 If I were to have contemplated where I wanted myself to be in 10 years, 10 years ago, I don't think that the word entrepreneur would ever have come into my vocabulary. I'm Linda Miller Nicholson with Salty Seattle, and I create colorful pasta using vegetables, herbs, and superfoods. I've been making pasta my entire life since I was four years old. When my son went through a very picky eating stage, I was like, you know, pasta's his favorite food. I make it all the time for him. I'm just gonna amp up my vegetable pasta. He didn't know what he was eating at the time, then once he figured out, oh, I can't actually taste the beets. Okay, this isn't bad. He was sort of that initial catalyst for but can you make blue, but can you make purple? All of a sudden I'm weaving 25 different colors together into these amazing, beautiful, patterned pieces of art, you could say. It eventually sort of took off like wildfire and I'm able to spread the joy of my art through social media platforms but that doesn't necessarily translate to dollars. For me personally, I'd never wanted to lose that artistic aspect to what I was doing but at a certain point, if I'm spending 80 hours a week doing this, there needs to be a return on that time investment. While I think your Instagram can be sort of like a, you know, a calling card in a sense, you have to actually drive those people somewhere so that you can, you know, create the revenue and so without a website, I literally wouldn't be able to, you know, feed my family. We are in the pasta studio and I've got to make a couple of different pasta dough colors. This is kind of just a sampling of some of the things that I use. I like to use a bunch of different greens for pasta making, seasonally watch kind of how the pigment is darker or lighter. So you can see right away that just adding a few beets completely impacts and changes the vibrancy. I started to realize that this was a concept that I absolutely needed to take from passion into actual career. Around the same time I signed my book deal, I had a lot of second guessing and questions and my editor said, you probably should do it or your idea is gonna be out there without you. So I almost felt like I was sort of running after my own concept, you know, realizing that if I didn't put out there what I wanted to put out there that someone else would have done it. All right, now for the fun part, I am going to take my beautiful rainbow palette of pasta dough and I think I'll do a little bit of shaping freestyle. One of my deepest loves is to be able to teach other people how to make pasta and during the pandemic it's actually been really cool because I used to teach only in person classes and the pandemic has opened this up where now I can be piped into anybody's kitchen all over the, I've had students from every continent except for Antarctica. I'm working on it. Life goals there. Luckily with GoDaddy I was able to create an entire virtual class workshop page because of my complete lack of technical proficiency I really needed a solution that was very swag and play and so far GoDaddy website builder has been that for me. It's been very eye-opening. I feel like I have gotten an ancillary business degree over the last several years of just sort of creating this small business and watching it flourish and thrive. GoDaddy had kind of the functionality that I was able to do a variety of different things with it. Hi. Hi, Linda. How's it going? Great. Being here in your space, in your dough, Joe. Mike, did you say dough, Joe? And is that spelled D-O-U-G-A? It is now. Okay, it is. Everything is bright. You are colorful. I think going to a lighter color palette, filling it in, you know, with little accents here and there that, again, really reflect who you are, the blog would be perfect for this website. Even if you're not actively posting, if you can get each blog post sort of jam-packed with those key words that people would go on the web looking for you, that will help you immensely with your search engine optimization. You're kind of going at this upward trajectory and every time you say yes to a project, you're no longer going up, you kind of go outward from there and you have to figure out where you're willing to stop going up. It's how I determine whether or not I'm going to add a new sort of aspect to my business. If I can do this and then it can kind of become sort of a source of passive income, then maybe that's a good idea. Maybe I will invest the time. As a female entrepreneur, we kind of have it a little bit more ingrained that if a job comes into my purview, you know, okay, I better take the job, no matter if the feeling isn't right and now I'm starting to learn to be a little bit more selective and then the jobs that do land in my lap are the ones that I truly want to take on and it helps me to be a little bit more excited about it. Success is sort of a nebulous concept that means something different for everyone but for me, always making sure that there is a meaning and a message and some joy behind what I do and always be thinking about what's next.