Let’s jump right in by discussing why business planning is a necessary effort in planning for success (you do plan to be successful, don’t you?). The primary intent of business planning is to provide you with the focus you need to prioritize your work, develop your communications, and invest your dollars. There is much more beyond this, but this is where you will want to start. Once you have a business plan, you should be aligning all of your work activities to the plan to avoid wasting extraneous effort on items that don’t support your business goals.

Let’s start by asking the seemingly most basic and straightforward question: What do you want your business to be? In other words, what are you going to be selling? Is it a tangible product such as jewelry or will it be a service such as graphic design? Mind you, services often come with tangible end-products (i.e. Graphic Design may end up with a logo, a banner, etc). Sometimes you can confuse the two, as happens occasionally in sewing. For instance, if you pre-sew plush dolls and sell them, you are offering a product. If you are taking an order for custom apparel, you are actually offering a service, even if the end result is a tangible product. Read More

OK. Maybe not THAT drastic. I hit a crux point of priorities, scheduling, finances and reality this week that is impacting my business plan going forward. Of course, that doesn’t mean much because I never really had a business plan! Like so many entrepreneurs, I jumped into my craft and art selling life without a lot of forethought, mostly because craft shows had been fairly easy to do and then I stumbled across Etsy, which seemed ideal as a start-up. Like most entrepreneurs who follow this unplanned path though, I’ve hit many stumbling blocks and instead of stepping back and evaluating what I need to do, what my goals are, and how realistic my lack of planning was, I’ve just kept pushing ahead blindly. Having been the Chief Technology Officer of a Fortune 50 company and a business consultant, you’d think I would have known better. I didn’t. I got caught up in the ease and excitement of being an online seller and left my brain at the keyboard. Thus, it’s time to re-think my approach in the manner I would use for others. I’m going to be sharing my thoughts hoping others can draw upon this for their own needs as well and will state up-front that this needs to be a multi-part series so if you can, hang in there until the end! Part I will be posted this weekend and will discuss the need for proper business planning, if you are just attempting to sell as a hobby or as a business. Look for it and I’ll see you then!

The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dali.

Well, going back to a 40+ hour work week last week really had a major impact on my art and crafts. I thought I was prepared for it, I really did, but I wasn’t prepared for it at all. Despite my best efforts, I have done very little painting, no sewing, and even went a day without any new original blog posts! As Pink Floyd sings, time is slipping into the future….

As being productive is very important to me, especially in light of the additional plans I’ve been working on, I really needed to whip my prioritization and time management up a notch. To begin with, I needed to determine what my priorities really are. Putting aside family (my children in particular), the priority of project-focused effort goes: Read More