Business Mistakes I Made (& What They Taught Me)

Mel, Five Design Co. // Squarespace web designer, online business coach

Hey there! As you may know, I’m Mel—founder and owner of Five Design Co.

I’m also the founder and owner of another business I started a little less than a year before this one—Four Wellness Co., a health coaching and wellness company.

Starting two businesses in one year is not something I ever expected to do… nor something I necessarily recommend doing. 😁

But, alas, that’s how it happened for me. And the whole process involved making plenty of mistakes along the way, which also (thankfully!) taught some valuable lessons that have been quite helpful since then.

I’m sharing those lessons here, with the hope that they can be helpful to you too… and maybe prevent you taking the same detours I did!

First, a brief background: I’m an urban planner by training. I worked in community health programs for several years, and ended up as the marketing manager for a hospital. During that time, I was a wellness blogger on the side and studied to become a certified integrative nutrition health coach.

In 2018, I left my corporate healthcare job to start a wellness company. As I was building the wellness company, I tried to do everything myself (more on that below!). I designed my own website (which I had some experience with, as a former blogger), and then other entrepreneur friends started asking for help with their websites.

In a strange plot twist, I found I enjoyed designing other people’s websites more than finishing and launching my wellness company as initially planned. So, I put that on hold and started a web design company… and now here we are!

Five Design Co. took off pretty quickly (which I’m very thankful for!), and my original wellness company became more of a side project.

For the past two years I’ve balanced both businesses (“balance” being used loosely here 🙃).

Starting and growing two businesses at the same time has often meant giving neither the full time and attention I would like to—but that is also one of the lessons we’ll get to below!

Business mistakes I made as an entrepreneur

Here are five of the top mistakes I’ve made in starting and growing two businesses—and the lessons they taught along the way:

1. Trying to do too much too soon

The original business model for my wellness company was awesome, if I do say so myself. 💃

Buuuut, it was way too much too soon—especially for a brand-new business owner!

I’m not sure if people warned me to keep things simple and I ignored them (whoops), or if I truly never heard that piece of advice anywhere.

But in any case, I did not attempt to keep things simple. I did very much the opposite and started with a super complicated business structure that would have been more suitable to a business in its fifth… or maybe tenth year.

I just didn’t have the bandwidth, the business expertise, nor the confidence to implement such a massive project.

Lesson: Start small, master one step at a time and grow from there.

2. Not investing in help

Just like many new business owners who have recently quit their job and have no income, I was very mindful of my business expenses when just starting out.

I knew that an online business had significantly lower start-up costs than a brick-and-mortar, but I mistakenly expected those costs to be next to nothing.

Sure, I was willing to pay for the technology platforms I was using (Squarespace, Mailchimp, Adobe Illustrator, etc.). I invested in a few online courses about Pinterest and Instagram marketing. I subscribed to a business community for online entrepreneurs.

But, I never considered the expense of bringing on real, live human help. I knew how to do most of the tasks starting a business requires (blogging, web design, Pinterest marketing, social media management) and had done most of that professionally before, so had this mentality that “I can just do it.”

From a social and sanity standpoint, I would have loved to have team members to help me. But because I was being so mindful of finances (and, ya know, didn’t have any income while everything was being built), I didn’t feel justified hiring help with something that I knew I could do myself.

However, even though I “technically” could do everything myself, I certainly could not do that in practice—there was simply not enough time in the day.

When I eventually got burned out from trying to do everything alone (not fun, do not recommend), I saw the light and realized I needed to hire assistance.

Now I have a Pinterest manager, photographer and graphic designer and, for the wellness company, have hired help with content creation and social media. Investing in help with these tasks has freed me up to focus much better on other areas that grow the businesses even more.

Lesson: Invest in help early and often! Find things that others can do for you, so you can free up your own time to do the things that only you can do.

3. Spending time on things that don’t matter (much)

When I was starting Four Wellness Co., I thought I needed to develop this very complicated purchase / scheduling / email communication system. (As mentioned above, not a good idea to start so complex in the first place.)

I spent what felt like a million years fine-tuning my Squarespace + Acuity + Mailchimp set-up and designing that messaging and client experience… that I never ended up using. (Side note: Practice Better works so much better for health coaching!)

There was a silver lining in that I now know Acuity and Mailchimp like the back of my hand and can help my web design clients set them up.

But the point is: when building a business that you’re not yet earning income from, the tiny “icing on the cake” details are not an ideal way to manage your time.

As a new business owner, I constantly got sucked into projects that weren’t that important or impactful in the grand scheme of things. I spent a lot of time in the weeds, which meant I spent that time ignoring the forest, so to speak. I focused too much on things that weren’t necessary at the expense of things that were necessary to get the business launched and growing.

Lesson: Be very clear about the priority work that will make the greatest impact in launching, growing and improving your business—and focus on those tasks first each day!

4. Taking on too many external projects & neglecting the internal ones

When my web design business became more popular, I started getting significantly more inquiries than I could handle. Yes, this is a good “problem” to have, but it can also be very distracting if you’re not careful.

I was trying to help as many people as possible, trying to “make up” for the period of time I didn’t bring in much income while building the original wellness company, and trying to fit as many design projects as I could into my schedule.

But, a key problem with this is that I had some important internal projects in mind I needed to do to grow and sustain my business—but kept putting them on the back burner as I helped my clients with projects they were passionate about.

Eventually I realized that in order to ever get to my own capacity-building projects, I needed to drastically reduce the number of client projects I took on. In other words, I needed to stop working so much in my business and start working more on it.

Lesson: Practice business “self-care”—reserve time for internal, capacity-building projects.

5. Not niching down enough

The irony of this one is that it’s something I now preach to my web design clients: the importance of niching down as far as you can!

When I first started doing web design, I thought I was plenty niched enough by focusing only on Squarespace websites. I didn’t have a particular preference for the types of businesses and clients I took on, so I didn’t see a need to niche down there (and, hence, have worked with a very wide range of clientele, industries, business sizes, etc.).

But: You can do anything, but not everything.

That has been one of the major lessons of both of my businesses.

Though I started out doing alll the websites—photography, non-profits, food blogs, travel blogs, online stores, you name it—I naturally started to gain more traction with certain types of website projects: membership websites (I use and recommend MemberSpace, which I’ve written some articles on); and health coaching websites (as a former health coach, an area I’m personally familiar with).

These are two types of businesses or websites that I have more expertise in and thus can better serve my clients with.

When you’re just starting out, I don’t see anything wrong with taking on a range of clients or projects, to get your footing and see what’s the best fit for you. But the end goal should be to niche, niche, niche so you can build a business around the specific expertise you have, and the specific audience looking for just that.

Lesson: Niche, niche, niche to best serve clients in need of your particular expertise.

a few things that worked well…

And, in contrast to the lessons learned above, there were a few business decisions I did get right along the way 😇:

Blogging: As a former blogger, I knew that blogging is one of the best things you can do to grow your website traffic—aka an audience for your business! This definitely helped me grow both businesses more quickly than I would’ve been able to without it.

Pinterest: Though I wasn’t initially interested in using Pinterest for my business, a chance encounter with an online course on Pinterest marketing convinced me to give it a shot—and it has since been an integral piece of the content marketing strategy I swear by for growing a new business.

Designing an intentional workspace: When I first started working for myself from home, I didn’t have a dedicated office space—I worked out of an armchair in the living room, and ended up going to a chiropractor a few months later. Since then, I’m very adamant about having a proper workspace and it makes a world of difference in my productivity (and back pain!).

Joining affiliate programs for products/services you recommend: The nature of my work (web design for small business owners) involves making a lot of recommendations for different types of business technology (see a complete list of my favorites here!). Early on, I joined affiliate programs for the tools I recommend most often, and this now brings in nice supplemental income as my website traffic has grown.

Pivot as needed: It was a tough call to switch focus from the wellness company I had poured so much work into… to a fledgling web design company. But it definitely paid off to follow my gut and switch gears to providing services that a) I enjoyed more, and b) people were actually asking me for. Now, rather than health coaching myself, I help other health coaches set up their business—something I happen to love even more! (More info on that here.)