as a result of our time commitment.

So what are we focusing on instead of social media? We chat about the focus areas that are showing growth in our business. Some of those areas are longer term growth strategies but will help our business grow past the vanity metrics of social media.

We give you some ideas of focus areas and how we're still engaging with social media but in a less time consuming way.

The month of October is a popular time for prompts of all kinds on social media. The prompts range from organizing your house to creative ideas for drawing each day.

These prompts can be a great way to expand your creativity (or organize your house) but you'll want to figure out what your purpose is for participating. You don't want to feel too much pressure in participating but instead have it be beneficial.

We chat about the types of challenges we've participated in and how it's been helpful to have the right approach to the month of prompts.

You have probably seen all kinds of information and advertising about how to make money while you sleep. But is it true, can you really make money while you sleep?

We talk about our definition of passive income versus what you may have been taught about it. Passive income can help you change your business and how you use your time, but it takes upfront work.

Is passive income right for your business?

Trying new things in your business is scary. You have ideas and you want them to be successful, so putting those ideas into action can cause a lot of fear.

We talk about how we've tried new things in our business throughout the years and how we've learned from when it's gone well and when it's not gone as we hoped.

It's worth stepping past the fear to try new things in your business because you'll learn so much.

We took a month-long break from social media for our business. We were curious to see if it would change the amount of traffic to our Laurent Collective website and if it would change the amount of sales we had in the month.

The social media break was also a time for us to assess how we felt about using the platforms personally. We wondered if we spent too much time on them instead of engaging in our lives.

Running a business takes a lot of time and we’re always looking for ways to streamline tasks. Over the past 15 plus years of our business, we’ve tried out a ton of business tools to help cut down time on common tasks.

Whether it’s setting up a website, sending out newsletters to scheduling pins, we have found some tools that help us and save us time. We share these with you in the podcast and you can download the free tools page to easily have links to the tools.

We had a dream of working on children's book illustrations and we started pursuing this idea. As we worked towards the dream, opportunities began to present themselves. But it didn't happen overnight.

We share how we stepped into illustrating children's books and encourage you in what you may be dreaming.

Social media is hard to keep up with and it often doesn’t help you see the results you want in your business. Is your social media bringing money to your business?

We’ve been considering quitting social media for our business and focusing on the areas that drive traffic and money to our business. We chat about the thoughts we’re in right now with the decision and how our time might be better used elsewhere.

Do you feel like you’re trying everything in your business and you’re all over the place with no focus? It’s easy to end a day or a week and realize you’ve just completed tasks, and you don’t feel fulfilled by any of it.

Finding a focus in your business is so important. It directs you and gives you a roadmap to figure out each next step. We chat about the idea of this focus and how it can help you in your business.

Are you preparing to end a part of your business or shut down your business completely? We experienced this with shutting down our photography business.

Closing your business, or a portion of it, can be challenging as you have so many emotions involved in the process. We share some tips and learnings from the difficult time in closing our photography business.

Are you wondering if you have to be constantly overwhelmed in your business? Maybe you’re thinking that’s just part of having a small business.

In this episode, we chat about how to realize you’re overwhelmed and then how to step out of it. We also share a free download you can get to give you steps to step out of the overwhelm of a small business.

Saying no to new opportunities is so hard because we want to be helpful and to help others. However, we can’t say yes to everything. Saying yes to it all leaves us exhausted and unable to help in a positive way.

So how do you determine what opportunities to say no to and how do you say no in a kind way? We discuss this by taking you through some questions to ask of each opportunity and some kind ways to say no.

These past two years have provided small businesses with ups and downs that have not followed normal trends. When you look back on your numbers to make informed decisions for the future, it’s hard to know what to focus on in the year ahead.

There is one thing that will help bring in some focus for you even if the data isn’t helping you. It’s understanding why you are in business. This will help direct you as you make decisions going forward. We chat about how this has looked in our business and how you can take decisions back to this why and purpose.

It’s common to want to jump into the new year with a fresh start, but we need to first start with reflecting on the year that has just passed.

In this episode, we chat about some questions to reflect on and think through as the year comes to an end. It’s important to reflect on your business the past year before you start thinking through your goals and hopes for the new year.

Timing is so hard when you really want something to happen in your life. Waiting and patience aren’t easy to apply to situations when you really want something to happen in your timing.

We’ve just gone through a season of not having major life moments happen in the timing we hoped. We’re sharing some things we’ve learned and are still learning as we have waited and tried our best to be patient.

We live in a culture that constantly tells us to do it faster and grow your business big quickly. We can see “overnight” success stories and think something is wrong with us if that hasn’t been our business’ experience.

In this episode, we’re chatting about the idea that it’s okay to have slow, continuous growth in your business instead of growing it super fast.

Sometimes it’s hard to take a step into something you’ve been wanting to do for awhile. You

have to take that first step and just get started!

We’re sharing some lessons we’ve learned about getting started in all areas of life. We hope it brings you some motivation to go for it and just start whatever it is on your mind.

We all learn so much when we go after something we believe in and we fail at it. We had a dream of having a non-profit and we went for it, but it didn’t succeed like we thought it would. After closing the doors to the non-profit, we have had years to reflect on what we learned from failing.

The Christmas season is busy for most small business owners which means it can be a stressful time. Over the years, we’ve learned some things to do to prep for the season and we’re sharing them with you today.

Have you thought about stepping into a totally new category in your business? It’s hard to know how and when to make a major shift in your business. We’re sharing about our current process as we step into a new category in our business.

What would happen if your choice of social media (Instagram, TikTock, etc.) went away tomorrow? What are you putting in place in your business to help have various tools to build your business?

We chat about the tools we have found to be important in our business and what actually brings sales and people to our website.

Has this year been hard for you in your business? Maybe you’ve run up against a difficult time in your business and you just want to quit?

We’ve heard from a lot of creative business owners who are considering shutting down their businesses right now. We want to give you some encouragement and some ideas on how to get through those difficult times in business.

How do you determine what income streams are best for you and your creative business? Diversifying is a really great idea, but it can be hard to understand what will work best for your unique situation.

We chat about the different types of income streams you could offer and some questions to ask yourself as you determine how you want to run your business.

Do you feel like life gets too busy and you don’t have any time to build relationships?

When you’re busy you don’t create space for rest and don’t allow lingering time with others. We talk about what we’re finding as our time opens up in new ways and how we find space to grow deeper relationships and for rest.

Do you work together with your spouse in a business or has this past year of Covid had you at home with your spouse more?

We’re going to talk about some things we’ve learned over the years of working together and being in the same space a lot. We’ve worked together in business for over 13 years so we have a few things we’ve learned but we are still always learning.

We often get asked how we ended up living in London and today we’re going to share part of that story.

As we share our story we’ll discuss how you process jumping into something when it doesn’t make sense.

We continue our discussion on figuring out your priorities and how you spend your time. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 in Episode 5, head back to give it a listen before diving into Part 2.

We explore some concepts that have helped us like block scheduling and figuring out what time of day you work best.

The idea of finding balance in your life is widely talked about, but is it possible? It seems to us to be more of an unbalanced act as you go in and out of different seasons of life.

Today we’re sharing some thoughts on figuring out your priorities and how you spend your time. We think about your dream life and what essentialism looks like to help you with your yeses and noes.

It’s so easy to see what other people are doing and want to mimic them, but we all have a unique path. So how do you stay on that path and not get side-tracked to what others are doing? We’re going to talk about that today.

Are you overwhelmed about making a big decision or perhaps it’s all the little decisions that are causing stress?

We're facing a big decision so we thought we’d share some steps we’re taking in the process.

Today we’ll share some methods to think through decisions you face. We explore the criteria we’ve created for saying yes or no to the opportunities we’re presented in life.