- When I work with makers,
I get to see all the stages of their progress:
from hobby, to starting a shop,
to growing and marketing their business,
and so, I also get to see the impact
that each stage has on the maker's mindset
and on their life in general.
And something I hear makers and sellers say quite often
is, "It used to be fun, now it's stressful!"
And let's face it, when you turn your hobby into a business,
it can get stressful.
So, what can you do when running your shop
stops being fun and starts being stressful instead?
Let's dive in.
(gentle upbeat music)
Bonjour, my name is Deb and I am the founder of tizzit.co,
a membership community for makers
and handmade shop owners,
just like your fabulous self.
You can learn more about our community, Tizzit HQ,
via the link below this video.
But for now, let's jump straight into today's conversation:
starting my handmade business was fun,
but now it's stressful!
The first piece of advice I give to makers
is to step back and take a moment to breathe!
I know I'm sounding a little bit
like your yoga instructor right now, but I really mean it.
Relax your shoulders, take a deep breath,
and breathe some of that stress out.
Because you cannot figure out the cause of your stress
when you're stressed! (laughs)
Let's face it, it's easy to know that you feel stressed.
Or know that your business is stressing you out
and making you feel all sorts of overwhelmed.
And when this happens, it's human nature to say,
"Ugh! I'm so overwhelmed!"
But we just keep trying, we wanna get things done,
hoping that if we catch up,
or we become more efficient somehow,
we're gonna feel less stressed and less overwhelmed
and all will be great.
But what you really need to do
is take a moment to ask yourself,
"What is stressful? What's the reason stress is there?"
Then use that information
to work towards an actual solution.
I like to call this my Problem/Diagnosis/Solution approach.
What's that?
It means that before you can come up with solutions,
you need to diagnose the root issues causing the problem
and start from there.
Then, you can start to get to the bottom
of why you're having this problem,
determine what things are actually stressful;
what's the reason that stress is there in the first place.
Once you've done that,
it's much easier to come up with a plan
to alleviate some of that stress.
To make this easier to understand,
let's walk through the three specific issues
I hear about the most when I work with makers
and shop owners that are often a cause of this
"It was fun, but now it's stressful," feeling:
the first is financial stress,
the second is overwhelm,
and the third is when the vision you had for your business
and the reality don't quite match.
So, the problem is that you're feeling stressed,
and the first thing you need to do
is find the issue behind the stress.
Let's start with the first issue,
you're feeling financial stress.
When you make things for a hobby,
it's all about the pure joy of making.
There is no pressure, you can just enjoy the process
and celebrate the result.
But when you make that switch from hobby to business,
your goals change.
You have expenses that you need to cover,
and while before making a bit of a profit was a bonus
and you really were just doing it for fun,
now, making a profit is a top priority,
you need to make money.
That's financial pressure in a nutshell.
So, if the problem is stress,
and the cause of this stress for you is financial pressure,
what's the solution?
The key here is not putting all of your financial eggs
into the one new business basket
if you're just getting started!
If you plan to go full time
with your business at some stage,
you want to build a buffer of savings
and see sales coming in
before you give up your other sources of income.
So, one, keep a secondary source of income.
By this, I mean don't quit your day job
or if you don't have a job right now,
find outside revenue streams
that will bring in consistent income
while you're building your business.
Build a buffer,
and wait until you see consistent sales coming in
before you consider quitting your job
to sell your products full time.
And second is, whether you're planning
your new business right now
or you're in the thick of starting and growing your shop,
reassess expectations
and determine how long it will take to make money;
it's important to set realistic expectations
because unrealistic expectations cause unnecessary stress.
I have a video called, "How long will it take to get sales
from your handmade or Etsy shop?"
that will help you figure this out,
I'll include the link to it below this video,
so that you can watch it after you finish watching this one.
So, the overall plan to lower this stress
is to remove that financial pressure as much as possible.
When you do this, you are letting yourself have more room
to experiment and learn
without a time bomb ticking above your head.
Now, lets talk about the cause of stress number two,
overwhelm.
Overwhelm is something that seems to set in
once you get your business up and running.
And it's a very normal and very common issue
that I see with sellers
coming out of the dream and start stages
and getting into the grow stage of the Maker's Roadmap.
Let me take a moment here
and explain quickly what the Maker's Roadmap is
for those of you who might not be Tizzit HQ members
and not know what I'm talking about right now.
The Maker's Roadmap is a four-step system I created
to guide you from starting
to growing a successful handmade business.
It lays out the four stages
of building a handmade business in the right order,
so you know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
There's four stages to the roadmap.
The first is dream.
This is when you're dreaming up your business,
you're thinking of what you want to sell
and how you want to sell it,
and you're developing a business plan.
The second is start.
In this stage, you get out of planning mode
and you dive into doing mode
in order to launch your shop and product collections.
By the end of this stage,
you have everything in place
to start getting traffic and sales from your shop.
The third stage is grow.
This is pretty much the marketing stage.
It's time to focus on bringing
qualified traffic to your shop,
marketing your products,
and most importantly, getting some sales.
And finally, the fourth stage is scale.
Once traffic is coming in steadily to your site
and you're getting consistent sales,
you are ready to add more traffic and sales channel
to your marketing strategy, scale up,
and expand your business.
Okay, back to our "overwhelm" issue.
Why am I sharing the different
Maker's Roadmap stages with you?
How is this related?
Well, because when you are in the dream and start stages,
at the beginning,
it's really nice and easy because it's linear, right?
You're doing one thing at a time.
First, you decide on what you're going to sell,
then you create it,
then you're going to take pictures,
write a product description,
add it to your shop, et cetera, et cetera.
Everything happens in a linear manner,
finish one thing, then do the next,
and it's easy in that way.
You have an action plan, you go through it,
and that's that.
But, when you move to the grow stage, which is marketing,
suddenly, it feels like you need to be everywhere at once!
You're managing orders, and customers,
and your different sales platform;
maybe you're on Instagram and on Pinterest,
and you're trying to do email marketing as well.
And suddenly, it feels like a lot.
It feels like everything is happening at once
and it can be very stressful and overwhelming!
So, if the problem is stress
and it's caused by this newly-discovered overwhelm,
what's the solution?
My first tip is always do less (laughs)
and follow the JOMO or Joy of Missing Out philosophy.
I cannot emphasise this enough.
So many times I see makers trying to do way too much
or trying to be on all the social media platforms.
They're on Etsy, or they have their own website,
they're on Pinterest, and Facebook, and Instagram,
and they're trying to do the best they can
on all those different platforms.
But that's, like, physically impossible,
there's not enough time in the day for it.
It causes stress and overwhelm,
and eventually, you will run yourself into a wall.
That's why I tell the makers I work with to practise JOMO:
the Joy of Missing Out.
When you follow JOMO,
you learn that focusing on just one or two key platforms,
and doing those platforms really well,
will bring you much better results
than trying to be all over the place,
which is not efficient in terms of marketing and results;
like, it can't work.
Next, I want you to develop systems.
So, as I talked about,
at the beginning of your business,
everything you do is linear.
You can make a handy checklist with things like:
take product photos,
write product description for that product,
and then upload that product to my shop, for example.
Then, you just work your way through it, and it feels nice,
and you can stay on schedule.
But now that you're in the grow stage
and focusing on marketing, things aren't linear anymore,
they become cyclical.
You have to do Pinterest maybe every week, every month,
Instagram every day,
maybe some stuff every week, every month.
And so, it just feels overwhelming
because you feel like every day,
you have a million things to do.
And when that happens,
you have to go from a "to-do list" approach
to creating systems for your cyclical activities.
You're going to create systems for your Instagram strategy,
you're going to create systems for your Pinterest strategy,
your email marketing strategy, all these things,
so that they are organised.
Now, I know some of you
are not liking hearing the word "system,"
but truthfully, all a system is
is a plan for when you will do something,
each week, each month, each quarter, and what you will do.
Having systems in place is the one and only way
to grow your handmade business successfully,
and will save you a tonne of time,
so that you have time for fun and creative things;
the things that actually bring you joy.
I have a video called,
"The Reality of Growing a Successful Handmade Business,"
that helps you decide which to-dos need systems,
and has examples to help you create your own.
I'll put the link for it in the resource section down below
if you wanna watch it after this one.
Now, cause of stress number three.
Something else that can happen is realising
that what you wanted your business to look like,
and how you envisioned it fitting into your life,
doesn't match with what it actually looks like in real life.
When you first get excited about an idea,
you follow through and implement it,
because that's just what creative
and entrepreneurial people do, right?
You see what other sellers
that are successful are may be doing,
and you're inspired by that
and you want to do that for your business.
But all this excitement
means that you might not spend
a lot of time thinking about
what it means for you long-term,
or how it's going to fit in with your life.
Or maybe you do, but once you start the business,
it doesn't fit into your life the way you thought it would.
So, let's look at a few examples here.
Example one.
Imagine that you paint watercolour illustrations,
and your entire marketing strategy
revolves around launching
a new original collection every month.
Your business model is built on original art,
and you've built a personal brand as an artist on,
for example, Instagram.
And that was really fun for a couple of years.
But now, you're starting to feel creatively drained
and a little stressed.
Each month, you might feel pressure to create,
and it's removing the love that you had for your art.
Plus, you're realising
that it's not sustainable long-term
because what if you want three months to go on a holiday?
Does that mean that you skip three collections
and you sacrifice three months of income?
Another example of that vision
not quite matching the reality,
is imagine if you became very successful
selling large home decor pieces,
like, say, woven or knitted wall hangings;
large one, custom one.
They're very time consuming to make
as they're literally a piece of art.
And for that reason, they are expensive.
So, in terms of the numbers, your business works.
You have a good profit margin, and in fact,
if you sell five to seven a month, you're golden
and you're making a really nice wage for yourself.
You're happy with that.
There's no need, or pressure,
to have a huge number of sales each month.
This business model has been working great,
but what you didn't maybe consider
is that when an order comes in,
you suddenly have to make room
to create that time consuming item.
Time that you didn't necessarily plan for that week.
So, you can't push it out
because that person is waiting for that item to be shipped,
and so, you're super stressed every time an order comes in
and you're working very late at night,
and when you get three orders in one week, it's panic.
Maybe you didn't have kids before and it was fine,
but in the last couple of years, you've grown your family,
so you have even less time flexibility,
and so, this business model
isn't really working for you anymore.
If that happens, you might start wondering
if it would be easier to have smaller items
getting sold more regularly,
rather than those big custom items,
or maybe a mix of both.
Now, if you recognise yourself in one of these examples
or you might not, but you might start thinking
about how your business fits into your life
and think, "Yeah, actually, there are some gaps there.
It's not exactly the way I need it to be
for it to work for me and not the other way around."
If that is the case and you're like,
"What have I done?"
"What have I built?"
"I've built a business that doesn't work for me."
Here's what I want you to remember.
You built it, you can destruct it,
and rebuild it differently.
It's normal for a business to grow and change,
and you can absolutely deconstruct what you've built
and rebuild it differently.
If there is stress caused
by how your business is working right now,
it's time to think about how you can change that
to reduce that stress and make it work better for you.
Of course, you need to do this in a way
that still brings the money.
It is a business and you need to be making a profit.
I know you need to make a consistent wage
and my goal with anyone I work with
is to help them make consistent income with their shop.
But, it's also important
that you do it in a way that works for you
and fits well within your life.
There is no one way to make this work,
you need to find yours.
Every maker and every business is different.
You don't have to copy
what you see other successful sellers do.
They have a completely different set of circumstances
in their life that you might not have and vice versa.
So, you always want to filter ideas
by asking, "How would that fit inside of my life?"
Go back to the basics and ask yourself:
What are my goals?
Maybe some have changed,
or you've realised new ones
based on what hasn't been working for you
in your current business model.
What do I have available in terms of time and flexibility?
Then, reverse engineer
how your business can fit around those constraints,
and start pivoting and shifting your business model,
so that it works better for you.
So, all of the things we've talked about here:
implementing systems to make your life easier,
matching your business model with your life
and your lifestyle,
reinventing how you do things,
and finding what works for you.
These are what we love to help our members do
inside Tizzit HQ.
We have all the courses you need,
plus supportive coaching calls
and accountability calls that help keep you on track.
So, if you feel you'd benefit
from some support and guidance
as you work out what works for you,
join us at Tizzit HQ and let us help you
get your business off the ground
or take it to the next level.
I'll put the link below to learn more
and to join the membership.
Thanks for watching,
make sure to check the links below,
and until next time, au revoir!