Slowing things down in 5 simple steps

 

It may seem contradictory to EVERYTHING about businesses.  After all, there is blog post upon blog post, and self-help book, and professional firms all devoted to *increasing* business and getting more sales.  So, my question is: what do you do when your business starts to overwhelm the rest of your life?  As someone who is crafting on a parttime basis, someone who has other responsibilities that have been deemed more important, it has become necessary for me to *SLOW* down my business.  Contrary to all of the “how to increase business” information that is available, I want to know how to decrease business.

Here are just a couple of things to keep in mind as you are trying to decrease your business.

• Just as it takes time to increase your business, it will take just as much, if not more time to decrease that business.  Unless you are wanting to stop business completely, just be patient with it.
• Self control and knowing when to refrain from something is going to be very important.
• Try writing out a list of your current responsibilities and prioritizing them.  Knowing where everything ranks as far as importance to you will help keep things in perspective.

So, on to 5 steps that you can take to decrease business

1. Don’t relist products.  Once they sell, just let them be.
2. No new products.  As you get those flood of ideas write them down, save them for later, but don’t post pictures on your facebook, or on your online shop, or market them in any way.
3. Lessen the amount that you post new things.  If you were putting up a new blog post every day, start limiting it to 2-3 times a week.  Same goes with your facebook, twitter, etc.
4. Limit the customized orders.  When you have the time to create, create like a mad-person and be sure to market “ready-to-ship”.  Not so much on the “made-to-order”.
5. It is ok to turn down orders and be choosy about what you want to make.  Fast and easy should trump slow and hard.

There are several reasons why you might want/need to slow your business down and it is ok to do that.  Maybe an unexpected illness came up, or a new job opportunity, or you expanded too quickly in the first place.  Whatever the reason, if you’ve just got too much on your plate, instead of stressing out and trying to battle with everything, go ahead and slow business down.

Go and see what’s for sale right now in my shop! (Hint: Click the picture)

http://www.familybugs.net

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Related articles

• Startup Stress: Dealing with Pressure While Delivering on Ideas (grasshopper.com)
• Why Starting Smaller Really Matters (kauffman.org)
• 48 Percent of Small Biz Owners Not Taking Vacations This Summer (smallbiztrends.com)
• How to Sell your Hand-Made Crafts – 5 easy steps (familybugs.wordpress.com)
• Burying the business? Is it a work in practise? (damienschulze.com)
• 3 Ways to Reinvigorate and Refocus Your Business (thedailymuse.com)
• 7 important stepping stones to better business blogging (polarisprinc.com)

 

Why you need to enjoy/love to craft in order to sell those crafts

There are a bajillion and three reasons why you might want to make and sell your craft products.  From supplementing your income, to making a full-time job out of it.  However, if you are going to take this selling business seriously, there are a few things that must be considered.

 

You must enjoy making it!  I cannot stress this point enough.  Depending on the craft, you will have to make LOTS of the same thing.  Maybe in different colors, maybe in different sizes, or maybe identical ones over and over again.  If you don’t enjoy it, you’ll lose the motivation, and the idea will go caput.

 

You need to have the time to make it.  Either your building up your stock to sell “ready-to-ship” items, or you prefer to dapple in “made-to-order” items, you are going to need the time.  There are 4 million stresses on any one person’s time throughout a day: sleep, eat, clean, children, spouse, social, exercise, just to name a few.  So, do you have the time to put into your creations?  Or, a better question would be: Do you enjoy crafting enough to make the time (sometimes LATE nights or EARLY mornings, putting aside housework, trusting the kids to someone else’s care, *making sacrifices*) in order to meet deadlines?

 

There has to be readily available resources.  It’s a bit unreasonable to start up your business when you have to special order, or even travel an hour or more to go get your materials.  Not only would that be another stress on your already precious time, but you would also have to calculate all of that into your pricing (which can get a bit tricksy).  I think that this would be just fine for ready-to-ship products, but I can’t see how it works to well with made-to-order items; your delivery time would be multiplied by two or even three (gotta wait for materials, then make the product, then the customer has to wait to receive it).  Going back to our continuing idea, if you don’t enjoy making the product, then you certainly aren’t going to enjoy putting forth extra effort to get the materials to make it, especially if you have to travel, or special order those materials.

 

What about research for the furtherance of your work?  Do you really want to hit this high point and then just stop?  Whether it’s doing research on the internet, taking classes from a local expert, or just developing new products, your going to be devoting time, and possibly money into growing your business.  Is this something that your willing to do?  Maybe you are looking into expanding your crafting to other revenues (like monograming as well as crocheting), or you want to add someone else to your website.  Perhaps you just heard about this awesome class that the local community center is having that can teach you a new jewelry-making technique.  If you really enjoy crafting, then this wont be an issue at all, you will *jump* at the oppurtunity to further your knowledge on the craft, but if you don’t, it will be a drag, chore, something to be dreaded.

 

So, to recap, you need to really enjoy crafting before you even consider selling it.  You have to enjoy making the time to make it, you have to enjoy shopping for the needed materials, and you have to enjoy studying further about your craft.  I hope that you have found this post useful, and I’d *LOVE* any input you might have as to why it’s so important to enjoy your craft in order to sell it!