Hype vs. Reality

We've all heard those peppy commercials: Be Your Own Boss! Work at Home! Set Your Own Hours! Spend More Time with your Family!

The Hype: Be Your Own Boss
The Reality: Work your fanny off.

The Hype: Work at Home
The Reality: Never leave home.

The Hype: Set Your Own Hours
The Reality: How does 8 a.m. to midnight sound?

The Hype: Spend More Time with your Family
The Reality: How well do you get along with your spouse and kids?

If you're prepared to look with a realistic eye at the grim side as well as the bright side of a home business, you'll probably do fine.

Even here in Idaho, the land of the independent, we're something of an anomaly. To work from home is a dream of many of our neighbors, who don't understand what it's like to work over a hundred hours in one week during our busy season. Once I was in the grocery store, bleary-eyed from working until 2:30 a.m. that morning, when a neighbor (who drives an hour to get to his job) stopped me and said, "You're so lucky to be able to work at home!" I stared at him and muttered, "Not during the busy season."

Spousal Support

Many people have told us, "How can you work with your spouse? If I had to work with mine, we'd kill each other." A home business, even if it is "run" by only one person, must have the support and approval of the other spouse in order to tolerate long hours, show travel, expenses, and an emotional gamut ranging from elation to despair. Is your spouse supportive of this?

You'd darn well better get along with – and respect - your spouse if you're going to have a home business. As the peppy commercials promise, you will indeed spend more time with your family. You won't be at leisure, you understand, but by golly your kids will be right there underfoot as you try to finish that rush order.

Don and I are fortunate in that we work well together. We each have our strengths in this business, but Don is the boss. I'm the employee. The advantage is that he has been having a long-standing affair with his vice-president for the last fourteen years, and I don't mind a bit.

Be Prepared to Live Very Frugally

Do you love to shop? Love clothes? Adore ordering from catalogs? Dream of the latest home-improvement project? Well, stop it. Starting a business costs money, and the first thing you learn is that any – and I mean any – extra money must be put into the business first. Did you make $1000 selling some products? Great! Now you can buy some raw materials to buy more, instead of binging on clothes at Macy's or buying that nifty fishing rod.

When we moved from California to Oregon, we had to adjust from an income of over $70,000 a year (between the two of us) to zero, zilch, nada. We lived on student loans and a modest savings account until we had our first show. There is no faster method of learning frugality than to become unemployed. You too can discover the joys of Goodwill and Value Village, my all-time favorite stores.

Time Clocks

There are no time clocks with a home business except the one in your head. To make your business succeed, you must be a strong self-motivator and self-starter. If you need a boss to nag you or at least keep an eye on you, don't quit your day job.

Blame the Boss

Be prepared to blame the boss – look in the mirror – if things go wrong. Don't blame your spouse, the economy (well, maybe a little), the kids, the dog, the weather…There is no doubt that certain factors not under our control can influence the success or failure of our business, but the fact remains that most business fail for two reasons: (1) poor business practices; and (2) nobody wants the product. The idea that nobody wants to buy your lavender-velvet frammerjammits might be hard to accept, but sometimes it's true.

Research Your Market

You need to find a niche and fill it with something people want. Yeah, yeah, you've heard it before, but it's true. To go into business competing with hundreds or thousands of people making similar or identical products is asking to fail. Can you honestly, brutally look at your lavender-velvet frammerjammits and determine if there is a need or want for them? Do people clamor for them?

For instance, a few years ago when the cigar craze swept the country, Don seriously thought about getting into the humidor business. A quick search on the internet revealed that there were hundreds of humidor manufacturers around the country. He dropped the idea immediately.

The more common your craft, the thinner the market. Country crafts and jewelry, for instance, are popular items, but there are many people already making them. Your product must be unique enough, cheap enough, or high-quality enough to compete.

Don and I learned that craft shows – the kind that feature country crafts or other products that appeal to women – are financial flops for us. Our tankards have a more masculine appeal. We learned that themed events such as Oktoberfests or Renaissance Faires bring in much higher sales.

To whom do your products appeal? Men? Women? Children? White collar workers? Blue collar workers? Yuppies? Rural dwellers? City dwellers? Tailor your marketing accordingly. For example, it would be less cost-effective for us to advertise to women because our tankards have a masculine appeal. Likewise, don't advertise in beer magazines if you want to sell lace doilies.

It Takes Time

Rarely does an item hit the market and become an overnight, long-term, national success. It takes time to build a market for your product. You must find customers, you must advertise, you must develop a reputation for excellence. This is where the frugality part times in: live cheap while you build your business.

Startup Costs

What kind of tools do you need? Will you need a sewing machine, a quilting machine, a bandsaw? Consider borrowing or renting an item for awhile until you learn whether your craft business will succeed. Alternately, think of a business which is compatible with tools you already own because of a hobby. Purchase items that you'll need slowly, over a period of time, before officially "starting" your business.

Don't bury yourself in debt (buying tools or supplies) because of wishful thinking or misplaced optimism. Obviously you'll need the raw materials and tools to make the product, but work your way up towards better items as you begin to bring in income.

When we started our business, we had an 850 square-foot house and a 10x14 foot unheated shop. This meant that in winter, the shop moved into the house. Or, to put it another way, we lived in our shop. It took us five years before we could afford to build a larger shop building. Yes, sometimes it got annoying living in the shop, but it was better than going into debt to build a shop at a time when we were financially shaky.

Do you have space on your property to run a business? If you have close neighbors, they may object to loud power tools. (Despite our nearest neighbors being a quarter mile away, we still won't run our noisiest tools after nine o'clock at night lest we disturb them.) Do you have a shop or a garage or a spare bedroom you can devote to your business? Do you have a computer for billing and internet purposes? Are you prepared for shipping?

Don't Quit Your Day Job

The most logical way to start a home business (this is an example of "do what we say, not what we do") is to do it in your off-hours. Evenings and weekends can be devoted to making – and selling – your product. This allows you to test the waters before sacrificing your secure income.

If you are an artist, say, and want to paint landscapes for a living, it would be foolish to quit your day job in order to paint if you've never sold a painting in your life.

I can't say we followed this advice, since we moved to Oregon with no jobs in sight. While some might argue that it was excellent motivation to make our business succeed, I would counter by saying that the stress and financial instability may not be worth it for most folks.

Be flexible. Look around at your talents – perhaps they can supplement your income as well.

Love What You Do

Can you devote hours, days, weeks, years to making your product?

Prepare to have a love/hate relationship with your product after awhile. Don and I are immensely proud of our tankards – we love to go to a Renaissance Faire and see strangers walking around with them – but to say that we love tankards might be a stretch.

If you're afraid that if you go into quilt-making full-time that you'll eventually loath quilts, you might be right. If you feel that doing a hobby full-time will ruin your enjoyment of it, perhaps you should consider making something else and keeping your hobby a hobby.

Efficiency vs. Quality

Always look for ways to increase your efficiency without sacrificing quality. Remember: efficiency equals time, and time equals money.

For example, one of the production steps in making our tankards involve gluing the individual side staves together into the body. For years we did this step by laboriously tightening a series of strings with a stick around the body of the tankard, three strings per tankard.

It was horrifically time-consuming, something like five minutes each. The un-winding of each string after the tankards dried took just as much time, five minutes each. If this doesn't sound like much, multiply this by a pile of 150 tankards that need to be glued up (and we do this about once a week), and you'll have an idea how much we dreaded glue-up days. We thought and thought and thought about ways to make this step go faster. We tried and discarded a dozen different ideas. Nothing was better than those hated strings-and-sticks.

So one summer, when work piled up, we hired a temporary worker and cannily gave the poor guy the dreaded glue-up job. Clyde stuck it out for two hours and then finally said, "Why don't use guys use surgical tubing and wrap that around the tankards?"

We stared at him, stunned. In two hours, Clyde managed to do what we had failed to do in three years: come up with a simple solution to our problem. Thanks to Clyde's suggestion, we now use surgical tubing, and it has decreased the total time spent on gluing each tankard from about ten minutes to one minute. Multiply this by the tens of thousands of tankards we've sold over the last fourteen years, and you'll get an idea of just how much time – and money – we've saved.

Oh yeah, we paid Clyde a bonus for his brilliant insight.

Read "The Home Craft Business", Part 3

Read "The Home Craft Business", Part 1