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Making the Right Hire

Making the right hire for a small business is absolutely critical. If you don’t hire the right person with the right skill sets and culture fit, it may sink your business.

Al & Sarah Katz from FirstSearch share with The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show practical tips to help ensure the right people join your company. His first pieces of advice are around whether you really need to hire at all, or whether there are other more cost-effective options. Spending your precious investor dollars too quickly can lead to unnecessary cash-flow crises.

Next, he and his daughter Sarah share some tips on how to make sure you create the right job description. All too often, Al says, business managers come up with a laundry list of skills, without truly soul-searching about what the organization needs now as well as going forward.

Al’s been at this for many years, and he shares his suggestions for making sure your job description is spot on, and then that they process for interviewing and hiring is designed to give your business the best chance at hiring a great fit.

His daughter Sarah helps source candidates, and she offer some great tips as well for people who may be job-searching themselves.

It’s a must-listen for any small businessperson looking to make a critical hire in the near future. Click on the arrow to get some great insights!

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Matriarchy: Coaching Feminist Businesses

Allison Staiger’s company, The Matriarchy, is a great example of a company building a business around a very specific niche.

The Matriarchy coaches feminist women, helping them build caregiving businesses.

The Matriarchy is Allison’s second business venture. Her first, Highwire Therapy, is a counseling practice focused on perinatal mental health.

Allison joins The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show to chat about how she’s rebuilt her business after moving from Louisiana to Illinois, and has gone about finding new clients.

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Memoir For Me: Custom Memory Books

Nora Kerr’s company Memoir For Me began when her father was dying of prostate cancer and was told he only had 6-8 months to live. Nora took that opportunity to sit down with him over the course of several months. She asked him many of the questions she’d always had about him and his life, and worked to sort through and learn the stories behind the many photographs.

She found she truly loved doing this. She started volunteering her time to do it for friends and other family members, as well as members of her community that were nominated by neighbors.

Along the way, Nora realized that not only could she make money doing this, but that it was a perfect way to blend her writing and photography skills with her IT background. Thus, Memoir For Me, a custom life-story memory book company, was founded.

The biggest challenge, she’s found, is convincing people that their ordinary, everyday stories are worth capturing. That everyday people lead remarkable lives in the small things they do, and that these deserve to be captured. But customers are increasingly finding her, and Memoir For Me is growing steadily.

Memoir For Me has been self-funded so far, but is just starting to look for funding, as Nora is realizing the company can’t continue to grow without investments in personnel and systems. It’s a great story — in fact, The Savvy Entrepreneur hopes Nora takes time to document her very own everyday, remarkable story of how her company got started and has grown!

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Lavender Eucalyptus: Helping NonProfits Be More Strategic

Trina Ntmere and her company, Lavender Eucalyptus LLC, are passionate about helping nonprofits become more strategic.

By helping them do that, they raise more money, provide more valuable services, and make better use of scarce staff resources. She shares with The Savvy Entrepreneur some of the ways she and Lavender Eucalyptus do that.

Non-profits struggle just like for-profit companies with too much to do and too few resources, says Trina. And this problem is magnified when long-term strategy is murky, changing, or non-existent.

She knows not every non-profit is a good fit for Lavender Eucalyptus, and she has become creative along the way in helping her clients find funding for initiatives they work on with her.

Trina shares some great insights into non-profits, where entrepreneurial skills are needed just as much as in for-profit companies. She also is living proof that there are opportunities for entrepreneurs in working with non-profits.

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Grounded Entrepreneurship: A Guided Journey with Kokoro

Nicola Brown, Founder & CEO of Kokoro, is driven to help entrepreneurs and small businesspeople stay in touch with their human side.

Rather than try to explain what that means, she takes both me and my listeners on a taste of what that journey might look like. At her suggestion, I turned the lead over to her and let her lead me through a typical beginning conversation that Kokoro might have with one of their clients.

Some of her questions really made me pause! Like her first one, asking me to describe how I’m feeling as weather.

I believe she asks these unusual questions to get people out of their everyday way of thinking and help them stay in touch with their humanism and passion.

Nicola and Kokoro are bravely trying to change how entrepreneurs think, and our interview is definitely a change of pace on the show. Take a listen and come along on the journey, and see what it reveals to you and about you!

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