A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about all of the things I had learned from my very first year as a one-person business.
As we small business owners are always so hard on ourselves, I thought it might be nice to revisit this process regularly. A reminder to myself of how far I have come, and a reminder to other small business folks that we are all in the same boat, facing many of the same challenges.
Then, last year hit me like a train, and this idea….like so much self care, got pushed to the back of the line.
So, having missed the lessons learned from my second year in business, here are the lessons from my third.
1. You must take care of yourself first.
It is so easy and so seductive to believe that you need to put your business first for a while, that you just need to push through a lean period and that you’ll get back to exercise and eating healthily after that’s done. Sometimes it might even be true. But these are usually very very short periods because, if you don’t take care of your health, everything else starts to get a hundred times more difficult and it becomes a kind of death spiral.
Often the lack of self-care is just another way of beating ourselves up because we haven’t reached the desired level of success yet (hello…my name is Nicola and I am a chronic self flagellator). Instead of coming from a need to prioritise one thing over another, it actually comes from a nasty place of believing that we don’t deserve anything until those bills are paid.
Don’t do it. Feed yourself. Get enough sleep. Get outside. Do the things that make you feel good and you’ll have so much more to give to your business and your customers.
2. Be wary of taking on too much.
If things aren’t going quite the way you planned (and frankly, when do they?) it’s easy to believe that more action is the key. For us artists and makers that means more shows, more exhibitions, more new products, trade shows, Etsy, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook…..more, more, more.
One of the many coaches I have worked with over the past few years once said to me that a sale of £100 takes the same amount of effort and work as a sale of £1000. It’s the same with all of the new things you try.
“You never know until you have a go” are some of the most dangerous words a small business owner can hear. You can’t always “know” but you should ALWAYS have a system to evaluate the opportunity in financial terms. All of these new shows, products, social networks take effort and time and everything you say yes to, means you are saying no to something else. This year I have definitely learned to be selective and say no far more often than I say yes.
3. Find Allies
As supportive as friends and family can be (and thank goodness for them) they can only listen to you talk about how much you love Pinterest for so long before they lose the will to live.
At some point, in fact at many points, you will feel quite alone. If you’re neglecting lesson 1 then you’ll also be struggling to make conversation with “normal people” as your brain spins. So find the people having the same struggles. Get together for coffee. Help each other out where you can. Keep each other on track. Many of my coaches called this an “accountability partner” but I prefer to call it “friends.” Friends who understand are vital. We don’t have co-workers to talk to but there are plenty of other people out there going through similar struggles and we don’t have to feel alone.
4. Professionals buy the tools they need. Amateurs say they can’t afford it.
This was the year that I finally gave up on spreadsheets (or F*cking Excel as I call it) and started using tools that were more intuitive for me….even if they cost money.
I started to use Kashflow for my accounts and inventory management and have gone from spending an entire day on my monthly accounts, to spending 10 minutes a day and about half an hour once a month to reconcile my bank statement. My accounts are submitted to my accountant right after the tax year ends and I move on to doing the stuff I enjoy doing.
I finally bought InDesign and taught myself to use it. I was worried about the expense and whether I would use it enough but it has save me literally DAYS of hair pulling work on my catalogues and linesheets. Previously I was using two different tools, neither of which worked properly.
I use Asana for keeping myself on track with everything that has to get done, replacing a million different notebooks and scraps of paper and no less than THREE calendar apps on my phone. I use Evernote as my personal scrapbook and Dropbox to keep all my files safe and secure. This is going to be the year I finally sort out a proper system to catalogue all my images too. I’m done with taking forever to find anything.
InDesign and Kashflow have options to pay monthly. Asana, Evernote and Dropbox have free options, though in some cases I have paid for additional features. Saving money by using a system that doesn’t work for you isn’t smart, or thrifty, it’s unprofessional and most likely all about that self flagellation once again. Do yourself a favour and invest in tools that free up your time…even if you don’t use that time for creative work…even if you use it for reading Kinfolk Magazine with a hot chocolate.
5. Turnover is Vanity, Profit is Sanity
This is something my Dad always says and, oh my goodness, is he right (but don’t tell him I said that).
Two years ago I was stuck in a rut of doing shows that just were costing far too much money in stand fees and accommodation. The shows in Yorkshire were smaller and less successful than the shows further afield, but the further away shows didn’t make enough to offset the increased costs of petrol, hotels and food. What a bummer, right?
I was exhausted from all of the travel and I really wasn’t seeing any benefits but I was really scared that it was only the shows that were keeping my little business going and that, if I wasn’t out in the world meeting people, then my sales would drop off a cliff and I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills.
Eventually, after one more barely profitable show I threw the towel in and decided to drastically cut back my shows in the next year. I used my F*cking Excel spreadsheet to work out a formula for which shows were profitable enough and which weren’t and I waited to see if my sales would fall off a lot….
And they did … but, and it’s a big but, I made far more in profits than I had the year before. Lesson learned. Less profitable events can be used as advertising, but then they have to be assessed against other forms of advertising. Sometimes it’s possible to get more bang for your buck elsewhere and persisting with a less effective advertising just because you don’t know or understand the alternatives is not the way forward.
6. Sometimes you have to completely throw something out, before you can find its replacement
As someone who finally realised, after two years of worry, that she had to quit her extremely full and busy job before she could see where to go next, you might have expected me to know this one but sometimes these lessons have a funny way of popping back up again, wearing a disguise.
When your life is completely full (see lesson 2) you have no space to figure out what to do next. You’re stuck on a treadmill and, if that treadmill isn’t working for you (see lesson 5), there isn’t anything else to do but get off. I’m looking forward to seeing what disguise this particular lesson is wearing the next time it comes around!
7. Remember why you got into this in the first place
Don’t ever forget that all of the day to day ins and outs of business are only there to support you in doing this thing that has real meaning for you and allows you to do your best work in the world.
This is why lesson 4 is so important. The time that you spend on doing things in the least efficient way is all time away from making or creating.
There isn’t an artist or maker alive who got into this in order to check off to do lists and fill in spreadsheets in F*cking Excel. We got into this to be creative. Every day. Anything that gets in the way of that has to be changed. Not all at once and not overnight. But recognise that this is not inline with the way you want your business and life to be and start making changes (see lesson 4).
8. Accept that every rejection is harder because your work is so personal but don’t take it so personally too.
It’s tough to accept and understand that rejection will sting all the more because the thing you are attempting to sell is so much a part of you. Every time a shop you desperately want to stock your work says no, every time you get no response to your pitch to a journalist, every time a customer tells you right to your face that your lovely thing is not for them, it will hurt. It will hurt far more than if you buy in products and then resell them. Sometimes that hurt will make you feel ashamed for trying to sell your lovely thing. Sometimes it will make you question its worth. Sometimes you will even forget that their comments or their rejection was about your lovely thing, rather than you yourself.
You can’t do anything about this. It is part of the deal when you make something that is a part of you. It’s incredibly rewarding when it goes well, and the shittiest of shit times when it doesn’t. Accept the rollercoaster, try to keep it in perspective and don’t take it so personally and you’ll bounce back much quicker.
And if you are an artist or maker and you want to learn all about how to pitch your work to shops in a friendly, non-sleazy and, most importantly of all, effective manner, I can highly recommend Indie Retail Academy’s wonderful “What Retailers Want” class.
So those are my eight lessons learned in the third year of running my business. Knowing me and my inability to learn, I may very well be repeating some of these in my fourth year. Do any of them ring true for you?