3 Common Struggles for Creative Based Businesses
When it comes to running a small business there are many pitfalls to avoid, and when you are running a creative small business there are some specific issue that can affect you more often than others. In this post I’ll cover the three common struggles I see for a maker business and how to overcome them. If these resonate with you, know you are not alone and you can overcome them.
Want to work on them with me? Get in touch!
Executing on your Vision
You have a great vision, but have a hard time putting that into a plan
Having a vision is a critical step in achieving your business dreams and turning that vision into a plan is what propels you forward. Without a plan, your vision is stuck as an aspiration and you may not hit the goals you have for your business.
So how do you turn that vision into a plan?
Define your vision: you should have a clear and well-defined vision. What do you want to achieve? Why? You want something that is specific and inspiring to you!
Break it down into goals: chunking your vision into achievable, time bound goals helps keep you on track and accountable for executing. See more about goals here.
Develop a detailed plan: prioritize your goals and put them into a plan, thinking about what resources, skills, and actions are needed for each goal.
Set milestones: milestones are a great way to set designated checkpoints to make sure you are on track and flex your goals/plan.
Create a timeline: now that your have your goals, plan, and milestones defined take all that information and put dates with them. Dates hold you accountable for following through. When working on the timeline think about what resources you need and where potential obstacles might pop up. Remember a plan is just that a plan, things don’t always go perfectly and that’s ok you can be flexible where and when you need to.
Take action: this is where your vision truly comes to life. Start taking the necessary steps towards your goals. Action is the bridge between your vision and reality.
Monitor progress: check in regularly with how things are going. Don’t wait until your timeline is over to review - check in often and adjust where needed. Celebrate your success and learn from your missteps.
Old Habits Die Hard
You had a system working great when you first started, but it no longer serves you
When you first start you figure out how to operate your business in a way that works for you at that time. It could be scrappy, manual, and hodgepodged together, but it works. Then you grow, you get more customers, start working with wholesalers, offer more products, and suddenly your old processes simply no longer work, but you aren’t sure which ones are and aren’t working, or even how to fix them.
How do you change these habits?
Name current processes: come up with a list of all your processes, think about the ones you run every day and the ones that happen only once in a while. For example this could be something like “Adding new inventory to my website".
Review the list: looking at the list of your processes identify which ones are causing you a headache. Which ones suck the most of your time? Let’s identify as “adding new inventory to my website” as one.
Audit the headache processes: look hard at the process and name where the pinch points are. If this feels daunting it can help to physically write down the steps of the process so you can visually see the steps that make you go “huh?!”. Let’s use our previous example, say when you add new inventory you write whatever you feel like in the description because of this you are having to manually go back and update descriptions because you forget to put in key information.
Research and plan new process: just like with goal planning, come up with objectives that you want to achieve with the new process. Design a new process to address the identified issues and aligns with your goals. Continuing on with our example, I would change the process so I have a template for each category of product listings that way it takes the guess work out of adding inventory.
Implement the change: roll out the new process and monitor the performance. Feel free to make adjustments if issues pop up or there are opportunities for further improvement, remember this process is for you. For our example, I would start using the template for the next batch of inventory I upload and work to go back and update old listings too.
Inventory Headache
Inventory is a battle, from making enough, performance, and tracking
*This one applies to folks who hold inventory in their business. If that’s not you, feel free to skip this section.
Inventory is the life line of your business - this is how you primarily make your money but with it comes a lot of equations to figure out. You need to know how much inventory to hold at a given time, understand how your inventory is performing, and if you use multiple platforms make sure they are all in sync.
How much inventory do I hold?
Inventory data: understand your inventory data to reveal patterns in particular stock. Do you sell a particular print more than others? Are all your mugs selling out? That can give you some clues of where to hold more or less inventory.
Figure out inventory turnover ratio: knowing your turnover of inventory will let you know how quickly you sell your inventory in a time period. You can calculate it by dividing the cost of goods sold (COGS) by the average inventory for the period. If you have a high ratio that means you are selling quickly, while the flip side of that means you aren’t selling quickly.
Lead time: keep in mind how long it takes you to produce or order certain inventory. If its a long process and you have good selling data you may be better off keeping some in stock for safe keeping.
How is my inventory performing?
Website analytics: website platforms (like Squarespace and Shopify) offer some insight as to how not only your website is performing but your inventory as well.
Pull your own reports: you can usually export product data from your website to build your own chats and tables to understand performance. You can look at conversion rates, revenue for each product, and performance over time.
How do I track all my inventory on my site?
Central management inventory system: if you have inventory that lives on multiple platforms it’s best to use one central system to do all the tracking and updating for you. Trunk is a simple inventory, cost effective, tool that can sync several platforms back and forth. You can update inventory numbers in Trunk and it will push it to the connected platforms or vise versa.
Manually keep track: this is my least favorite option, but sometimes is reality. If you have to keep track manually be sure to put solid processes in place so that you review and update your inventory stock levels often and throughly.
