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!