Sunday Summary #116

It takes a team.

Hi there,

Welcome to Scho & Jo’s 116th Sunday Summary. This edition of the Sunday Summary was written from the Ormond Beach Public Library.

The Latest.

In the last two weeks, we published our course, How to Anchor and Love It, and released our latest spreadsheet, 600+ Great Loop Anchorages and Free Docks. We appreciate everyone who supported our small business and shared valuable feedback!

In December, I shared some of our end-of-year statistics as a small business. Since we’ve been in a “work mode” for the past year (and for the next several weeks), I thought I’d shed some light on what it takes for us to run our small content creation business. My Nanny inspired this as we’ve lived with her the past month. During this time, she’s asked us many times, “What we’re doing on our laptops?” We’ve responded by explaining the various things we’re working on, which varies day-by-day and encompasses many tasks and wearing many hats. Here are some of the hats we both juggle on a weekly basis as content creators running a small business:

• CEO - Head honcho who makes the final decision

• COO - Two contractors work for us, and managing their tasks requires attention.

• Scriptwriter - Writing new video ideas and scripts so we know what the topic of a video is about, what we’re planning on talking about, or a line-by-line narrative telling a specific story.

• Editor - Each YouTube video we create contains about 200 video clips with an hour to an hour and a half of footage. We take that footage and edit it down into our YouTube videos.

• Producer - releasing videos to YouTube and doing all of the YouTube stuff “behind the scenes.”

• Writer and SEO Analyst - Using SEO and keyword research, the writer behind the blog posts in a strategic way to rank on Google.

• Social Media - writing content, researching hashtags, scheduling posts, responding to comments and DMs.

• Photo Editor - We use a software called Lightroom to edit all of our photos.

• Brand Manager - Working with other brands includes researching brands to work with, writing and following up with emails, making brand negotiations, and reading contracts.

• And Everything Else… - like responding to comments on our website and emails. Writing our email newsletter (like this one you’re reading) takes time to write, find and edit photos, accumulate links, find quotes, etc. Meeting with our Mastermind group of other content creator, small business owners to bounce ideas with, vent, and share news in this business space. General updates: for example, we hired a graphic designer last year to create new branding with our latest pivot or change the email service we use to send these emails.

I’m sure this list doesn’t surprise you if you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner familiar with wearing multiple hats! While learning how to execute all these roles is challenging, that is also part of the joy. Every day as a business owner is similar to our life on the water. We are always students!

We are in the final stretch of Great Loop daily vlogs with six videos remaining in our backlog 😱! As exciting as that is, we’re going to go back down to 2 videos a week because juggling the three videos/week schedule has been taking a toll on our physical and mental health with poor sleep and anxiety over the past two months. To give you a bit of history, when we re-started our Great Loop in March 2022 from Key West, we filmed daily videos and released 4-5 a week. That didn’t last long… When we got up to the Chesapeake Bay, we had to reduce our release schedule because it was unsustainable. We’ve released two videos a week from May 2023 until December 2023, and when we kicked off the three-video-a-week schedule this year, our goal was to complete our Great Loop in a reasonable time since we were no longer boating! We’re so excited to share the end of the chapter with you all, as well as start the next! Editing our Great Loop videos has been a true labor of love this past year, and we appreciate your patience and understanding as we go back down to 2 videos until the Loop ends and then 1 video a week afterward! I hope this gives you a little peek behind the curtain of content creators running a small business.

 Videos.

In case you missed it, here are the latest videos we’ve posted to YouTube:

Blogs.

Here are the blog posts we’ve released since our last Sunday Summary:

 From the Eyes of Ollie. 

I have really enjoyed being at my great grandmother’s house. Nanny gives me lots of treats. I walk to outside with her every morning to get the paper off the driveway. She’s trying to teach me fetch, but I don’t care about the paper. I just want to sniff the morning grass.

 Gratitudes. 

Once a month we chat with a group of friends who are in the content creation business and it’s always a real highlight of our month. We share ideas, discuss books together, latest resources, and just overall chat about life. It’s an unbelievably supportive group of people (4 couples, 8 people total) that have improved our lives for the better. And for that, we are grateful 💕