Where Have All the Hours Gone?!

When you start up a creative business selling your wares to the public it is usually because you genuinely love creating things.  Whether you love form, colour, texture, the sense of achievement that comes from creating a finished piece or the public adoration and praise that comes from exceeding your customers expectations you have something that motivates you to create.  You would therefore imagine that running a small crafting business is like living in a 'Happy Land' where people will pay you to make your beautiful work!  You would think so wouldn't you but that's not always the case for a number of reasons.

The harsh reality is that if you are successful in your chosen field you will find that making your delightful creations starts taking up less and less of your time and running your business and all that entails starts taking up more and more of it.  But 'I'm a crafter' I hear you shout.....................well not anymore!  Now you're a business owner.

So assuming you've stuck it out and survived the exciting and slightly confusing first few months.  Managed to  work your way through the frenzy of buying, making and posting without bankrupting yourself.  Then coped with the stress and self doubt whilst waiting for your orders to land, and hoping your new customers love what you've made enough to put in another order or at least recommend you to their friends, you now have a business on your hands.  It's most likely a micro-business, but it's a business and it's your business none the less. 

Having managed all of that to get your venture off the ground time suddenly becomes your most precious commodity, as if it wasn't already.  If you're a Mum the chances are it was already in short supply! 

In order to fulfil orders you need raw materials, or stock.  So as reality dawns that you are now a business and have deadlines and profit to make, you have to turn your attention to stock control.  I admit this is something of a challenge to me, by my own admission I have failed to manage my stock levels as well as I would have liked to have.  The simple reason for my error was that instead of steering my customers in the direction I needed them to go in with their design requests I went out of my way to find them the colour or embellishment they wanted and spent money on stock I would use only once.  Do that a few times and you too will wipe out your profit!!  In addition to the direct cost of the stock, sourcing new stock takes time.  Time to find what you need, time to place the order, and time waiting for it to arrive.  Take time to plan ahead how and when you will order in stock, whether once and month or once a week, and manage your Customers expectations accordingly.  In addition, as I have learnt to my cost, try to reduce your suppliers down to as few as possible and make your orders as few and as large as possible.  This reduces your admin time, allows you to negotiate better rates, reduces your postage costs and very importantly enables you to build relationships with your suppliers.

Next we have 'Speculators', as I shall call them, to deal with.  Now a 'Speculator' can become your best customer or your biggest time waster, and you have absolutely no way of knowing which one they will turn out to be.  Speculators are the people who send you emails and comment on your pictures............... "I love this can I have 10 of them?', 'Can I have it just like this but in blue?' etc etc.  So you correspond with them and they don't reply..............ever, OR, you correspond, they reply and you invoice them...................and they don't pay, OR you correspond, they place their order, pay the invoice and become a Customer.  All this correspondence takes time, time you don't make a penny from, but without it you can't turn Speculators into Customers so you haven't got much choice.  Corresponding, chatting and commenting is the whole purpose of Social Network Marketing such as Facebook and becoming good at it will get you customers, so there are no corners that can really be cut in this area.  You need to appear accessible and friendly to your potential customers, answer their questions and deal with their queries, even share a little of yourself and your life with them.

So what about Customers, what about time spent on them?  Well of course you have to make their order up for them but what about all the other things involved that no one pays you for.  So upfront there are all the emails back and forward to confirm the order.  If you're lucky the customer will set out exactly what they want, size, shape, colour etc and you can just confirm and invoice.  In reality you rarely get all the information you need so many emails go back and forward.  Then there is the invoicing which has to be done and you may have to chase payment on more than one occasion.  Sadly you will find that the busier you get the more likely it is that your invoices will never get paid! 

Assuming you get paid and make the order, you then have to wrap it, in my case so it survives the good old British postal service.  This can take as much crafting ingenuity as it did to make the product in the first place.  Then you need to dig out the invoice and address the packages.  This whole process can take literally hours each week depending on how many orders you have to send.  I will easily loose a minimum of a day per week just wrapping and addressing orders and taking them to the Post Office.  Of course the busier you get the more time you will loose on each of these activities, meaning the less time you have to actually complete the work which pays the money!  It really is a vicious circle and I'm seriously doubting there will ever be enough margin in handcrafted items to enable any of one of us to take on admin staff to carry out these non-profit generating activities!

Even when the creation has been posted there will undoubtedly be other issues which crop up.  To my shame I made a beautiful heart for a customer to give as a wedding gift a couple of weeks ago.  When it arrived the Customer emailed me to say she absolutely loved it ..................but I got the grooms name completely wrong!!  Even if you don't have moments of complete madness like me, occasionally your things will get lost in the post so you have to hunt them down or fill in claim forms for Royal Mail and re-make the item for your Customer.  More and more and more time will be lost sorting out problems and again there is not a lot you can do other than try to sort them out and then get on with the making!

So what is my point?  If you are starting out in business be VERY careful to manage your costs and manage your time.  It is difficult to plan ahead as you really don't know how busy you will be, and trying to get your Customers to plan ahead is almost impossible.  I know because I've tried.  Build relationships with other page owners and if they are more experienced ask them for help.  A couple of pages who seem to have themselves very organised when it comes to managing their customers orders are The Fernery and Polka, they use their notes pages to list all the orders which I think is a brilliant idea.

Actually making any profit out of handcrafted items is tough and even tougher when you decided that you want to work in more than one medium, like I do.  Time will tell if it was a brilliant idea or a terrible mistake!

The Daily Challenge

From my early plans to may be have a couple of orders a week as a bit of a hobby, I have been running Spangly Sparkles as a business for a year now.  Fortunately the process of running a business wasn't new to me having worked as a self employed HR/Employment Law Consultant prior the birth of my second daughter.  So I was able to apply that knowledge to get myself set up correctly with the Inland Revenue, absolutely essential and not as scary as you might think, and organise a very simple accounting system which, as long as I put the right information in, keeps track of my order values and costs and tells me if I'm actually making any money.

So if I knew how to run a business what were the challenges of my first year in business?

One of my biggest challenges initially was finding suppliers.  I needed regular and reliable suppliers who would be able to provide me what I needed at a good price and of good quality.  A price that would enable me to make my finished products at a price customers would pay, whilst allowing me to make a profit.  When I started I didn't know what stock levels to hold.  I didn't know what would be the most popular items and at the same time I wanted to expand my product range, so that meant taking a chance and buying more raw materials.  A year on I still haven't cracked this particular challenge.  What is popular one week will suddenly be replaced by something else.  When I first started out, my 20cm Letters were the most popular item and I would make, sometimes, 20 or more a week.  This last month I am busier than ever but I have made only 2!

My other challenge was Customers!  Perhaps it's wrong to consider Customers a challenge but believe me they are, and that is not because I have difficult customers! First of all without customers you won't have a business, so you need to get some. I was fortunate that I set up on facebook, made a few sales through Ebay and before I knew it word of mouth and recommendation meant my business grew at a rate I was happy with, so fortunately that wasn't a particular challenge for me. 

My Customer issue was and still is Managing Expectations.  Don't get me wrong most orders run without a problem, the order is placed, paid for, made and dispatched, but now and again life gets in the way!

First of all just about everything I make is a custom piece.  You can't just pick them off the shelf.  My work is made just as the customer wants it, from scratch, which takes time.  What also takes time is that unlike most of my competitors my wooden items are all sanded to within an inch of their lives, painted and then varnished so I know that my customers are getting quality that will last and survive the everyday bumps and knocks family life has to throw at them, which provides value for money as a lasting keepsake.  Now although most of my customers are aware that my items, by their very nature, take time to make, some of them think they can order today and it will be posted tomorrow.  Try as I might to manage expectation on this, I am not always successful.  Firstly, I cannot expect all of my customers to realise the work that goes into one of my items and secondly, because we have become a society that is so used to being able to get whatever we want right now that some people just don't do waiting very well!  This isn't a huge challenge but it is a notable one because it will be faced by anyone who hand makes custom work.

By far my greatest challenge related to Customers is managing their expectations to fit in with my own needs, something I am still struggling with and am likely to for some time yet.   First and foremost I am a full time Mum to two young children.  My children are my top priority and I only run my business to put me in a position to afford to pay for the likes of clothes, shoes, dancing and gymnastics lessons!  So as every Mum of young children knows your time and your life seldom is your own and rarely goes to plan.  Throw in the fact that I suffer from Hyermobility Syndrome which causes chronic pain and often means I struggle with day to day activities such as standing, walking, and lifting and you may understand that I have a bit of a problem on my hands from time to time!  There are no local Aunts, Uncles or Grandparents who can step in to help so my my long suffering husband and I muddle along as best we can, and that includes finding time to get my work done.

Someone I know who also runs a similar sized business said to me that her customers don't seem to care that she has a family and other responsibilities.  The absolute bottom line is, no, they don't, they want the product they have paid for by the date they said they wanted it!  Now if you make and provide something that they simply cannot get elsewhere then they will probably cut you some slack as long as you communicate with them.  Something I try to do, but it's not always easy when your child is ill or you are simply at the end of your tether.  I'm sure we all have those moments!  

If you are very lucky you will start to get regular customers who want what you make and no one else, and so will pretty much stick with you through thick and thin as long as you don't abuse the relationship.  I think I am very lucky, I have a core of lovely regular customers who have been more than understanding about the personal and supplier challenges I have faced this year and have stuck with me.  For that I am always grateful and I am even more grateful to now consider a few of these people my friends.  Designing for people can really give you an insight into their personality and I very much enjoy that about what I do.

As with all things, sometimes despite your best efforts you just can't win.  The realisation that you can't keep everyone happy all of the time is a tricky one, and if you're anything like me any type of complaint or criticism hurts.  I put my heart and sole into what I make,  I give up time with my family to make orders, so when someone complains, I'm not happy!  Fortunately it is a rarity.  A word of advice to anyone starting out in business, however hard you work and however hard you try there will always be someone who isn't happy.  For your own sake be ready to let a few customers go, you aren't for them and they aren't for you.  Work for those who you know appreciate what you do, they are the ones who will recommend you to others and they are the ones who will be repeat customers.  You may think that's easy for me to say when I am as busy as I am if you're just starting out and need every customer you can get, but it was true when I worked in the corporate world and it's even truer now making custom design work.

I don't always get the balance right between my family life and my work life and that's something I am trying to address this year.  Twelve months in I've learnt a great deal and I'm learning to manage my own expectations of what I am able to achieve in a day.  There will never be enough hours in the day, so the challenge for this year is to organise myself better and I think a part of that will be learning to say 'no' sometimes!  More on that another time.

How it all Began

In February 2011 I decided that I might like to try to make a few crafty things.  I had attempted and failed to succeed at knitting as it took too much concentrating and counting and that just didn't work for me with a small child and new baby in the house.  As a hobbyist Wood Turner my husband has all sorts of 'stuff' in the garage and so when I decided I was going to try painting a wooden heart and put our eldest daughters name on it he knew about how painting 'raises the grain' and showed me how to sand things and also had a pot of varnish kicking about that he let me use.  So there is was my first attempt at making something.

Since I didn't really know what direction my new creativity would take me in I ordered a few small  cheap wooden boxes and had a go at painting them and then had what I now consider to be the best idea of all which was decorated letters with hanging name tags.  So I ordered a couple of letters and made one for each of my daughters, put the pictures up on facebook and Ebay and started getting a few orders in.













Sourcing good quality raw materials from reliable suppliers was my biggest challenge initially.  I didn't know what demand would be like for my products or what sort of things they would order so I tried a few different ideas before settling on what I now consider to be 'my style'. 

It was a steep learning curve and I had to learn fast.  Within weeks people were asking me if I could make painted boxes, freestanding letters and a variety of letter designs.  I kept uploading my pictures to Facebook and slowly but surely my number of 'likers' grew.  I knew nothing about the likes of The Supermums Craft Fair and UK Mums Who Make at that stage or about liking other pages, shoutouts and networking.  Nevermind silent tagging and liking ladders as a way of increasing your like count!

My business, although launched on Facebook, grew through good old fashioned word of mouth until I stumbled across the afore mentioned networking pages and found a number of lovely pages on Facebook and so my networking circle began to grow.

So what advice can I give to New Pages just setting up?

1. Create the best quality items you can - pay attention to the detail and the finish, that's what gets you a good reputation, recommendations and repeat business.
2. Take good quality, in focus, well lit pictures of your work.
3. Arrange your pictures into as few Albums as is possible - it's plain annoying for customers browsing otherwise.
4. Start with a clear well defined product range - you can add to it later.  Too many bits and pieces can look messy and make it unclear to customers what it is you make and sell.  Examples of pages that have an clear brand and style are Holly-Blues and Quirky Birds, Patterns in the Wind, Gracie's Dolls , Funky Vintage and Hattifers and there are many more.
5. Clearly mark each picture with a price, some people won't like to ask and that could lose you a sale.
6. Get out there and network - 'like' other pages, comment on things they do that you like and start up conversations.
7. Observe good Facebook etiquette - do not plaster your pictures all over other sellers walls.  It's plain rude and will not win you any friends.
8. Set yourself achievable targets - whether that be for number of likers, page visits or sales.
9. However much you may be tempted by seeing how well someone elses product sells -  under no circumstances should you copy it.  If you are not good enough to design and create your own product line to a high standard then may be this isn't the business for you!
10. Enjoy meeting and interacting with your customers - there will be some challenges along the way but you will also meet some wonderful people who may well become your friends!

Welcome

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while and today I have finally decided to do it.  We all have ideas in our heads from time to time that need to come out and 'Spark of an Idea' is going to be my way of logging my ideas and sharing them with the world...............better out than in as they say!!