Boomer Sassman, owner and CEO of Big Boom Design in Asheville, talks about building your client base, defining what products and services your small business provides, and the importance of learning managerial skills.
I'd say what I love the most about being an entrepreneur is just the the sheer flexibility. If it's a beautiful sunny 75 degree day and I don't have any pressing meetings, I can choose to take the day off and go play in the woods, and that to me is invaluable.
My name is Boomer Sassman and my company is called Big Boom Design. So Big Boom Design is an educational web design and internet consulting agency, and we primarily focused in the WordPress space. The problem that we solve for our customers and clients is basically taking the burden off of them to manage and monitor and keep their WordPress websites up to date. I think the work that we do to lets them focus on what they do best, which is their business, and so we try to take over that burden for them. My participation in the small business incubator helped me, I think grow as a manager primarily, the timing was appropriate for us to get an office. And at that point, or up until that point, I had just remotely managed everybody, and I thought I was managing, but in fact, once we all got into a one localized space, I realized that I needed to focus in on some of those managerial skills and over the next three to four years. And since then, that's become the main focus for me in the business. If somebody is interested in joining the small business incubator, I would say, do it, apply, go through the process, even if you don't get in for whatever reason, the steps you go through to refine your pitch and refine your elevator spiel and just all the logistics that it forces you to think about, I think are a very important step in the growth of a company. When
was planning my business, one of the hurdles that I had to tackle is, what platform I was gonna build websites on. And so at the time WordPress wasn't yet the front runner, and so I had to experiment and build the same website on multiple platforms, and I needed a hybrid of functionality and ease of training. So my advice to somebody who is faced. with this decision of maybe too many avenues early on, you kind of have to run concurrent paths and that's okay early on. I think as time goes on, as you build your client base and build your conversation skills around what you do, it'll start to get more clearly defined, either by yourself, your clients, the industry, technology, whatever it might be, I think the proper path kind of shakes itself out.
