Holly Goodman was a teacher with a side hustle for many years.
On weekdays she'd sculpt young minds. But on weekends, she was busy packing gift orders.
Living in Tamworth NSW, Holly had noticed a gap in the market. There was nowhere to buy luxury goods and products in her area, so Holly created a service where she'd source and send beautiful brands' products to locals.
As The Good Gift Co started to gain traction on social media, customers further afield from her patch of NSW started rolling in, and in 2019 Holly was able to bench teaching and focus on gift-giving full time.
In turning her hobby into a business, Holly set about making a website all on her own with the help of online tutorials and frantic Googling. It wouldn't be until the 30-year-old started her second business in 2021, that she'd realise how much easier that whole process could be.
Enter: GoDaddy.
Off the back of success with The Good Gift Co (which Holly has recently sold) the mother-of-three saw an opportunity to combine her former career of teaching with her newfound love for entrepreneurship, and created a business to help other small businesses grow and thrive.
"I'd seen GoDaddy pop up online. I really liked the idea that everything's all in the one place. Previously, building my first business I had stuff everywhere so I was constantly logging into this, that and the other.
"I was able to get the domain I wanted and a matching professional email, as well as the ability to build my website and add security and hosting – basically, the works – all in the one spot. It was super convenient.
"Also with Go Daddy's Microsoft 365 Business Premium package you can definitely work smarter, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, email, a planner – all in the one account."
With all of these inclusions available to Holly both in the office and remotely, she said it made her life that much easier.
"I'm definitely finding it very easy to use, which is nice. It's very straightforward and the GoDaddy W+M platform itself is really good and intuitive to build a website on," she said.
When you think of what online success looks like in 2021, having a strong social media presence is often top priority.
Holly can attest to that.
She mastered the ins and outs of how to use platforms like Instagram to build her following by being consistent and confident in her posting. It's one of the skills she plans to pass on to her future clients.
"If you aren't present in environments where your customers are, then the sales aren't going to come through," she told Mamamia.
"It would amaze me... when I would post up on Facebook or Instagram, that's when you'd get a sale. Because obviously no one can physically touch your products. It taught me that I had to continue to ramp that up."
Holly said it was critical to have a website that these leads could come to in order to experience the brand she'd built. She said this is where she could then add these customers to her email subscribers in order to build up her community of supporters.
But as important as customer facing things like marketing are, in hindsight some of the most game-changing lessons' Holly learnt were more 'behind the scenes'.
First time around, Holly used multiple different providers to help her set up her business, and found the process quite complicated. But as she ventured into business number two, GoDaddy had that side of things covered.
She told Mamamia, she's so impressed with how user-friendly GoDaddy is that she'll be recommending it to her own clients.
One of the key things Holly also advises new business hopefuls do early on, is secure their domain names.
For The Good Gift Co, Holly went through a different company and found the whole process quite hard. Second time around, GoDaddy secured all of the relevant domain extensions for her, just with a few clicks.
"It's something that a lot of people forget. But it is actually one of the first things you do so that you know it's not going to be taken.
"You don't want to start a business, and have it all sorted and set up and then realise, 'oh, I'm going to need a domain for my website'. You don't want to do all the hard work and then not have it.... So GoDaddy made that process really easy and accessible," said Holly.
Holly also recommended the GoDaddy Guides for support at each step. With phone support 24/7, Holly said it was like having her own personal tech team on hand whenever she had something to figure out or grab some help on.
As for things like website security, Holly admits when she was setting up her first business "it's not something that I had done before, because I didn't really know how to do it."
"But GoDaddy has made the process quite easy. In my head originally, I thought, that sounds very tricky I'll just leave it, but it is so important," she told Mamamia.
GoDaddy have monthly plans that completely simplify your safety solution, including things like firewalls (to prevent hacking), malware scanning, unlimited site clean-ups, 25-200GB of secure backup and Content Deliver Network (CDN) to provide fast delivery of Internet content to your website visitors.
With GoDaddy making all of the cogs run smoothly in the background, Holly is able to focus on the fun stuff – building her client base and imparting her business wisdom with those hoping to follow in her start-up footsteps.
Now that Holly's got her website all set up ready to go she admits she's "so excited about it, she's on it every night", tinkering away in the GoDaddy powered backend.
She's ready to dive head-first into her new venture. And for anyone still tossing up whether to take the plunge into entrepreneurship in the first place, here's Holly's advice.
"It takes hard work and consistency. There are going to be ups and downs: people need to know that. But anything really is achievable if you are motivated and determined," she told Mamamia.
Feature image: Supplied.