But I Want it NOW:
It Takes Time to Establish
A Home Craft Business
by
Patrice Lewis
plewis@rezmail.com
www.donlewisdesigns.com
Imagine, if you will, that I’ve adopted a nasty whiny voice, something like a three-year-old might utilize in some of her more annoying moments. “But I waaaant it noooowwww!”
Want what? A toy, a play date, a cookie?
Nah, nothing that simple. What I’m whining for is Instant Business Success.
We are a nation of instant gratification, and the old platitude that good things are worth waiting for is never truer than in a home craft business. However, this is easier said than done. We all want success now, at once, this instant, immediately, right away. Sometimes the “right away” can include an irrational desire for something to be given to us without having worked for it beforehand.
We run a home craft business. It’s our sole source of income. We work at home. We don’t have to commute. We get to see our kids all the time. We’re living the American dream, everyone’s fantasy lifestyle. (Right.)
Gosh darn, aren’t we lucky.
NOT.
The Harder I Work, the Luckier I Get
I’ll admit, I get a little bit offended when people attribute our current circumstances to luck. Luck implies that we haven’t done anything to get to where we are. In other words, luck implies that our present situation had nothing to do with our past sacrifices. And boy, did we sacrifice. Still do.
We spent ten years sacrificing before we “succeeded” well enough that I could stop working outside the home and join my husband in our home business. Ten years of staggering financial insecurity, of really, really long hours, of poor decisions that impacted us in both the short term and the long term. Ten years.
No, we’re not lucky. We’re stubborn, we’re determined, we’re (sometimes) desperate, but we’re not lucky. Through hard lessons we’ve finally acquired a modicum of business sense and made some sound decisions, but that business sense and those sound decisions were only obtained after a lot of stupid errors, poor business practices, and other embarrassing relics of that decade from hell.
Rarely does a craft 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 frugality comes in: live cheap while you build your business.
High Expectations
Of course, you’re going into business because you have high expectations of success. There’s nothing wrong with that. (What would be the opposite – that you went into business with the expectation of failing…?)
However, temper your expectations with a huge dose of reality. Did you expect that you would do a single craft fair, or open up your webpage, or do some other promotional event, and that your product would be instantly lauded to the skies? That customers would be so dazzled and impressed that they would pass the word to their friends, and that within a month orders would come pouring in?
Possible, but not likely. Your product is in competition with every other booth at the craft fair, with every other web page on the internet, with every other business out there who is vying for the dollar in the customer’s pocket. It’s up to you to garner the patience to keep improving your product, your pricing, your exposure, your market, your wholesalers, or whatever other means you utilize to increase business. And this all takes Time.
Patience and Foresight
It’s all too easy to look at a successful home craft business and assume that somehow it came effortlessly. When we see a thriving production, all we see is the “snapshot” of the here-and-now, and we grow envious that those people are living the, ahem, good life. What isn’t seen is the blood, sweat, tears, financial uncertainty, gnawing anxiety, and other unpleasant side effects of starting a home craft business. A thriving home business has gone through all those stages, and it’s unfair to envy them their success just because your business is at the beginning of its growth pains.
We know a woman (I’ll call her Amy) who runs a successful business making items out of beeswax. Beyond candles and other wax items, she markets a series of beauty products as well – lip balm, skin ointment, that kind of thing. Her items are classy, smell terrific, and she does very well indeed.
But it wasn’t always that way. When Amy started her business, things got going quickly. Almost with a bang, you might say. Then her child came down with a devastating illness. She needed to go back to work in order to obtain health insurance, and had to put her dream of business away for five years until her child recovered. Five long years.
Then she dusted off her dream and started again. This time things didn’t start off with a bang. However she persisted, and over the years Amy built the business slowly and surely. Today, with her husband retired, she supplies the primary income for the household. Amy overcame difficult hurdles and succeeded in her business.
Naturally we hope these horrific circumstances don’t ever happen to you. But even simple and common disasters can delay your dream of a home business (your car stops running, your kid needs braces, the barn needs a new roof). Be patient. As my mother is fond of saying, “This too shall pass.”
Oh, and by the way, even present “success” doesn’t mean that the business owner still isn’t experiencing blood, sweat, tears, financial uncertainty, and gnawing anxiety. Take it from me, it never ends.
So, among all the other factors you need to consider when starting your home business, patience is something to add to your list. Patience and foresight.
The patience is obvious, but where does the foresight come in?
You need foresight to be able to project ahead, sometimes far ahead. This is a highly unappreciated skill, and one you should practice regularly. Nearly any business decision you make will have an impact on your future.
If you annoy the craft coordinator for a local craft show, you may not realize that he probably knows and might mention you to the craft coordinator at a larger show, who will then mention you to yet another craft coordinator, and so on up the chain. You could find yourself blacklisted.
Alternately, if you prove to be an ideal vendor at a local craft show (non-complaining, helpful, complimentary, prompt, self-sufficient, that kind of thing), then not only will you be invited back the following year, but your reputation may spread to larger events. Everything is a chain reaction.
Or let’s say you need a new table saw because your old one is on its last gasp. Do you splurge on the finest table saw money can buy, putting it on your credit card and tossing the dying saw in the scrap heap? Or do you nurse your old saw along for another month or two while you save up the money and pay cash for the best saw you can afford? If something glitches in the economy and your business slows down, which route will give you greater peace of mind?
So think about the future impacts of your current decisions. Ask yourself, “Will this improve my business next week, next month, next year, next decade?”
Be Practical…and Frugal
Occasionally, when hearing about our “success” with a home woodworking business, people express an interest in seeing our workshop. God only knows what they expect to find…maybe a masculine dream of Geppetto’s workshop, full of wonderful tools and clever crafts lying about in pristine condition.
They are inevitably disappointed because, as my husband Don points out, they might as well
go to Sears where they can see most of our tools in a much cleaner environment.
Our shop is a place of business, designed to do one thing: make tankards (and occasional Christmas gifts). There are a lot of major woodworking tools that are “missing” because, though we might want them, we don’t need or wouldn’t use them. We don’t do woodworking for fun (mostly), we do it for business.
Keep your “workshop” – whatever form that takes – practical and frugal. Don’t buy what you don’t need. If you run a home bookkeeping business, why have a laser engraver? Sure it might be fun, but it’s expensive and you don’t “need” it to conduct your business.
Work Hard
Long hours are another unappreciated factor in the success of a business. “It takes time” is a statement that not only applies to the number of years it takes a business to get off the ground, but also the number of hours in a day you put into working to make that business succeed.
Consider that when you’re off having a good time on weekends and holidays, we’re usually working. Last New Year’s Eve, for example, my father called around 9 p.m. to wish us a happy New Year, and asked what we were doing.
“Making tankards,” I replied, and it was true. My husband and I had put the children to bed and were sitting at the kitchen table, gluing up tankards while most of the rest of the western world was off partying.
That’s what you have to do to succeed. You need to work hard, work consistently, work even when you don’t feel like working.
Build Your Reputation
We have a booth at the Kansas City Renaissance Faire. The event runs every weekend from about the beginning of September through mid-October.
It is, without question, our single biggest money-maker of the year. We have a husband/wife team who manage the booth for us, and these two people are among the finest sales people you’ll ever meet on the planet. For a giddy period of six or seven weeks, we make money hand over fist.
Yes, we sell well at KC. But once again, what you’re seeing is the “snapshot” of our current success.
The reason we sell so well is that we’ve been there so many years and because our booth managers work their butts off. The behind-the-scenes picture you’re not seeing is how long it took us to find our wonderful booth managers; how high the booth fee is; the taxes we have to pay to the State of Kansas; the hideously long hours we work during our busy season, supplying them with enough stock to keep the shelves full; and on and on and on. This doesn’t count the elusive things we work hard to maintain, such as high standards of quality, a nice-looking booth, and our reputation as solid, dependable craftspeople. Whew.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget that we have to salt away the money we make at KC to get us through much of the rest of the year. So please don’t gripe that we’re successful because you’re seeing the “snapshot” of the successful side we’re showing to the world. We’ve earned it.
To Gamble or Not to Gamble
We prefer not to do first-year events (shows that are in their start-up year) because we want to see a tract record of how the event does. If it’s a flop, we haven’t lost anything. If it’s a success, we might apply as a vendor the following year.
The same reluctance to take a gamble may apply to your product. People like to see a tract record for a business. They want to see if you have longevity. The “sheeple” concept says that many folks don’t want to buy something new/weird/different/strange until enough other people buy it first (then it becomes “trendy” rather than “weird,” right?).
Of course, this implies an unfair “Catch-22” situation. How can your product succeed if people won’t buy it until you’ve succeeded? There’s no solution here except to live frugally, keep your day job (if possible), and hang on until you’ve developed the tract record people like to see.
Sales are often an exponential thing. You start off slowly, and then as you sell more and more, the word catches on and you sell yet more.
Sometimes this growth process can be hurried, as with good advertising…if you can afford it, that is. Advertising is expensive, and it’s expensive for a reason - it works. You need to decide if the cost associated with advertising is worth the price you pay.
For instance, we know a fellow who had a start-up web page selling a nifty product (we’ll call them lavender-velvet frammerjammits). His web page wasn’t getting much attention or sales, so he decided to advertise. He took out glossy print ads in various sizes in three different magazines. He researched the magazines carefully, looking at their circulation, demographics, and the ad costs. Then he bit the bullet and placed the ads. Altogether the ads cost him around $4000.
Was it worth it? Yes and no. The ads gave him greater exposure to his website, and he certainly sold about $4000 worth of the frammerjammits as a result. Trouble is, as soon as the ads ran out, his sales dropped off. While he “paid” for the ads, he really didn’t do much more than that – pay for the ads.
Here is a rough (rough!) rule of thumb for advertising costs: the cost of advertising should be approximately 10% of the return on your advertising investment. If you spend more than 10%, then you should reconsider that advertising venue and look into something else instead.
It Takes Time
I like to think our “success” as a home business is measured in longevity and the fulfillment of a dream of working at home, rather than in strictly financial terms. Yes, this business supports our household, but it does not support us in what is commonly considered luxury. Still, that’s not what we’re seeking in life, so that’s okay with us.
This is a rather depressing article, and I hope it doesn’t discourage you from striving to achieve your dream of working at home. Yes, there is a lot of struggle and sacrifice in starting a home craft business, but I can assure you that it is well worth it.
So don’t let me scare you away. Instead, let me hold out a hand and invite you to join us in the ranks of the self-employed. That way you too can listen to the traffic reports on the morning talk show…while you’re milking the cows. You can spend a lot more time with your family. You can work your own hours. You can do all the other clichés that people talk about when it comes to be self-employed.
Remember: good things come to those who wait. Oh, and who works their butts off in the meantime.
Patrice Lewis is co-founder of Don Lewis Designs (www.donlewisdesigns.com).
She and her husband have been in business for fourteen years.
The Lewis’s live on forty acres in north Idaho with their two homeschooled children,
assorted livestock, and a shop which overflows into the house with depressing regularity.
