Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host Sarah St. John. This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way. My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement with right away in your own Bootstrap business journey.

Now onto the episode Hi, my name is Melissa Cho. I am a marketing and media consultant. So my background I originally started in TV production in D.C. and then I moved to LA. I was out there for 10 years working in live sports production, reality TV shows, post production. So I did that for a while. Then I came back to the east coast and now work in digital marketing. What led me to start my business was the freedom just to create my own work style, my own work life and working with different clients. What I did to bootstrap my business was to really just bring together all the information that I had taken from working a corporate job and as well as my freelancing jobs and just integrating all that together and my knowledge into creating a framework for my business. The biggest failure is probably the administrative and accounting stuff, learning how to do self employment taxes, business taxes and figuring out that so I'm not as good as in that part of it. So when you run your own business you kind of have to do a little bit of everything. So so that has been a learning experience for me. My best tips for bootstrapping your business I would say having a good project management software system. I tend to prefer airtable so it's great for if you want to project manage different projects. If you want to create a content strategy, calendar does that too. It has lots of templates you can choose from so definitely project management is really important. Planning ahead is really important. Figuring out what is the long term goal you want to achieve, what are the goals for each quarter. Also talking to your peers and also people outside your industry as well is really important. So I always make an effort to talk to different types of people. Even though I mostly work in marketing and media, I may touch on tech, healthcare, biotech, startups. So I'm usually talking to many types of people, even locksmiths. So right now I'm training as a locksmith apprentice so I'm talking to locksmiths even though it has nothing to do with my day job really I like being able to learn from different types of people because they have interesting different perspectives of how they do things. So that's really important so you don't get so attached to I need to do this a certain way and that's the only way. There are actually many different types of ways. So understanding that the mindset of an entrepreneur is also very different from a corporate person, I think that is also very important. So I try to consciously work on my mindset, do mindset exercises. I use meditation apps, so there are different types you could use. I would say my best advice for business owners is to really work on their mindset because that will be the foundation for anything that you do. Because if you have limited beliefs or you only work under the framework of a corporate employee, it's going to be really difficult for you. So definitely work on your mindset. There are a lot of apps for that. Affirmations, visualizations. Visualizations are great. I love those. So there are YouTube videos for that, there are books for that. And so I definitely encourage any business owners to really focus on that. It really does make a difference and it makes you feel better as well, so you don't feel so in the struggle. If you want to reach out to me, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. It's under my name, Melissa Cho. And then there's a link for Book a call if you want to connect with me or send me an email. I also have a substack newsletter as well.

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal Show Guests.