Proper Introduction to Mostly Design
My name is Jaana, and I’m the owner of Mostly Design. I’m third generation entrepreneur and on a mission to do to your marketing, technology and IT processes what Marie Kondo does to your closet: organize, structure, minimize and simplify. Because your business deserves to be successful.
How It All Got Started
I come from the happiest country in the world, Finland. When I was young, I didn’t know what I wanted to become when I grew up. What I knew however, was that I didn’t want to grow old in my little home town. I needed a challenge and an adventure. To accomplish these goals, I set myself to study to pass the entrance exam to Helsinki School of Economics, which is nowadays called Aalto University. The school is basically the Harvard of Finland, and they only take in only about 20% of the applicants. For the entrance exam, you had to study 5 business books and pass a very difficult test. I (barely) passed, and started my 5.5 year journey towards a Master’s degree.
So I moved to the big city and immersed myself into the student life. Moving to the big city didn’t make my future choices any clearer, I was still totally clueless about what I wanted to become when I grew up. Fortunately for me, our school didn’t make us decide our Major right away, but allowed us to spend 1.5 years on general business studies before making the big decision. Lucky for me, I stumbled into an introductory class on Logistics, and fell in love with it immediately. Concepts like Just-In-Time inventory, Total Quality Management and Kanban made so much sense to me. I especially loved solving complex problems like how to optimize your slow moving inventory when you want to keep your service level at 99%. <3 You could call this my intro to Konmari, just on the business side.
Pulkkilanharju, Finland. To me this is the most beautiful place on the entire planet.
Plunge into Technology
I quickly realized that as nice as it is to know logistics in theory, it’s not enough. For a company to have streamlined and efficient processes, they need T-E-C-N-O-L-O-G-Y. As a result of the thought process, I started looking for a job in the technology field, and ended up at Andersen Consulting as a management consultant before I even graduated.
Boy was that a rough landing into the real work life in technology field! I had 0 (ZERO) technology experience, and my first project task was programming! It took me 6 months to go from 0 (ZERO!!) technology knowledge to being really good at what I was doing. It was hard, no sugar coating it. But totally worth it. After teaching myself how to program in 6 months and how to be good at it, took away all of my doubts of what I could accomplish if I just set my mind into it.
Fast forward many years, some Fortune 500 companies, multiple medium size companies and a move to the United States. I had designed, built, and managed many implementations of technology solutions to make these companies more efficient in their processes. I had helped the teams to work smarter, not harder. Throughout all these years, the voice of the little entrepreneur gene grew louder and louder in my head. Some days, I was so full of business ideas I thought I should start selling my ideas.
The Entrepreneur Force Is Strong with This One!
There was no escaping my destiny, and I started my first company around 2011. It was an online store for children’s clothing. I built the website, purchased some inventory, and did all the other activities required in running an online store, including shipping and accounting. Starting up the online store was the most exciting thing I had ever done! It was a big failure (=necessary lesson) too. I had totally underestimated the marketing effort needed to get visibility for my company, and didn’t have the skills, time and money to put into finding customers. Then life stepped into the way, I got other priorities and soon closed the operations.
Ever since, I’ve started three more companies, all with technology focus. Two of them were together with friends, great ideas how to make the world a more efficient place with the use of technology. Unfortunately, those two companies are no longer operational. They were fun as long as it lasted, and both of them taught me a lot.
Once you start on the entrepreneur path, there is no turning back. The Force is strong with this one! I spent a lot of time talking to my brother and my dad, both small business owners in Finland, about the challenges they’ve faced as small businesses. I talked to other small business owners in the United States, startups, and friends who had businesses. I talked to many technology company owners, about the services they provide and the challenges they faced themselves. I talked to my lawn guy. I talked to the electrician. The plumber. The construction company. The café owner. Everyone who was willing to listen (probably lost a couple of friends along the way!).
I asked them the same questions: What is the biggest challenge you have in your business? If you had a possibility to change one thing in your daily operations, what would it be? If you could have one application that could do whatever you needed, what would the application do? What applications do you use and how do they work for you? And I did a lot of research on applications, downloaded free versions and tried them out.
The small businesses were all struggling with the same things. Finding customers. Lack of time. Lack of time to do sales and marketing properly to find the customers. Manual tasks that could be automated but nobody had the time to investigate any options, less implement the solution. Doing the same manual repetitive tasks over and over again. Manual tasks that resulted with a lot of errors thus creating more and more work. Unnecessary things that rubbed my logistics-konmari core the wrong way.
The Lightbulb Moment
LIGHTBULB! The small businesses are struggling with exactly the same problems as the big companies are struggling with. The problems that I had been solving for the big ones for years. My mission had been to understand what the problem is, find the solution that fits the customer schedule, scope and budget, implement it, make sure the customer the customer gets their time back, and is able to make better decisions as the right information is available. Exactly what small businesses need, even more than the big ones!
And this is where Mostly Design steps in. Mostly Design started as a WordPress website builder, web hosting service and digital marketing company, but the demand has been way beyond that. A website, or social media management can take you only so far. You can actually get yourself into a lot of trouble and find yourself buried in extra work if you don’t plan the way you actually do your work. There are many fantastic, free tools for small businesses out there, but few have the time to invest and investigate them. That’s why I’m here. The full package. Not just a website. Not just digital marketing. I’m here for the big picture – to help you run your business efficiently. I’m here to help you organize, structure, minimize and simplify your IT, technology and marketing daily tasks. So that you can concentrate on the essential part of your business. So that you can leave the mundane, repetitive tasks to automation. Because your business deserves your time. Because your business deserves to be successful.
Follow Mostly Design on social media for upcoming videos and blog postings on how to free up your time to actually run your business!