If you're feeling frustrated
and overwhelmed with your handmade business
because maybe it isn't going anywhere.
You're spending so much time working on it,
but why aren't you flooded with sales yet?
I get that feeling when you think
your business is struggling.
But that's why you have to watch this video
because things may not be what they seem.
Keep watching.
Hi, my name is Mei, and I help
makers, artists, and designers
make a profitable handmade business online
without keeping up with social media.
I'm going to say something that might blow your mind.
How you feel about your business
and your sales numbers
aren't always correlated.
Take, for example, an influencer on Instagram.
She takes really cool pictures,
gets loads of comments
and hearts on her posts,
because huge falling.
She's excited, and feeling great about her business.
And then I say,
“Hey, can I see your sales numbers?”
Uh oh, even with 2.6 million followers
and tens of thousands of likes
and hundreds of comments on each post,
you couldn't even sell 36 t-shirts?
Yep.
That's what happened with a real-life influencer Arii a few years ago.
She made it on the news.
So you can see how easy it is to
let certain metrics
make you feel good about certain things,
but not all metrics are an indicator
of the actual health of your business.
Vanity metrics don't really affect
your actual sales and profit
Yet we can be so hooked on
those metrics like follower size
and engagement numbers.
On the other hand,
there's me and my Instagram account
for Tiny Hands Jewelry
got shut down last year
right before the holiday season.
For no good reason.
And I keep reaching out to Instagram to appeal it,
but it doesn't go anywhere,
and then I start to feel really crappy.
Like what's even the point anymore.
So I missed out on a great Black Friday
Cyber Monday season
because I was feeling
so out of it that I didn't do
my usual prep and strategy.
Sales just fell flat.
And by the end of the year,
I felt really crummy about my business.
Especially since I was kind of mourning
the loss of my Instagram account.
I mean, I only spend a decade growing
that account to about 50,000 followers,
but guess what? I
like to review my numbers at the end of every year
and discovered
I actually made a really great year.
I still made about a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in sales.
My conversion rates were up and I
didn't need Instagram to make sales,
even though I might have thought
it was important for my business.
You see, the moral of the story is feelings lie.
Numbers don't.
So I want to take some time to help YOU
crunch some of your own numbers.
so you can finally get clarity on how your business is.
Doing intuition is great,
but the numbers will tell you the truth of what's really happening.
The only way to tell how your business is doing
is to really sit down and look at numbers.
Well, I'm not going to go through the accounting details
because everyone's using a different
software and counting techniques.
I will give you, however, a few questions
you should think about when you review your business.
The first question is, what was your last 365 days of revenue?
That's money coming in.
Now, what about your expenses?
You can take your revenue and deduct your expenses
to find out your profit.
Your profit is the money you're left with.
Are you charging enough to make enough profit?
If you feel like you've been working really hard
and and you're barely making any profit,
it's a sign you're not charging enough.
Second question:
What was your biggest expense category,
and is this justified?
So are there places where expenses seem too high?
Have you reached a level where you
can change up your supply line,
for example,
ordering in bulk,
or shifting your packaging options
doing an audit on your expenses
can really show you how to optimize your spending
so you're not wasting money
in things that don't actually move your business forward.
Next, what recurring expenses
do you have or services
are you signed up for,
and are you fully satisfied with the service you're getting?
For example, maybe you're paying a monthly fee to
access a craft class membership site,
but you haven't logged in for months.
Are you making the most of your subscriptions,
or could you downsize your subscriptions
or maybe even cancel them all together?
I was paying $500 every month for a
paid Facebook Ad software
that was great when I started using it,
but in the last year,
it stopped being useful.
Why was I still keeping it around?
No good reason, so, I canceled it.
And now that $500 can go towards
something more useful for my business
or it can go straight back into my pocket.
Now. I also want you to look at what was your biggest traffic referrer?
Where are you getting most of your traffic from?
Social media,
Instagram, Facebook Pinterest,
or maybe it's from Google,
or from that one blog feature.
you had a while back.
And did that form of traffic actually convert into sales?
What was the sales conversion rate
for each of those traffic sources?
For me and most business owners I know,
Pinterest has one of the lowest sales conversion rates.
And once I found that out,
I stop spending so much time on my Pinterest account.
On the flip side,
is there a way to replicate the positive results you've achieved
with your top referral?
Let's just do more of what works, right?
Next, where are you spending the most time in your business?
If you're not sure, this is where it can be useful to start tracking your time
based on what activity you're doing
over the next couple of weeks.
It’ll be incredibly eye-opening,
and I recommend you do this even though
you have a hunch already on where you spend your time on,
because as we mentioned earlier,
our hunch is usually off.
How this is useful to know Is
it could tell you if there is a
step in your production process
that's keeping you from growing.
You want to know about
bottlenecks in your business
so you can bust through them
and keep moving forward.
Are there apps, plugins, processes that can help,
or maybe you need to hire some freelance help?
I know hiring help can sound scary,
but if you outsource the right things,
it could save you a lot of
valuable time and money.
You might also want to compare all of your numbers to the previous years
if you've been in business for a while.
Have you been growing or stagnating?
Remember it's easy to feel like you're not getting anywhere,
but that's because you're used to the new normal of making
however many sales are making now.
But if we stop to think about how
many sales we made last year,
it will help us see just
how far we've come.
These are just a few questions to get you started.
The more you can get comfortable with your numbers,
the more power and control you have
over your business.
It'll give you a direction to move towards
rather than just flailing around,
not sure what to do.
So, were there any numbers that really surprised you?
I want you to let me know in the comments!
I love to hear.