Work at Home - The Home Craft Business - How to Succeed by Really, Really Trying

(Note from Tawra: I am pleased to present this work at home article by Patrice Lewis, which is an excerpt from Patrice's book, "The Home Craft Business: How To Make it Survive And Thrive". Patrice writes for my favorite magazine, Countryside, and I just love her articles on working at home. So many of her observations really hit home with us! ;-)

In 1990, after my husband and I were married, we lived in Sacramento. We were doing okay in California: double income, no kids, no debt. We were renting a nice house in a nice section of town. We had a huge yard for our two dogs. Our jobs were challenging and interesting. Life was just ducky.

By Bay Area or southern California standards, Sacramento wasn't a bad place to live, but it was developing all the problems endemic to big cities. Traffic was getting worse. Gang violence was increasing. The murder rate was on the rise. Faced with these urban difficulties, rural living starting looking more and more attractive.

Besides, what kind of problems could arise from living in the country? Life would be Simple. That's it, Simple.

I leafed through a magazine and saw a bucolic picture of a farmhouse amid shocks of corn. "That," I told my husband Don, "is more what I want."

"Farming is hard work. Besides, we know nothing about it. We can't make money from a farm."

"Okay, not a farm then. A homestead where we grow our own food and stuff, and be independent and self-sufficient."

"I'm not saying we'll be good at it at first..." I said defensively. "But I want something different. Not this." I gestured toward the door where the sounds of heavy traffic could be heard, a constant din that accompanied us everywhere. "It's too crowded. Do we really want to raise any future children here?"

"We can always make a living. If we get a place where the rent is lower, we can always find jobs. Even if we're both making minimum wage, we can get by. Besides, we have some savings and no debt."

So we decided to get out of California. We looked around for a place where I could go to graduate school - that was our excuse - and bought an old house (built in 1874) and four acres just north of Medford, Oregon. Or rather, we bought the four acres, and they threw the house in for free. Literally. This tells you something about the kind of house we bought. When I told visitors how to get to our house, I'd tell them to look for the house from The Beverly Hillbillies, before Beverly Hills.

"Move to Oregon. We bought a farm," I'd reply proudly, exaggerating the truth just a touch. Our four acres were anything but a farm, but it sounded good.

"Why on EARTH do you want to leave California?" a third asked, genuinely puzzled.

"Aren't you nervous, moving to a rural area with no income?" legitimately asked a fourth.

So we moved. I went to graduate school. Don began looking around for a job in his field (he was a geologist). It occurred to us, as the months passed by and we gradually ate through our modest savings, that this wasn't quite how we envisioned the job market.

So Don decided to try something new and different: start his own business. It was all part of the Dream, you see. Somehow it didn't seem "right" to move to the country but still have an office job. We were striving for more self-sufficiency and independence, and a home business was part of this plan. We decided it was now or never.

Do you want to work from home? Are you looking for a legitimate alternative source of income in uncertain times? How about turning your craft hobby into a business?

The Home Craft Business e-book gives you step-by-step details about how to start your own business from the ground up.

This is the best e-book we have ever read on selling your crafts to make some extra money. Though Patrice has a craft business, most of the information is relevant for any type of home business.

And what would a former professional, with a master's degree in geology, do for a home business? That's right: make wooden beer steins. Gotta be a market for those, right?

Always an avid amateur woodworker, Don spent the first five months in Oregon (between job hunting) perfecting the design for our tankards. We booked our first outdoor show over Memorial Day weekend near Eugene, three hours north of us. It was an historical re-enactment camping event with about a thousand people in attendance. We set up on Friday evening, just in time for the rain to start.

We should have known. This was Oregon, after all. It rained and rained and rained. Around midnight our tent collapsed, draping soggy fabric over us as we slept. Cursing, grabbing flashlights, we splashed through the mud and repaired things as best we could.

Saturday morning dawned gray and drizzly. We sat in our booth, with the water dripping down the flaps, and gloomily regarded the rain. Occasionally we had an interested visitor, but for the most part people hurried by, splashing in the wet grass, heads bowed before the weather. Don started talking about finding a job – any job - when we got home.

Around noon, the weather broke. The sun came out, the trees shook off the water, and things looked decidedly better.

It started as a trickle of visitors, a few people who decided that, with the sun out, it was time to do some shopping. When they came to our booth, the reaction was surprise and delight at our product. When they learned that the tankards were actually functional (Don and I were, of course, demonstrating this by drinking copious quantities of hot tea throughout the day), they were enchanted.

Word spread like wildfire around the encampment. People started coming in droves. Don and I began selling tankards like crazy. They flew off the shelves, and we barely had time to restock. We made money hand over fist. Cash literally spilled out of our cash box. By the time the rain started again four hours later, we had made over $1500. In four hours.

Saturday night, when the tent collapsed under the downpour once again, we didn't even curse. Due to the weather the event was concluded early. We drove home, chilled in our damp clothes but with a happy glow in our hearts.

It would be nice to say that all our problems were solved from that day forward, but of course that wasn't the case. In fact, we had no idea of the life of hardship we were heading into. Once again, ignorance came in handy.

We spent much of the next two years on the road, going from show to show. Southern Oregon is physically isolated from most of the big shows we needed to do, and we spent four days a week away from home (driving on Friday, show on Saturday and Sunday, driving on Monday), leaving us just three days a week to work. I was still in school full-time, working part-time, and much of this exhausting schedule fell on Don. Vehicle breakdowns were frequent. The stress level was huge.

To say our finances were shaky is a massive, enormous, colossal understatement. We scraped, literally scraped, for money. We were getting discouraged and depressed by all the travel and the uncertainty of whether a show would yield any buyers or not. We wanted to start a family, but felt we couldn't until we were on less shaky ground. We wanted to start a homestead and get some livestock, but we were always away from home.

After a couple of years of this mad schedule, we found ourselves back in Sacramento (do you see the irony here?) after a show. Sunday night we got together with some friends for dinner, during which we poured out all our frustrations. If anyone could understand our insecurity and exhaustion, Tom and Pat could. Tom had started an oil-and-incense business on a card table in his garage some five years before. When he and Pat were married, they both worked on the business, developing it and expanding it, until they were now quite successful.

"Guys," they told us, "get out of the retail side of things. Stop doing shows. You'll burn out too quickly. Instead, go wholesale."

They explained that by selling wholesale, we receive only half the money per item (though we sell more pieces per order), but we have none of the expenses incurred by being on the road. No travel expenses, no broken-down vehicles, no booth fees, no gas or food purchases, no motels. Plus, and this was the largest advantage, we didn't have to be away from home. Time away from the manufacturing process was the most costly factor of all. If we sold wholesale, all of our time could be spent making product.

Over the next ten years we gradually weaned ourselves away from traveling and acquired wholesale vendors. We had two children. We fixed up the house. We acquired cows and chickens and planted a huge garden. When I finished school, I worked swing-shift full-time for six years. Eventually I quit my job to work on our business, and it became truly a family affair.

That's it in a nutshell. We've been in business now for fourteen years and have sold tens of thousands of our tankards all across the country. We have a webpage (http://donlewisdesigns.com). We have a fifteen-second commute to the shop (okay, thirty seconds in winter, when we have to wade through snow). Four years ago we sold our modest home and four acres in Oregon, and moved to a forty-acre farm in north Idaho, which we're developing into the homestead we've always wanted.

A pipe dream, you say? For some, maybe. Working for yourself takes a tremendous amount of dedication, discipline, frugality, a sense of humor, and the ability to work with your spouse. Although our product may be unusual, the principles discussed here can apply to nearly every home business.

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