Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Kristen McDonald, CEO of The Bossy Sauce, located in Berkeley, CA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

TheBossySauce.com provides HR, recruiting, and business resources to small companies and start-ups on a seed budget. We offer free and budget resources to those launching their business and getting it off the ground in the first years of operation. We're a start-up too! We believe that helping you grow will foster loyalty and, in turn, help us grow. We don't need to charge a lot for our services and resources in order to do that.

What type of resources do we provide at TheBossySauce.com? We have 5 main pillars of offerings to optimize your small business:

  1. Compliant, time-saving HR documents and contracts, saving your company legal fees. This includes offer letter templates, PIP documents, etc.
  2. Plug & Play Performance Management, saving small companies thousands of dollars from industry competitors with the use of templates, video tutorials, and Google Forms or Microsoft Forms. If you're under 50 employees, you don't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on industry performance review softwares.
  3. Learning and Development to uplevel and upskill your teams. Employees not only want to learn in their roles, they expect it. Upskilling can save your company money, especially when it comes to employee retention. You can outsource a lot of L&D. We focus on courses in HR, Recruiting, and People Management.
  4. Employee Satisfaction & Well-being. The happiness and well-being of your workforce are essential to performance, success, and retention. You don't need to spend a lot of time and money to check in on your employees. You don't even need an HR team! You just need to know how to do it and how to do it right. We provide surveys, materials, and guidance to manage this in-house.
  5. We build relationships with tools and products we think could be valuable to small businesses and start-ups, broker exclusive deals, create tutorials and reviews and offer these exclusively to our community. We do the research for you so that you can operate your business!

The annual release of our e-Book, The Solopreneur Tool Guide, is completely free at TheBossySauce.com. It includes all the best programs to run your small business without breaking the bank on softwares and tools. It includes all the best free, freemium, and cost-effective tools for small businesses - updated each year to reflect the best new products and updates in the market.

Tell us about yourself

I'm Kristen Diane McDonald, the CEO at TheBossySauce.com. I'm an SPHR certified Career Coach, Human Resources, and Recruitment Leader with experience consulting on-site and working for Google, Microsoft, Activision, Hilton, Essence Mediacom, and frog Design. I've lived in San Francisco and Berkeley for the last 10 years and started businesses in the US and Canada. I understand how valuable saving time and money is at the beginning stages of a business. This is why I started my company.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

I started successful consultancies in both the US and Canada. I've achieved all this success with a GED and an Associate's Degree from a community college. If I can achieve this success, so can you! For a long time, I hid behind the last piece of my resume until I felt I could bury the parts like my GED, hoping no one would notice anymore. I no longer have shame. I'm now proud and wear all my experiences with pride.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

The biggest challenges I've come across are:

  1. Knowing when to stop working.
  2. Staying focused and prioritizing when there's always so much to do.
  3. Defining the brand and staying true to it at all costs.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Given the challenges that I just listed, make sure you draw boundaries in your work. You can run a successful new business and have limits to your work. I also recommend using a project management tool, even if you're a solopreneur. Organizing your tasks and priorities and sticking to them is essential when there are so many things you want to do. If you're a creative type, the brain juices will never stop flowing when you believe in what you're doing and when you're excited about it. It's useful to channel that excitement a little into prioritizations.

Define your brand and stay true to it. Even if your business is one, two, or three people, craft a mission, vision, and values for your business. Your culture will develop from day one. The business you bring in, the partnerships you make, and even the logo you use will all form around those values. There'll be more cohesion from the start.

Lastly, don't wait for the stars to align to get going. Figure out what you really need to get started, and get moving! Life doesn't wait.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.thebossysauce.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebossysauce/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebossysaucepodcast/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristendianemcdonald/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

Turn your craft into recurring revenue with Subkit. Start your subscription offering in minutes and supercharge it with growth levers. Get early access here.