When I work with makers, I get to see all the stages of their progress — from hobby . . . to starting a business . . . to growing and marketing their business —
and I also get to see the impact each stage has on the maker’s mindset and on their life in general.
Something I hear makers say quite often is “It was fun, but now it’s stressful!”
Let’s face it, when you turn your hobby into a business it can get stressful.
So – what can you do when running your business stops being fun and starts being stressful?
Let’s dive in.
The first piece of advice I give to makers is to step back and take a moment to BREATHE!
I know I’m sounding a little bit like your yoga instructor, but I really mean it. Relax your shoulders, take a deep breath, and breathe some of that stress out. . .
Because you can’t figure out the cause of your stress when you’re stressed!
Let’s face it: it’s easy to know that you feel stressed. Or know that your business is stressing you out and making you feel overwhelmed.
And when this happens it’s human nature to say “UGH I’m SO overwhelmed!” and just keep trying to get things done, hoping if you catch up, or become more efficient, you will feel less stressed and overwhelmed and all will be great.
But what you really need to do is take a moment to ask yourself “What IS stressful? What’s the reason stress is there?”
Then use that information to work towards a solution.
I like to call this my Problem/Diagnosis/Solution approach..
What’s that?
It means that before you can come up with solutions, you need to diagnose the root issues causing the problem and start from there. Then you can start to get to the bottom of why you’re having this problem – determine what things are actually stressful; what’s the reason that stress is there in the first place.
Once you’ve done that, it’s much easier to come up with a plan to alleviate some of that stress.
To make this easier to understand, let’s walk through the 3 specific issues I hear about the most when I work with makers and shop owners that are often a cause of this “it was fun, but now it’s stressful” feeling:
So the problem is that you are feeling stressed – and the first thing you need to do is find the issue behind the stress.
Let’s start with the first issue— you’re feeling financial stress.
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When you make things for a hobby, it’s all about the pure joy of making. There is no pressure . . . you can just enjoy the process and celebrate the result.
But when you make that switch from hobby to business, your goals change.
You have expenses that you need to cover, and while before making a bit of a profit was a bonus and you really were just doing it for fun, now making a profit is a top priority – you need to make money.
That’s financial pressure in a nutshell.
So if the problem is stress, and the cause of this stress is financial pressure, what’s the solution?
The key here is not putting all of your financial eggs into the new business basket if you’re just getting started!
If you plan to go full time with your business, you want to build a buffer of savings and see sales coming in before you give up your other sources of income. So:
I have a video called “How long will it take to get sales from your handmade or Etsy shop?” that will help you figure this out.
So the overall plan to lower this stress is to remove that financial pressure as much as possible — when you do this you are letting yourself have room to experiment and learn without a time bomb ticking above your head.
Overwhelm is something that seems to set in once you get your business up and running. . .
. . . and it’s a very normal and common issue that I see with sellers coming out of the DREAM and START stages and getting into the GROW stage on the Maker’s Roadmap.
Let me take a moment here and explain quickly what the Maker’s Roadmap is for those of you who aren’t Tizzit HQ members.
The Maker’s Roadmap is a 4-step system I created to guide you from starting to growing a successful handmade business. It lays out the stages of building a handmade business in the right order – so you know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. There are 4 stages to the Maker’s Roadmap::
The courses on Tizzit HQ guide members through each stage with step-by-step video courses that take you through everything you are setting up at that stage.
OK, back to our “overwhelm” issue – why am I sharing the different Maker’s Roadmap stages with you? How is this related?
Well, because when you are in the dream and start stages, it’s really nice and easy because it’s linear, right? You’re doing one thing at a time. First you decide on what you’re going to sell, then you create it, then you’re going to take pictures and write a product description for it, etc, etc.
Everything happens in a linear manner—finish one thing, then do the next, and it’s easy in that way.
You have an action plan, you go through it and that’s that.
But. . . when you move to the GROW stage, which is marketing, suddenly it feels like you need to be everywhere at once!
You’re managing orders and customers and your sales platform. . . maybe you’re on Instagram and on Pinterest, and trying to do email marketing as well—
and suddenly it feels like everything is happening at once and it can be very stressful and overwhelming!
So if the problem is stress and it’s caused by this newly discovered overwhelm, what’s the solution?
I literally cannot emphasize this enough. So many times I see people trying to do too much, or trying to be on all the social media platforms.
They’re on Etsy, or they have a website, they’re on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram and trying to do the best they can on all those platforms.
But that’s like physically impossible, there’s not enough time in the day! It causes stress and overwhelm, and eventually you will run yourself into a wall.
I tell the makers I work with to practice JOMO: The Joy of Missing Out.
When you follow JOMO, you learn that focusing on just one or two key platforms – and doing those platforms really well – will bring you much better results than trying to be all over the place, which is not efficient in terms of marketing and results—like it seriously will not work!
So as I talked about, at the beginning of your business everything you do is linear.
You can make a handy checklist with things like
. . . then you work your way through it and you stay on schedule!
But now that you’re in the GROW stage; things aren’t linear anymore – they become cyclical. You have to do Pinterest every week, every month, Instagram every day, every week, every month.
And so it feels very overwhelming because you feel like every day you have a million things to do.
When that happens, you have to go from a “to-do list” approach to creating systems for your cyclical activities.
You are going to create systems for your Instagram strategy, your Pinterest strategy, your email marketing strategy—all these things—so that they are organized.
Now I know some of you are cringing when you hear the word “systems,” but truthfully all a system is is a plan for when you will do something (each week, each month) and what you will do.
Having systems in place is the one and only way to grow your handmade business successfully – and will save you a TON of time so that you have time for fun and creative things – the things that bring you JOY!
I have a video called “The Reality of Growing a Successful Handmade Business” that helps you decide which “to-do’s” need systems, and has examples to help you create your own.
Something else that can happen is realizing that what you wanted your business to look like, and how you envisioned it fitting into your life, doesn’t match with what it actually looks like in real life.
When you first get excited about an idea you follow through and implement it, because that’s what creative and entrepreneurial people do, right?
You see what other sellers that are successful are doing, and you are inspired by that and want to do that for your business.
But all this excitement means you might not spend much time thinking about what it means for you long term, or how it’s going to fit in with your life. . . or maybe you do, but once you start the business it doesn’t fit into your life like you thought it would.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Imagine that you paint watercolor illustrations, and your entire marketing strategy revolves around launching a new original collection every month.
Your business model is built on original art, and you’ve built a personal brand as an artist on Instagram.
And that was really fun for a couple of years.
But now you’re starting to feel creatively drained and stressed.
Each month you feel pressure to create, and it’s removing the love that you had for your art. PLUS – you are realizing that it’s not sustainable long term — because what if you want three months to go on a holiday? Does that mean sacrificing 3 months of income?
Imagine you became very successful selling large home decor pieces, like woven or knitted wall hangings.
They’re very time consuming to make as they’re literally a piece of art. And for that reason, they are expensive. So in terms of the numbers, your business works.
You have a good profit margin – in fact, if you sell five items a month, you are golden and you’re making a really nice wage for yourself. There’s no need, or pressure, to have a huge number of sales each month.
This business model has been working great, but what you didn’t consider is that when an order comes in, you suddenly have to make room to create that time consuming item.
Time that you didn’t necessarily plan for that week. You can’t just push it out because that person is waiting for that item to be shipped. . . and so you’re super stressed and end up working very late at night when the order comes in.
Maybe it was fine before having kids but now you do – and so the business doesn’t work with your personal reality, with what you have to work with.
Over time you begin to realize that you don’t have enough flexibility in your business model, and you start wondering if it would be easier to have smaller items getting sold more regularly, rather than those big custom items, or maybe a mix of both.
I want you to remember that it’s normal for business to grow and change . . . and you can absolutely deconstruct it and rebuild it differently!
If there is stress caused by how your business is working right now, it’s time to think about how you can change that to reduce that stress and make it work better for you.
Of course you need to do this in a way that still brings in the money you need: It is a business and you need to make a profit.
I know you need to make a consistent wage and my goal with Tizzit HQ is to help makers make consistent income every month.
BUT – it’s important that you do it in a way that works for you and fits well within your life. There is no one way to make this work, you need to find yours.
Every maker and every business is different. You don’t have to copy what you see other successful sellers do – they have a completely different set of circumstances in their life that you might not have and vice versa.
So you always want to filter ideas by asking “how would that fit inside of MY life?”
Go back to the basics and ask yourself:
Then reverse engineer how your business can fit around those constraints, and start pivoting and shifting your business model so that it works better for you
So all of the things we’ve talked about –
are what we love to help our members do inside Tizzit HQ.
We have all the courses you need, plus supportive coaching calls and accountability that help keep you on track.
So, if you feel you’d benefit from some support and guidance as you work out what works for YOU – join us at Tizzit HQ and let us help you get your business off the ground or take it to the next level!
BECOME A TIZZIT HQ MEMBER AND TURN THE HOBBY YOU LOVE INTO INCOME YOU’LL ADORE
Thanks for reading, make sure to check the links below, and until next time, au revoir!
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