Transcripts

1. Welcome To The Course: hi and welcome to the course. We're gonna be going over everything you need to kick, start and at home melting poor, so business. Throughout the course, we're gonna show you how to make melting poor soap plus goers from great free marketing tools to help you get your name out there. We have included a ton of excellent resource documents, everything from how to build a business plan to a great sales guide that shows you how to connect with people and do those first couple of meetings or cold calls. We're also going to go over the financials, associate it with planning your new at home business. And then we've also include a recipe guide to give you some ideas to kind of jump start your brain on different types of soap that you could make. I'm excited to have you here in the course, and I can't wait to get started and help you make your at home melt and pour so business 2. What To Expect: hi students. I wanted to take a second and talk about the course and what to expect in it. This is primarily a small home business course first and a soap making course second. So while we will be covering how to make Melton poor soap and how to do several different types of Melton poor, so bars were mainly going to be focusing on business tools and specifically, business marketing tools. We will be covering how to do business plan how to do sales. How do financial documents? But the key part to any business is marketing. Why is that marketing sales there? The life blood of a business? Because if you're not moving product, if you're not making money, there's no point in even having a finger quote, finger quote business. So it's the main focus of the course because it's the most important thing. If you don't have sales, there's no reason to make more soap. There's no reason to keep inventory. There's no reason to do anything else, so we will primarily focus on the tools you will need to start getting out there, getting your name out there, living people, knowing what you're doing, reaching out to other businesses and give you some really detailed resource is on how to do a deep dive into sales and marketing. Its I hope you enjoy the course. I hope you find it fulfilling, and I hope you see the value in marketing and sales and all of the other business components that come with starting a soap business. 3. Soap Making: here we have the ingredients and equipment that you'll need to make, so we have so pace. We have baking extract and some food coloring. We have toothpicks to pop. Bubbles appear in our soap. We have a spray bottle with some rubbing alcohol. The higher the percentage, the better. That's also to help us get rid the bubbles. In our final product, we have a Pyrex or in microwave safe measuring cup. We're going to use this to melt the so base, and then we have a loaf mold and a silicone baking sheet. You can use whichever one you prefer. If you'd like to go out and buy a loaf moulder, usually about 20 to $30 or if you have any type of baking sheet that silicone. You could make soap in that just as easily. Over here, we have a currently cutter that's been to add a little bit of embellishment or soap, but you could easily use a kitchen knife as a replacement. Our demo soap is going to involve all these ingredients in this equipment. First we have are so base, which is a shade butter so base you can use any so base you want, and you can find them at your local hobby store or at so supply stores online on Amazon. We also have a blend of macho green tea powder, Himalayan salt and ginger. We have some orange extract soon green food coloring, a toothpick, a butter knife to help a stir in case we needed. Our spray bottle filled with rubbing alcohol are loaf mold and are heart shaped mold. What we're going to do now is we're gonna melt are so base in the microwave. This will take a little bit of time, but you want to be diligent and make sure you're doing it in 10 to 15 2nd burst. If you Micah waited for too long, you'll end up scorching the soap, and you have to throw out that batch. So let's go ahead and get this in the microwave. Now that you have your so based melted your food coloring and your mixture of Mata and ginger and Emily insult all in there along with your orange extract, you simply take this picture and poured into your mold and just spread it around evenly and make sure if there are any clubs that developed any type of skin. You just pour the rest of the soap over to get him out, and we're gonna let any remaining so just kind of come on out and then just simply set this off to the side. Now we're gonna take our spray bottle and give it a couple sprays of rubbing alcohol, and that's gonna pop any bubbles if you need to take a toothpick and go through and pop the manually, as you can see here, I have the heart shape, baking mould that I've gone ahead and poured some soap into to kind of give you an idea of what that's gonna look like. Now, let's say you made so and it just didn't turn out the way that she wanted it. What do you do with that soap? Simple. You just re melted. So what we're gonna do now with these little soaps that made bad on purpose is we're gonna re melt them and pour them into our heart shaped mold. Now that you have the soap that you didn't like re melted your important in any mold that you would like. This is called re Kon, so making its taking something that was soap and then melting it and turning it back into soap. So now we're gonna go ahead and pour this into our heart shaped molds. If you have any leftover, just try and top them off as best you can. And now that we've got our so poured into a mould, we're just going to spray it with rubbing alcohol, just like last time. That's going to get rid of those pesky bubbles. Have there any bubbles that didn't pop? Just manually going with your toothpick and look for them Now that you popped all the bubbles, It's time to wait. About 24 hours is what it takes for a larger mold, and smaller molds can be overnight or within an hour. It just kind of depends on how much soap you're trying to cool. The important thing to remember is to give the soap as much time as it needs. The last thing you want is to have your soap fall apart whenever you go to cut it. All right Now that are so has had a chance to cool. We're gonna go ahead and take it out of our mold. It disassemble is the same way that you put it together. Just take each one of the four sides off one time and then peel the bottom off. And what you're gonna want to start off with is you want to cut the end off your soap, and the reason what it is is the in that comes out of the mold is very plain Jane. Nothing really to too fancy and could have. Some blemishes are some of the types of deformities. Usually, what I do with the ends is all use those as a test bar or bar to give away to a friend. Then, as far a sizing on how you're going to cut it. You know I usually use a finger, but if you want to use a measuring stick, or if you want to cut a certain size way it and see if it's the right weight for what you want to sell, any of those options are perfectly fine. I use a crinkle cutter cause I think it has a little bit more definition to the soap, but you're more than welcome to use a large kitchen knife or any other form of, you know, kind of heavy duty cutting implement. So now I'm gonna place my finger right here. I am going to bring the cutter measure and I'm simply going to press down firmly until the soap bar comes free. And there we go. We have a bar for labeling. I recommend a piece of ribbon, some card stock and you can get a stamp made of your logo. Or you can just use any stamping them, right, your information on the back. Or put a sticker on the back with your information in it. And you can get standard sticker paper from any office supply store Wal Mart and these are all very low cost options to kind of get you up and running. Plus, they had a nice, homely nous and artisan re tude that makes it look like it was a homemade product or a craft made on artists and made product. Here we have some of the other Cepsa we've created in this course. You can see this is our reconstitute. So that was from the little bitty hearts. We took it and mixed it with the remnants of this soap and with the little hearts themselves, melt them down, put him into a big heart mold. And it made this really interesting kind of rosy color with a little bit of green fleck in it. Very nice. Here's the blue soap that is a tester piece in the mold at the very beginning, and it came out like a really nice marble blue look very cool. And then a couple of those upset made in the mold just to kind of give you some ideas to go on. And here's some of their looks that made this is a gelatin low fleet using clear base. And then this is a spice soap using nut mag mace, ginger cinnamon just to kind of give it a nice holiday field. After you've gotten all of your so put together and done, you know, rapid up, set aside and move on to building your business. You need to spend 20% of your time making soap and 80% of your time out there. Networking and selling the business 4. Active Charcoal Reconstituted Soap: we're gonna be making reconstituted soap. And to do that, you need any soap that just didn't turn out the way that you wanted for whatever reason, and deformed, it cracked. It just didn't look right, whatever it may be. And you want to break that down into smaller chunks, you can see here. I have already prepared all of the other soap that we're gonna be using today on the tray and small kind of half inch by happens chunks. We're also gonna be needing some active char cold. I get this at my local hobby store. You can order it online. Next time you need to put our chunks into heat safe container and melt them thoroughly in 10 to 22nd bursts in the microwave. Once everything is fully melt in a nice even liquid, we're going to take some active charcoal and just added into our melted soap and feel free to put as much as you would like. The important thing here is to make sure that your liquid is fully melt in the microwave before adding your active charcoal. We want everything to makes thoroughly and have no clubs. Now you're going to take the next several seconds and really mix the act of charcoal in after everything is thoroughly mix, and there's no clumps left in our active charcoal and soap mixture. We're gonna poured into our waiting mold, and you can use any mold you would like here. I'm using a loaf mold, but feel free to use any soap, mold or silicone baking sheet mold that you want heart stars whatever looks good to you after you get all of your soap fully poured in. Then we're gonna take some rubbing alcohol and sprayed over the top, and this is to get rid of any bubbles. And you want to use this high proof of rubbing alcohol as you confined. Now that's done. We're gonna allow this to cool. Overnight after your loaf of soap has fully cooled. We're gonna take it out of the mold, and then we're gonna go ahead and cut it. Here. I'm using a crinkle cutter that feel pretty. Use a knife, or what a reform of cutter you prefer. You can measure by using just your finger or two fingers, depending on your personal preference, and just cut the soap bars and whatever size you think will be best here. I'm going to be using two fingers. I'm just going to measure than cut straight down. And we're just gonna repeat this process. This would be a rather chunky bar soap. So to make a very excellent gift, or if you just want to use around the house, it would be great for pretty much anything that you want a very strong soap for after completely cutting your soap, take it out and take a look at it. And you have your nice, lovely, reconstituted, active char cold soap. Enjoy. 5. Business Tools: here we are at camp a dot com. This is used to build marketing materials and even logos and Facebook Post and a lot of other really great kind of marketing media things really great thing about canvas. It gives you a lot of preloaded designs, so you're not having to sit there and start from scratch every time. So what we're going to start off with first is you need a logo for your company, and the local we're gonna build today is actually the logo that I used for me for this course. So we're gonna go over here to create design, or you can go to the little type in section. I'm just gonna type in logo and it's gonna pull up logo over here on the left hand side. Once it loads, you're gonna find all of the pre made logos. And when I would recommend for you kind of starting off its final in these pre made logos that really fits you and says that's not exactly what I want, but that's pretty close. And then tweak the colors, tweaked the wording, tweaks some other things until it fits what you're looking for and just kind of use that as a jumping off point. While you're building your business, you can change your logo as many times as you want. So I'm just gonna come down here until I find one that I like. And I like this action core. I'm gonna pull it over here and bam, there we go. So the couple changes. I'm gonna make Teoh make it fit. What I'm using for this course is we're gonna change this gray to a black. We're gonna go and change sports channel to education, and then we're gonna take out the action core and put a She's me a p d. And then I want this to be a little bit bigger. So I'm gonna come up to my controls up here and here. I can adjust the font type and they have a bunch of really great preloaded fonts. I can just the font size, just like what you're gonna remember from word or any other of your standard computer office style programs. And I obviously want the phone bigger. There we go. That was great. We can just the color if we want it. I like the white, black and red I think that literally cool, weaken, turn bowled off, turn bold on italics so forth and so on and a lot of the other controls that you're gonna be used to like any of the other office programs. So things over here that are a little different, we have copies. So let's say we we made something and we wanted more than one of it. The copy. It's going to generate a copy of it if you want to. A mess with the transparency and kind of have this look a little misty. You come over here to transparency and do that if you want ungroomed things, which means that all these items are now individual little items that you could move around and do whatever you want with that son group. If you want to group them, you simply highlight all of them and click group and then group them over here. You see me using the undo and redo buttons, just like what you're used to in most other standard office stuff. And then any file you have saved show margins, um, all the normal things you're gonna find yet again. Lastly, we have share, and we have download download is gonna give the option toe use as a PNG or JPEG or pdf, whatever is best going to fit your needs share is going to give you the option to come and take friends about it or send it to particular places where you want to show it off. Canada does have a paid version. You're not really gonna need it for what we're gonna be using because the free version is really great. If you do choose to go into the paid version, it's whatever you feel you need for your business. But I would say the free version is a really great starting place and getting really good. That, and using all of these tools for your business is just gonna be so huge. Don't even worry about the paid version until you're just absolutely thinking that you need to have it. So here we go. We have a logo. It's really simple. It's nothing crazy. Um, if I want to change anything, reoriented whatever else I'm a certainly could they give you these really great little guidelines toe help. You get everything nice and center, and that's it. So let's build an actual logo that you might use for yourself company. So I'm just coming down. And first thing that catches my eyes is a soul crown. I'm gonna pull it over and this looks pretty needs a starting off point. Let's already has skin care in there. So I'm just gonna change this to royal soap. I kind of has a cool vibe to, you know, with the crown, I like the blue and white, but let's say you want to dress this up a little bit, You could come through and you could start playing with color. So we're going to change our crown yellow, and we're gonna change the skin, care to yellow as well. And always kind eyes just like any of your other office Softwares, You're gonna have the ability to change fallen size of font color font. Most phones you can, bold or italicize objects can be ungroomed grouped. You can copy objects if you want more than one of them. There is undo and redo Over here. Position effects, how far up or how far back or helps you kind of auto align things depending on what type of feel you're going for. And then yet again transition is going to help you if you want. Toe, you know, kind of make it ghostly, appear partially appeared. That's where you would mess with transition. Other things to know about Camera Teoh kind of give you an idea of what's out there and available to you. There are all these different elements and icons and objects and frames that you can add in . So let's say you wanted to have this stop sign in the back for whatever reason you could. You can also add text to your heart's content for whatever reason. Let's say you want to change that. You could do that. Backgrounds. You want to have some type of different background in there to give you a different feel. You can do that. Let's say I want to go to pink. You know, there I am with pink looks is good, but this is your logo. It can be whatever you want it to be. You can upload your own images, you can build folders, and there's other things that are available for you to use in camera to help. You kind of be a secretive as you want to be. Now we're gonna make a Facebook posting campus or just click on the Facebook post icon and you have all your templates here off to the side. And I yet again, would just recommend picking one the templates and saving yourself some time and creation if you want to make something from scratch, There are the elements, text and backgrounds over here that you can do whatever you want to do it to customize something, however you want to look or you can also just upload an image and start from there. But we're gonna make a sales flyer, and we're gonna use this winter sales. So we're just going to start off when we're gonna say soap sale because that's what we're selling. And we are selling this at Bob's soap and that's it done. I've made a sales fire, our cells post. I don't have to do anything else this unless I want to. Now, could you take this and dress it up and make everything bigger and arrange it? However you think is gonna look best, of course. But the important thing to take away from this is you can do very little and have professional looking marketing without, you know, putting forth a lot time, effort, energy or even money could yet again. This is all for free. Whenever you're ready to publish it, just come over here, publish it to wherever you want to go to, or you can download it. However you want to do it yourself, you can share it so forth and so on. This is just a great free tool because it requires no real training and yet again, no huge time or monetary investment. And I would highly recommend that you get as much as you can out of Canada. Now we're gonna look at building a flyer in Canada. We're gonna start out over here and just pick a template that we like. And then I've uploaded some photos of some of the soak from the course, and I'm gonna go and put that in the flyer. Now we see a problem here right off the bat. This photo does not fit this flyer. So what do we do to make it look good? We simply click on the photo, go to crop, and then we can adjust this stuff and kind of make it fit the photobox area a little bit better and then we can take the photo itself and move it around in that box. So I'm just gonna try and frame this up is as best that I can didn't have to be perfect. And then I click done. And now we have a lot better looking image to go with our flyer, and it may have gotten a little distorted. So you may need to kind of tuck it in or move it out. Whatever you need to do there. And usually what I like to do whenever I'm doing work like that is come over here to this whole section and just kind of zoom in to get better kind of angle on what I'm working on, and then you can just take it and move it and fit it to the rest of the document like So Now you see, we got clean lines all the way around, and we can back out kind of sort of where we were. Now, one of things that we've been brushing on but haven't really given a name is copyrighting in any time you're gonna add any type of slogan or saying whatever is that's called copyrighting and you can Google that and learn more about it. But learning how to do copyrighting effectively is one of the big differences between great marketing materials and okay, marketing materials. And one of the things that you're really trying to reach for with any type of copyrighting is what's known as a coal to action. It means that they read this. They see this, the person who read it and saw it is going to go and do something. In your case, what you want them to do is reach out to you and want to buy soap, right? So we're gonna go through here and we're just gonna kind of ask ourselves, you know, what would somebody who was gonna buy our soap be interested in seeing, you know, Is it specialty? So Crafts. No. Maybe it's maybe it's a discount slogan. Maybe they want to hear that they're going to get, uh, 50% off. Oh, um, Spice soaps. But whatever that call to action is going to be in whatever that that wording is that's going to reach out to your target customer. You need to think about that. And the more text that there is on something the more so you need to think about that because there's more real estate that you're trying to feel fill with really good, engaging quality text. So that's a flyer in camera, and that wraps us up on Can va. The important thing to remember about canvases your imagination is where everything begins and ends. If you see something out there in the world that you like, take a picture of it, get a copy of it. Whatever. Bring it back, play with making your own version of it in camera. Don't plagiarize, but it's okay to be a little derivative or have similar work. Your goal is to make something looks good. Make something that fits you. Make something that puts your soaps best foot forward. This is Melchett Melchett. EMP is a designer for e mails and mass distribution and analytics of the results from those emails. This is a free tool up to 2000 unique emails on a list, so just keep in mind if you go over 2000 emails on a list or in the system, you will be looking at being switched over to a paid account. Where that said, that's a little bit of victory in itself because if you're sitting and information to over 2000 people, you're probably doing pretty good. Um So what we're gonna go through today is what is what does mail chimp look like? How do you build list? How do you put names in the list? And then how do you craft a good looking email to send out all the people on your email list? First things first. This is the default home screen, and it's just going to kind of take you through. Some of the other options are available of middle champion going critic campaign. We're gonna move right on to creating a list. Analysts is really simple. You want to put the name of the list You want to put the default email who it's gonna come from, which would be your email, the email that you make for your business Here, put the name who's gonna come from, and here I've put you know, Bob Soap. It's going to generate Earl for your email marketing send out for you so you don't worry about that, and then it's gonna ask you to turn on or off a few other options that we're not going to go through as well seem over the design face. Next. How do you add in things to that list? You will simply go to your list. Click the list you want click Import and then it's gonna ask you, How do you want to import information into your list? And what I usually choose to do is going to excel or Google sheets. Make a spreadsheet first. Name, last name. If you have their phone number, that's great, too. And then email and just start filling out all the individuals you can think of or you give you permission. Teoh. Be a part of your newsletter or your mailing list or whatever. Maybe, and then you can important that list as an Excel file or to see his fee file. Or if you're using some of the type of service where you know every time a particular action happens somewhere, it's gonna add their information to your mailing list. You can turn that on as well. So talking about the design of the email and this is we're going to spend most of our time . There is a long, a different ways to make a really great looking email, but you need to keep in mind, just like whenever we're talking about in Canada. You know, there's a lot of ways to make some really not so great stuff. And you want people to feel engaged. You want people to like what they're seeing, and you want to make sure you have really great calls to action. That way they'll want to come and purchase some of your products. So first you're gonna pick which list you're gonna send everything to. You're gonna add in who it's from, which is going to be named your business or your name and your email address or the email address that you made for your business. Then you're going to create a subject. And, you know, it could be something as simple as ah NIU sale on winter soaps. And then over here in preview text, you could put something like 50% off all eso or whatever you want to do. And just like what we were talking about in Canada, copyrighting is a really important skill to investor time and learning how to make a really great call to action, learning how to make a really great one liner that's going to make people want to reach out to you want to purchase from you? I want to be involved with you and your business. And then here's the most important part. This is the actual design phase. So just like when we were talking about in Canberra, mail chimp provide you with a lot of themes in templates to kind of help you get started. And I really recommend that you you build off of those because it's going to save you a lot of time in the thinking part of the design phase. So we have some great themes to look at. Like, for instance, this this 1st 1 right here, which is Art street showcase. Everything on this email could be changed to fit whatever you want. Here we have their logo, which is art biz. You can simply come in and replace that upload your logo that you made in Canada. You can add a link to which could be a link back to your website or to your Facebook. And then now we get into the rest of me to the email. This is gonna be your tagline. Get again. This without really great copyrighting comes in. Here's a section to talk about whatever is your need, email out, you know, new sale, new soap, new products or we're going organic, whatever made being. And then you can come down and you can adjust all the other sections of this email by changing out the photos. Changing out the Burbage. You can even change some of the structural things, or you can add in a text box or a divider, another image or no social follow. That's for people to be able to come and follow your instagram or your Facebook or what have you. Uh, if you don't like some of the background images, you can go over here into design. And like, for instance, we can go in here and let's say we don't like that geometric pattern that was up at the top . We could replace that with something else or edit it on Ben. You can come over here and comments and give feedback or send a test email and thence basically everything in a nutshell. You know, a lot of it just kind of depends on how creative or how much time you want to invest in this and you can spend a lot of time and make something really great or you can spend a lot of time and makes them. It's just mediocre. So keep in mind, you know, in the beginning it's more important to be getting the information out there than to have something that's absolutely perfect. So used. These templates use the tools that are made available to you by mail Chimp and just try and focus on something that looks clean and gets the information across that you want to get across. After that, we go back to our page where we have everything set up, and then we just simply click send, and it's gonna send it out instantaneously to everybody who's in your email list. They could email you back if they want to. And really, you want that you want that engagement. You want people asking you questions. You want people saying Hey, what about this or Hey, I saw this because that means you're more likely to make a sale off the individual or they're more likely to refer you to somebody else who you could potentially make a sale off . Included with this course are several resource documents toe help you continue to develop your business and your personal abilities. So what you're gonna find in the downloadable resource is section is a sales strategy guide . Some recipes a how to build business Plan a balance sheet to help you get your start with your financials, a monthly income statement and a monthly expenses forecasting for one year. And these are all things Aaron A correlate back to building your business plan in the sales guy, which you can see that I made a lot of this in Canada. It's going to contain all of the basic sales knowledge that you need to kind of get up and running and reach out to businesses who might become re sailors or reach out to individuals who could become referral people for you and your network or could become purchasers of your products. The important thing to remember with all these things, it's the beginning of your journey, learning these skills. But this is a great place to begin. As far as the recipes go, I give you some good ideas for jumping off and kind of give you an equipment list of everything that I talked about in the soap making video, but just some generic recipes to kind of help get the creative juices flowing like lemon rosemary. So poor men, ginger and then down towards the bottom. I give you some more complicated recipes about doing color combination soaps and using other things in your soap to create more unique and interesting. So how to build a business plan is gonna be a very detailed read. You need toe stop, take time and read through every piece of this with a very analytical and very inquisitive mind set. Because it's gonna ask you to stop and think about what is your target customer? Who is your target competitors? What makes them who they are and how does that affect you in your local market. So before you get into this guy, I recommend you set aside several hours and have your computer or your no pad ready to go. That way, you can start making notes and start working on all the little pieces that build a business plan, but highly recommend that you look into this. If for nothing else, it will give you greater mental and physical infrastructure for your business, plus If you ever need to go and get alone and take your business to the next step, or maybe do an actual soap store, this is gonna be something that the bank is going to require. Toe. Take that step as a part of your business plan. You're gonna have your basic financials. A balance sheet is pretty much the cornerstone of all of your financials, and it's also one of the easiest things to learn how to do. You just simply have to start off asking yourself, How much money do I have coming in, What equipment or what things have I bought? How much money do I have going out? And then you put it on the sheet, tabulated at the bottom. Your monthly income statement functions similar to the balance sheet, but it's meant to be used. Maura's a kind of a spot light of what's going on that month. Get again. You're looking to collect all of your revenue, all of your costs of goods, all of your other expenses, and then put him in here and conscious. Find out where you're at now. I haven't set up for it to be done monthly for you if you choose to do this weekly yearly, whatever you may choose to do, the important thing is is you start using tools like this to help you know where your business is at and lastly, and probably the most important is the monthly expenses Forecasting for one year. Whenever you choose to go into this business, ask yourself, what is it gonna cost to run this business month after month after month? Now, I've shown you in the lectures, and I talk about arm or in some of the other resource documents, how inexpensively you can start in at home, so business. But there is still a cost. You're gonna have to buy ingredients. You're gonna have to buy some equipment. So think about what that's gonna cost month after month after month. And just remember, as you sell more, you're gonna need to buy more products. So there is a correlation between doing better with revenue and expenses that go out to inventory. Acosta gets hold