If you are a regular reader of Inspired Livelihood or Craft Biz Blog, you know that I have three criteria for the ideal business venture:
- It is profitable
- It improves lives
- It utilizes a local workforce when possible
Frequently, when someone comes to me for help creating a socially responsible enterprise, they are initially thinking non-profit. They are surprised that they can create a business in the private sector that makes a difference and they think they have to manufacture product oversees to make a profit. Of course they can have the item made more cheaply in sweatshops that do not pay fare wages but what good is building a business to help people and then taking jobs oversees that could be creating local income and helping unemployed Americans create a livelihood?
I try to encourage the use our own labor force whenever possible so I was absolutely thrilled to read about what I think is the perfect sustainable model. Darr and Tom Aley founded Mojo, (short for Moms and Jobs), a hand made apparel company that hires and trains single mothers living near or under poverty level. They provide child care, health care and career training to help these women get off social services like food stamps and welfare and create sustainable livelihoods to improve the lives of their children.
If you know of other businesses that are profitable, improve lives and use local workers, please post in the comments below. I’d love to share them with our other readers. What can you think of that you can do to meet the above three criteria in your own business?
Most men won’t even shop for Valentines Day presents until tomorrow and if you make handmade jewelry, you should exploit those procrastinators. It’s not too late to set up a last minute trunk shows at a men’s hair salon, health club or even a pub where men hang out. If you have the chutzpa (or ambition) to walk into any male-trafficked locale tomorrow with a trunk of your gorgeous wares, you have a captive audience of guys who will see you as their savior because they don’t have to hit the mall and guess what she might like. You may offer to give the proprietor a percentage, a donation to his favorite charity or better yet a free piece for the woman in his life, but you may find they are happy to just let you hang out because the excitement may generate more traffic and business for the venue as well. Do you have any idea how many men would love to have your help in choosing a piece of hand crafted jewelry for their wives or girlfriends rather than have to scour shops trying to figure out what girls want? After a successful sale, you’ll have an open invitation to return for Mother’s Day. See the December post on how to sell handmade jewelry to men. Or, go to the right of this page to get 13 Free Tips on Turning Your Crafts into CAsh Now.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about life purpose and calling. I have a birthday this month and for obvious reason, birthdays trigger the “ am I doing enough with my life” syndrome.
An article by my friend Sandy Dempsey @sandydfromnj in The Dreaming Cafe Newsletter got me thinking even more about how a calling isn’t necessarily something we do for a living (although, I believe life’s even richer if it is) but an element that should be present in every aspect of our lives.
Because I help people create business that make a living and a difference, I naturally attract clients who talk a lot about finding their life purpose. Sadly, what I hear too frequently is that they are either afraid of not identifying their true calling or they don’t see how they can make a big enough impact to make a difference, so they do nothing. My job, and I believe this is my calling but not my sole life purpose, is to show them the possibilities, that they aren’t limited to a single calling and that making a difference in their own community or even a change in one life may be what they are here to do. Not everyone, in fact almost no one, was truly born to change the world.
Life purpose isn’t about identifying your calling and doing one thing for the rest of your life. I believe we can and do embrace our purpose in many different ways that evolve over a lifetime. Those of us with many interests Read the rest of this entry »
My friend and mentor, Barbara Winter asked this question on Facebook, “How do you keep your curiosity alive?” My initial response was that curiosity is an innate trait rather than a skill that needs to be honed. However, Barbara replied that all two year olds are curious-we all are born with curiosity but it is often discouraged. That makes sense to me. While in my family of origin, curiosity was valued and encouraged, I married into a more reserved family and my husband was embarrassed when I would ask too many questions, calling it “nosey”.
This conversation on FB reminded me of all the valuable human traits we are born with but taught to suppress in favor of politeness, safety or fitting the mold.
About a year ago, I read an article in a Canadian newspaper about a study done in Ottowa schools. As I recall, the conclusion was that career counseling should start as early as 6th grade. That may seem very young for a student to begin planning for a career but think about one of the first questions nearly every re-careering coach asks you. What kinds of things fascinated you when you were a child? What could you spend hours doing?
Since our earliest interests are key to our ideal livelihood, it sure seems reasonable that we’d begin exploring viable career options with kids in elementary school. The occupation a child aspires to at that age is based on passion, not paycheck and external expectations. So, exploring different careers at such an early age may just keep young people more focused on making a living doing something they love rather than what their parents, teachers or society deem an appropriate career for them.
Many schools do have a career day of some sort that involves parents coming to school and discussing what they do and students have the opportunity to shadow an adult at work for a day. When my son was in grade school, there were two commercial pilots and a pitcher for the Padres among the parents. When I suggested that either my husband or I go to talk about being entrepreneurs, our son said, “no one wants to grow up to be a business man.” I agree that if we went to school and talked about sales quotas, projections and balance sheets we’d have put the kids to sleep (and embarrassed our son). But talking about getting paid to do what you love and the benefits of self employment (like taking your dog to work or taking your work and your kids on a snorkeling vacation) would have peeked their interest in entrepreneurship.
In primary school, all the boys wanted to be firemen or policemen because they were heros. Why not show them examples of businesses that make a difference and improve lives; entrepreneurs who teach a whole village to make a living and bring schools, clean drinking water and shoes to children their age? Almost daily I hear from middle aged adults who’ve spent decades in a career they were bored with, chosen because they were told they had an aptitude for it or because it was expected of them. They are looking for something that has more meaning, that they enjoy. What would happen if we didn’t have to go back and reconnect with the passions of our youth because we were encouraged in grade school to start thinking about doing something we love for a living instead?
Do you remember what you loved to do as a child? Were you encouraged to think about doing that for a living? What kinds of messages did parents, teachers and advisors give you about career choices? Were they based on your passions or your aptitude and societies expectations? As always, you are invited to share your thoughts with our readers below.
Do you ever feel like you are just so overwhelmed with emails, newsletters and google alerts that you don’t know what to respond to first? Or that if you don’t keep up with everything related to your business you will miss something vitally important? Between invitations to join free tele-seminars, podcasts and webinars, you can easily spend the entire day without even connecting on the social networks or checking the blog posts in your RSS feed reader.
In the fall of last year, I was feeling absolutely overwhelmed with electronic information. My head was spinning with all the input and I had no time or energy left for “output” such as product creation or my own writing. I wasn’t sleeping well because I couldn’t stop the flow of ideas and felt that I never had time to execute all of them.
What I previously saw as a gift, my ability to continuously generate new ideas, felt more like a curse. Nonstop internal chatter was beginning to interfere with my ability to give my private clients the focused attention they deserved. Because my commitment to clients is my priority, I wasn’t following through on several projects I’d started. While I solved that by sharing some of those business ideas with colleagues and clients who could implement them, I was feeling anxiety about not developing new programs for 2011.
My son was coming for a week at Thanksgiving and I didn’t want to be frazzled and grouchy so I made a BIG, DRASTIC DECISION. I gave myself permission to UNPLUG. Not just for a few days but for as long as it took to refresh and refocus. I did scroll through emails once daily just to make sure there was nothing urgent from family or friends, but left hundreds of emails unopened, didn’t check in on Facebook or Twitter or read blogs. And my world didn’t fall apart. Rather, things started coming together again.
Yes, this is contradictory to the advise you receive from business coaches and mentors. I too recommend reaching out to your readers and followers regularly through blog posts, newsletters and social networking. You do need to stay current on what’s happening in your industry, but at what point are you trying to process so much information that you put off making decisions for fear of making the wrong decision?
There’s lots of information online about how to manage your time, apps for handling that information and an overwhelming number of articles about how to get out of overwhelm. Even with good time management, there is just so much information out there that if you try to read everything for fear of missing something, you may just end up doing nothing. Maybe it’s time you give yourself permission to unplug and get centered. You’ll likely come back refreshed, recharged and ready to focus.
As always, your comments are welcome below. I’d love to hear how you handle information overload.
January 24th,2011
Uncategorized | tags:
emails,
FAcebook,
information overload,
newsletters google alerts,
overwhelm,
podcasts,
social media,
tele-seminars,
Twitter,
webinars |
No Comments
Today’s post is by guest blogger Marianne Cantwell, Head of Adoration, Ideas and Kicking-Ass at Free Range Humans., director of career change coaching organisation, Career Revolution and a leading writer and speaker on career change.
Reading time: 55 seconds (unless you speed read)
I know what it’s like. You have an idea for something you’d like to do, you Google it… and find that someone has beaten you to it. Someone already has your dream business. Doesn’t that suck?
Well actually, it doesn’t. Here are three reasons why you shouldn’t let someone else’s work stop you from making use of your own idea.
1. The second-mover advantage.
If someone (or lots of people) are working in your area then that’s great! You don’t have to create the whole field, you tweak it to fit you and what you want to offer.
Not being the first mover can be an advantage. Think of the iPod and the iPhone. Did Apple have the first smart-phone? No, but they do have the best selling one now. Did they have the first MP3 player? Of course not.
In fact, do you even remember who launched the first smartphone? (ok, I know a tech-geek is going to reply with the answer here, but you see my point! First isn’t always best).
2. You will be different in ways you can’t yet imagine.
Your difference may be in your message, in your service or simply the way you
communicate your message and service. But chances are you don’t know it yet.
When I first went into business for myself I did the usual competitor research and found someone who had precisely the business I wanted.
Right down to the brand name (poo!). She said everything I wanted to say, had the website I dreamt of, and worst of all had a great media presence. How on earth could I compete as a newbie with nothing? What was the point?
Fastforward to now… and I don’t even view this person as a competitor. When I started discovering what I really wanted to say (which was different from what I first thought), and actually launched and worked with clients, I realized my message was different from other people’s, my delivery was miles away.
When I really focused on who I was and what I wanted to shout out to the world, I was somewhere completely different, and very me.
Now I wouldn’t take that business if it was handed to me because it’s not who I am. You simply don’t know this stuff when you are just intellectualizing and doing ‘competitor research’.
3. You won’t be just one of the crowd.
Well, not if you do it right. There’s little point going into a crowded market and being just another face with an indistinguishable offering (and that’s what most people do). However it does NOT have to be that way.
So many people spend time trying to emulate others, thinking that the way it has been done before is the way they should do it. That’s where copy-cat, generic products come from (again, think of lesser iPhone copycats…).
Trying to emulate others is the obvious way, but that is what causes people to struggle to stand out from the competition. That’s what results in people saying they are in a crowded market and struggle to make ends meet.
Following the rules, sticking to what has been done before, not being you… that’s not the Free Range way, is it?
All I’m saying is: if you have something you REALLY want to do, please don’t hold back because of the competitor fear.
The world will be losing out if you hide away.
For more on this topic, see: “Do you try so hard to blend in and conform that you are making yourself invisible?”
You can find Marianne at http://www.free-range-humans.com/
Today’s post is by guest blogger Tara Swiger a yarn-obsessed, pink-haired, crafty-business-loving, wonky-embracing teacher + helper. Tara blogs about yearn and the business of craft at http://www.taraswiger.com/
One issue that keeps coming up in my one-on-one work with crafters is that it’s not crystal-clear how someone will give them money.
If your site visitors don’t know HOW to give you money, than they probably won’t!
Here’s a quick list of ways you are making it hard for me (or anyone!) to give you money:
It’s not clear what you do, or that you take money to do that thing
You have an Etsy or Artfire shop, but I can’t find it on your website (or your blogger blog). If I have to scroll down to find it, it’s too hard to find.
You sell in ways other than Etsy, but I can’t find that information.
I’m not sure WHY I would buy from you. What are the benefits? What makes your thing different than Joe’s thing?
I don’t know who you are. If your About page describes a faceless business, I’m not going to get that thrill of buying from a real, live person.
You only have an Etsy or Artfire shop, so I don’t know how to find more about you. I can’t get to know you via Twitter or a blog or an About page.
You list your prices in your country’s currency. What is it going to cost me, a self-involved American?
This is only a partial list!
Do you have examples of what businesses do that makes it hard to buy from?
Share it in the comments!
Are you feeling as if no matter how much work you sell, it isn’t generating enough income? Are you concerned that you can never produce enough pieces to make a living? Even artists who sell a lot of work find that eventually, they hit a plateau because selling crafts that are hand made one at a time is still trading time for dollars and does limit your income. If you have to produce so much work to make enough money, it may stop being fun and actually feel like work.
So how can you increase your income as a crafter if you’re already selling as many pieces as you can comfortably produce?
You need to find other “profit centers” as my friend Barbara Winter calls multiple income streams. (she says “streams sounds wimpy”.) So what other ways can you bring in income without having to ramp up production?
The best way I know is to leverage your time and knowledge. Let’s look at some opportunities for increasing revenue that will also help get your name out there.
If you produce a product that is based on your signature design, one great way to leverage is to sell kits with all the supplies and instructions so that others can duplicate it but you are still getting paid. I wouldn’t worry about losing sales because the person who would purchase a kit to make a piece like yours is a different customer altogether than the one who would buy a finished piece. Say for example, you are a jewelry designer. You can make a piece once and then sell the instructions, beads, findings, etc as a Make-it-Yourself kit. Or, if you make handbags, for each style you design, make up a pattern that you can sell along with the fabric, buttons, zipper, thread and any other supplies needed to make the bag.
Another very simple way to leverage your revenue from art is to teach both live classes or virtual. It’s very easy to make a video demonstrating “how-to” do your craft and sell either a digital version online or a physical DVD. Again, the client who will pay for your instruction video is not the same client who will buy the finished work.
Go through the craft section at any bookstore and you will see color plates in the “how-to” books featuring different artists’ work. An added source of income is the sale of your pattern or instructions to an author or publisher. Of course, submitting articles or patterns to craft magazines is another great vehicle for selling your design.
Some artists will choose to have two or more different series in their line. One can be a higher end, labor intensive limited edition while the other can be more competitively priced. This works well if you sub out assembly to work-at-home parents who can each have their own cottage industry. You pay them by the piece and it’s a winning scenario for everyone, including the customer who may not purchase your higher end work. Making sure the lines each have a distinct look will help to maintain the prices on the more upscale pieces.
When you offer to do a demo along with a trunk show at a home party or local boutique, you will be able to reach the crafters who will pay you for lessons and kits as well as the collectors who will pay for your work rather than do it themselves. Any exposure you can get will be a marketing step.
If you want to be sure not to miss any of the helpful hints on how to leverage your craft and time, go to the right of this page and click on the “RSS Feed” or “subscribe” button to receive updates via email or you feed-reader.
In many areas, school starts this week. It used to be that the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day were all about popsicles, bicycles and running through sprinklers, right? School seems to start earlier every year.
With all the recent budget cuts, districts are more in need of funds for even basic supplies so expect the doorbell to ring more this fall with kids selling the usual magazine subscriptions, chocolates and wrapping paper. Unfortunately, that revenue won’t cover the arts and sports so groups will still be open to new fundraising ideas.
Whether you’re an artist, crafts person or just good at organizing, this is the perfect opportunity for you to approach the PTA, sports teams or chorus and band leaders with a new fundraising project. Any group in need of funds will be thrilled to have someone else handle the details and have something that doesn’t require the kids going door-to-door.
A craft fair can be a high revenue, low-cost event to operate and is also a convenience for the teachers and parents who don’t have to use their personal days to run around town shopping for gifts. Simply contact the person in charge of the school bulletin to put out a call for entries or send a flyer home with the kids letting parents who are artists or crafts people know that you are organizing a crafts fair and include a booth entry form with your phone number and email address. Ask each participant to donate a specific percentage of her sales to the school, teams or organization. Ideally, each craftsperson will man her own booth or table. If you don’t have a network of artists on your radar, you can approach a local crafts guild to participate. And don’t overlook the obvious. While bake sales went out with poodle skirts, the new gourmet cupcakes and artisan breads command a higher price and are well received. Of course, hand-made soaps and body lotions are also considered crafts so include a good variety.
If your neighborhood school holds a fall festival, you may choose to piggy-back on that event and run the crafts fair simultaneously or you may find it more beneficial to run it as a separate boutique. However you do it, make sure to solicit help from other parents and artists.
Remember, each event is more exposure for your craft so be sure to always have a personal bio and tag with your contact info. Look at each time you show your work as an opportunity to build your mailing list of raving fans. Rather than see this fair as a one-shot time to sell your art, view it as exposure to more repeat collectors who will not only buy from you but tell their friends about your work. Include extra cards with each purchase so that your customers can pass them out to others who admire your work.
Do you have hints you’d like to share with other readers about raising funds with your crafts? As always, we’d love to hear your comments.
Our guest blogger today is Sandy Dempsey of the Dreaming Cafe
As artisans and crafters you work in one of the worlds oldest mobile professions. Many of you travel yearly to attend and participate in craft fairs, festivals and outdoor expos.
You may have a website (or you should have) and maybe an Etsy store, but you may also be wondering how to take advantage social media and use Facebook and Twitter to grow your business and make more money.
Here a few quick tips to get you started.
- Collect email and physical addresses from people stopping by your booth or exhibit. Use a guest book or do a giveaway/prize drawing as an incentive for people to give you their personal information.
- Include your website, Facebook page and Twitter ID on ALL of your marketing materials (flyers, brochures, business cards, packaging labels, etc) and encourage people to ‘Follow’ you on Twitter and ‘Like’ your Facebook Fan page or send you a ‘Friend’ request for your Facebook personal page.
- When people engage you via social media, thank them, talk to them and encourage ongoing conversations.
- Use Facebook and Twitter to share where you will be (venue, city, state, booth, etc) in the upcoming months.
- Encourage people to stop by and visit you. Offer them a Fan or Follower only discount or special offer.
- Using the email addresses you have collected to stay in touch. These people have already shown an interest in your work. Share what you are doing, new projects you are working on or share some industry insiders secrets – an enthusiastic, well educated customer is usually your best customer.
Bio: Sandy Dempsey is the founder and creative director of Dreaming Cafe Ventures, LLC, a diverse education and consulting company dedicated to serving the needs of the lifelong learning community with a primary focus in the areas of personal growth and development, creative self-expression, self-employment and social media and technology.
Sandy also writes about, talks about and teaches journaling, creative self-expression, time management and productivity, dream building and goal-setting, using social media and using free or low cost online tools and technology to help start and grow a businesses and make more money.
You can find Sandy blogging at thedreamingcafe.com
