University of La Verne SBDC Small Biz Blog

Joy Helou DDS, Inc.  1434 S Grand Ave Glendora,CA,91740 Joy Helou DDS is a professional dental corporation located in Glendora, California. Joy purchased an existing practice due to the previous owner’s philosophy of practice and existing clientele, which proved to be a great fit. Joy is a relative of the Dean of Business and Public Management, she reached out to him for help with a business plan since the dental school didn’t equip graduates in that area. Joy’s biggest challenge was the lack of a business background. Since dental students spend years gaining skills in medicine, they would not have time or instruction dedicated to running a business. “My background in the sciences like biology and dentistry. I graduated with a B.S. from the University of La Verne in biology. The hardest part was having to buckle down, look at the business plan with Sean and make decisions with numbers. Currently, I look at that plan almost daily because it gives me a refresher on what I need to be ...

by Joshua Botello Want to know how to blog for your business? Check out how we do it here at the SBDC. I'm gonna take you through the process of content creation that I use for the SBDC. So this is so much a step-by-step guide as a “how I work” type of video. I’ll throw in tips and tools that I use and I hope you get something great from it. This is going to be part of a series of marketing your business with the latest techniques like video production, webinars, podcasts, and social promotion campaigns. Ideation Your first step when creating a business blog is: What are you going to talk about and why? Is it to build awareness or SEO? To help customers purchase or for customer service. This will influence what topics and format you are going to choose. Brainstorming Once you have an idea of your audience and how you want to talk to them, let’s brainstorm some topics. If you are just starting you want to create a bunch of topics at the start so you have a variety of topics to pull ...

By Joshua Botello If you’re looking to create graphics for your emails for marketing materials but have no idea how to do that, then using the tool Canva may be something you want to look into. Canva is a free online graphic design tool that can help any small business owner be a graphic designer with free templates for Marketing and social media. So let’s get into the review. Who’s it For? Canva is primarily for small business owners who don’t have a large marketing budget to spend on graphic design. It is also for the non-artistic or creative business owner who needs to create email or other social media content. You can easily grab a pre-sized template for most social media platforms and quickly edit for a graphic or make your own custom ebook, worksheet, or presentation. Canva is not for those who are engaged in creative marketing and do you have a budget for a graphic designer to create their graphics for them. Demo So getting started with Canva is as easy as setting up a free a...