I’m Elona Trogub. I know a small business often requires the owners to wear every hat all the time. That is not only impractical, it’s exhausting. With over 20 years of small business and startup experience, my goal is to let entrepreneurs focus on their products, services and customers while I execute a range of maverick office management tasks. Let me wear a hat or two for you.
When I’m not wearing a stack of hats, you can find me elbows deep in the soil pulling weeds and likely frying them up for dinner. Or possibly in the middle of a lake fishing off my stand up paddleboard. I speak fluent English and Russian. My favorite color is cerulean.
FAQs
Understanding the Cost of Success
Whether you’re starting a new business or you’ve been hard at work for yourself for years, there’s one thing we all want as entrepreneurs: SUCCESS. We’ve all learned that success comes at a cost. Exhaustion, missing out on special moments with family and friends, poor diet, early gray hairs, deterioration of physical health, these are all-too-familiar to us. There is a big need for small business support and I want to help.
What causes burnout and all the symptoms of it? In my experience, it’s being stretched too thin. There are just too many hats to wear, too many tasks to accomplish, too many details that need attention for small businesses to take off and grow without every ounce of our willpower.
Especially if you’re a creator with a small business, the amount of time you leave yourself for creating grows smaller and smaller as your business grows in complexity. As much as I love farming and cooking, in the 20 years that I’ve been involved in the restaurant industry and the small-scale agriculture community, the majority of my time has not been at the stove or with my hands in the soil (or hemp fiber mats, in the case of Gorge Greens). The majority of my time was spent at a computer or on the phone: crawling through legal and certification mazes; finding funding through grants, loans and investment strategies; creating management systems to make those businesses efficient, creating protocols, SOPs and developing strategies for employee management, and more.
When I went back to finish my bachelor’s degree, I focused on systems theory which allowed me to learn the rules by which the universe operates. Since graduating, I’ve applied these rules to the small business systems I design with excellent results.
Personally, I’ve realized my greatest skill set aligns with a real community need for small businesses. Instead of running my own restaurant or farm, I’m turning to helping new and existing small businesses find their footing, root down and bloom. I wish I could have hired me when I got my last business venture, Gorge Greens Microgreens, going.
My skill-set is like a small business multi-tool, a maverick office manager along with a host of other services.
If you’re struggling with your small business because your focus has turned more on management of paperwork, payments, compliance, employees, marketing, or any other component that doesn’t actually allow you to create your product, deliver your service and interact with customers in the way you wish you could, then give me a call for a brief (20 minute) consult. It’s totally free and may very well give back hours in your day and allow you to return to doing what you love and love what you’re doing.