Scalability and Our Handmade Business (Part II) - how do we get to be spidey-woman and still make stuff?

white heart studios - get your spidey on

I wrote a series of posts a couple years ago on different ways to make money on Etsy, but it was really a kind of whine about how tired I was. You can read it here.

Burn-out is an occupational hazard of working from our hearts and with our hands and heads and I don't believe it is totally preventable. It is one way we know it is time to change things.

Scaling our business is something lots of makers start thinking about when we are burned out or our businesses become unsustainable; sometimes because we are selling more than we can make but sometimes because we are making more than we can sell - the smart ones work it into their model from the start.

For those of us who haven't, raises hand here, redefining our business later is a lot of work. It is like trying to comb your hair in a hurricane. Our business still needs to stay open and making money while we make changes in the background. This takes time and time is the one thing we think we don't have. Time is kind of stretchy though - if we need to make changes, we need to figure this out.

It's like spending more money now - for example buying your supplies in bulk - to save money later, spending time now to save time later works the same way.

One maker model of scalability is the make something once and sell it again and again model - the illustrator who sells prints of his work for example. He still gets to do what he loves which is draw, but he doesn't have the one for one maker model that limits his sales to how many drawings he can produce in a day and he has the bonus of still being able to sell his originals for much more.

(of course he still needs the traffic and he still needs to be producing original things people want to buy to make this all work for him)

Anytime you can make something once and sell it again and again you have created scale. Anytime your fixed costs or the time it takes to make the next one of something you make is reduced from the first one you made, you have created scale - it can take me as much time to make 1 of something as it does to make 3, for example. So every time I make 3, I create scale (of course this assumes I can at some point sell 3).

Some ways for makers to
start thinking about scale:

1. Sell a pattern or tutorial (the old create it once, sell it again and again thing)

2. Sell 3 things to 1 person - Upsell to existing customers. It is cheaper to sell 3 things to one person than 3 things to 3 people, so set up your site to make this easy.

For example a customer looking at rings should be shown a link to other rings or maybe a customer looking at a ruby ring should be shown a link to other ruby jewelry, you decide what you think they want to see, and pics are always better than words when it comes to links and selling online.

When thinking scale it is always better/cheaper

to focus on existing customers ... or is it?

3. Sell 3 things to 3 people (you know my rules are always bendy) 

Create a referral system - more happy customers create more good word of mouth which creates more customers that you didn't have to do anything to get (other than be your amazing self, of course)

For example - try a send a friend deal with a coupon code for people who refer people - you might not totally be able to police this, but who cares.

4. Create a mailing list - this is very important because it is so much less work to sell to people who already love our stuff - just ask your customers if they want to be added and make it worthwhile for them. Give them sneak peaks and discounts and information they want.

I wouldn't email them more than once every 4-6 weeks - when people using mailchimp email me more frequently than that I almost always remove myself from their list - the emails, just like every interaction with a customer, should always reflect your brand. Don't just throw something out there.

For example - Email customers a coupon for a discount on something in your store and in the email include a downloadable simple card they can give with it if they purchase it as a gift. I have found this works better than just a coupon.

5. Keep track of your existing customers' wants and needs - remember, the less time and money you have to spend finding new customers the more you are thinking scale.

For example - Soap lasts, I don't know 30 days - can you sell auto-renewals or subscriptions? You have probably seen this genius viral campaign for this genius tampon delivery company.

Someone who bought mittens from you last year will almost certainly have lost them by now.

Someone who bought cufflinks from you for their wedding a year ago will have an anniversary right now.

Ask customers for their birthdays and email them a birthday card and a coupon two weeks before.

This stuff will take time and maybe money to set up in the beginning, but if you do it right will more than pay for itself later. Hire someone local on TaskRabbit to help you get this set up.

6. Streamline your makings

for example - if you sell on Etsy, maybe you created certain whosee whatsees that you don't sell much, but they drew customers in who maybe bought other things - or this was your thinking anyway, well, maybe now that search is so different and so crowded this isn't true anymore and you can just ditch this stuff and save yourself time, money and headaches

7. Think passive income

For example - sell blog advertising, create a subscription service, etc

8. Hire help; any kind of help that saves you time - if you can pay people less to do things than you can charge someone else, you have created scale. You may not technically create scale if you do this solely to save your own sanity, but in a spideywoman world it totally counts. So if you save 4 hours a week, by having someone clean your house and can put that time into your business, or into wth a nap, and need to do it - go ahead.

Spidey-woman is not superwoman. 

Superwoman burned out.

Spidey-woman is just getting started.

The best thing we can do is build scale and passive income into our business in the beginning - this does not have to be something gigantic.

Big thinkers do not always look like big thinkers to the outside world because our thinking is more broad than tall - we are thinking deep. We are not leaping tall buildings anymore - we are scaling them. This allows us to move over here and over there when we need to, so we get to have an actual life as well as a business.

Spidey-woman has taken superwoman down, folks.

Of course the problem with dollars for hours has always been that if you create a successful whosee whatsee you will run out of hours.

Next week - part III what to do when we really run out of hours

Mercury retrogrades today - let's add non-reactive to our list of "re's" for this one

unless it's the last of the milk and mercury has just gone retrograde

Mercury is the messenger; the magician - the god of mind, intellect, voice and language. Mercury is about what is being communicated to us

(it's the stuff we take in that literally makes us who we are - did you see this Jimmy Kimmel video - he asks kids the worst thing their mother has ever said and boy after boy say it was when his mother called him stupid - this might be funny on Kimmel, but not so funny that this is what our boys are hearing - I am sure their mothers are well-meaning and it was probably something like "well, that was stupid" when the boy did something, well, kind of stupid, but this is what the boys remember - we always have to be mindful that it is what we take in that makes us who we are)

Mercury energy asks the question "what are we a voice for?"

This is powerful stuff. 

We honor Mercury when we speak our truth, when we think through our thoughts before we say our words, when we say more and talk less.

We dishonor Mercury when we are glib or hot-headed or rude, when we believe that talking about something is the same as doing it; when we say what we think someone wants to hear when it isn't what we really believe.

I have had a few crazy confrontations with people lately myself and probably the only reason I have not had more is that I do not get out much. I am not in the mood to take any baloney from people these days.

(unless it's wunderbar - I know this stuff will kill me, but it's addicting - good thing I only eat it when my sister visits from Portland once a year - it's like our secret handshake)

I really need to be with people who walk their talk right now - who just do their jobs. We are all working so hard now. Excuse makers please exit stage right. Maybe I am not the only one feeling like this.

Now that Mercury is retrograde until November 11th it is probably best to be more 'non-reactive'.

This one is in an earth sign. It feels like some kind of balancing of our connection with cyber reality and our connection with actual reality is happening. We need to get outside and stay grounded. Actual physical environments will change now for some people.

As always a retrograde is a good time for the "re" stuff. Redo, reconnect, rethink, repeat, revise, redesign, recuperate, repair things or buy recycled (rather than new) - stuff like this (warning shameless plug ahead) amazing jewelry.

It's best to spend these weeks gathering information - not so much acting on it. The information communicated to us will be in constant flux now, so working with it will be like trying to hold on to jello - oopsy. If we stick to the "re's" now though, when this retrograde ends in November we will all be in a great position to get our holiday groove on and make some ka-ching.

(at least it's not hitting us during prime shipping season again)

More on Mercury here.

Scalability and Our Handmade Business - how do we get to be spidey-woman and still make stuff?

round and round we go - polarity locket

So, as makers we have been kicking this scalability issue around forever.

And since our businesses are living, breathing entities (not in a businesses are people kind of way, of course) that evolve and grow maybe this is something we can look at now with fresh eyes.

You have probably heard that you might be able to increase profits by making your business scalable (or that you do not really have a business if it isn't scalable) and maybe

you are kind of picturing yourself climbing a mountain or maybe being carried up a mountain on the shoulders of a hardy sherpa.

(which is probably the only way I could climb a mountain right now - NOTE TO SELF - put the inflatable bed away, the guests have been gone for a month and pull the elliptical machine back out, oh and actually get your ass on there Cat).

When I was in banking being able to scale a business just meant the business was efficient enough to be able to grow and work just as well in a large 'scale' situation - when a business model or design failed with a quantity increase we said the business will not scale - so no loan for you good buddy, see you later, have a nice day.

Today more commonly when someone talks about scaling our business they mean we add more business (the ka-ching part) without adding more work or increasing our (proportional) costs - our business becomes more and more profitable without us expending more and more energy (energy = money or time).

Scalability refers to the ability of a site to increase in size as demand warrants. Businesses are extremely scalable if the costs to operate the business are relatively fixed and more customers do not significantly increase our costs but they do significantly increase our profits. This is the perfect business model but doesn't work for everything.

It might be easier to picture what scalability is with an example of what scalability isn't.

(and usually the best way to learn anything from my blog is to read what I have done and then go ahead and just do the opposite)

I used to sell from seasonal mall carts.

This was in the days when people still did most of their shopping there. I started with one cart (see my story about that first season from hell here) and worked it myself six days a week, insanely long hours as the holidays got closer, and then had my brother and his friend work on Sundays.

It was totally exhausting, but a short enough season that I somehow managed to survive and lived to do it again.

That first year I grossed X amount of dollars. Let's say the X was $100,000 - it was probably not that much but this number will be easier to work with. Now because I sold something for $20.00 that cost me $5.00 to make which is about the minimal kind of mark-up you needed for a mall cart in those days - so it was something like $100,000 gross minus $25,000 product, $10,000 rent, $10,000 start up costs, $2000 salaries and $3,000 out the window who knows where costs, let's say I made about $50,000 (before Uncle Sam took his cut).

The next year I became one of those 'go big or go home' kind of girls and rented two mall carts.

And because I am the kind of compulsive thinker who thinks 36.5 steps ahead and because these two malls were an hour away from each other I hired enough people to cover both carts all the time (I think I hired 12 people) so that I was never scheduled to work and would be available to race to a cart if someone didn't show up for work or something went wrong or we just got swamped somewhere, any one of which I saw as a high probability.

Anyhoo, to cut to the chase. The second year I did not work quite as physically hard but mentally I had more stress and worked harder - more people to manage, more situations to manage, more inventory to manage, yada yada.

The second year my numbers looked totally different but because of the salaries I paid people (and when you pay people salaries you also pay half their social security and FICA and need a little thing, which is not such a little thing, called workmen's compensation insurance) and some inventory miscalculations, I ended up netting almost exactly what I had netted the first year.

Almost to the penny is the way I remember it.

Now, I did expand my business - I almost doubled my sales and my customer base, but I also showed myself it wasn't a very scalable business model. I slept through most of January.

I thought about scale the 3rd year (although I didn't actually think the word 'scale', I thought the word 'exhausted') when I planned for 3 carts and a manager to run them, but life twisted on me again - my mother's illness worsened and she moved in with us. I did one cart and hired some help. I have never really been a "go big or go home" kind of girl anyway - I was always more of a stay small and nimble kind of girl.

(except I have never been either small or nimble, but this is kind of how I see myself, go figure).

Today, we are mostly selling online which is great for scale because we can potentially reach more people without outlaying more energy (time, money) but we are also selling things we make by hand which is not so great for scale because usually we can only make so much.

Scalable is definitely possible for us, too, (it will likely require help, most good things do, we didn't come to this planet with 6 billion other people to go it alone, folks) although if we have not set ourselves up this way, it will be some work for us to get this scale thing going. And a product based business will probably never be highly scalable, but there are things we can do to increase profits without increasing energy (time or money) expended.

Later this week - part II - So how do I get to be spidey-woman and still make stuff

let's get our daughters into this scalability thing early girls

Manufactured Goods and the Fishing Boat Captain - part lV (the treasure)

paint and ink

"What are we pirates now Sully?" Captain Mooney asked.

"No, we aren't pirates Mooney. We are still fishing boat captains."

"But maybe there is something we could learn from pirates Mooney. Maybe a little pirate magic." Sully looked around the room.

He unfurled the 5 foot long map and slammed empty mugs on to the map corners to keep it open.

"What do you see?" he asked them.

The fishing boat captains gathered around the table. They looked from Sully to the map and back again puzzled. The moon light began to flow through the pub windows, slowly growing brighter and brighter until the map was almost blinding. Sully stepped back. The men shaded their eyes and leaned in.

The bartender, who had been pretending to busy himself with a dishtowel saw that the crazy fishing boat captains were standing around an empty table, each one staring at a different place on the dark table top, transfixed by ... nothing.

"These guys have finally gone off the deep end", he thought to himself.

Suddenly, the pub's lights flickered and dimmed. The bartender reached under the bar for his flashlight and when he looked up, the lights were on and the bar was empty. "What the hell?!" he screamed. 

Epilogue (1 year later)

Captain Mooney helped the dozen little girls and their mothers off her boat. "These boating birthday parties are so much fun", she thought to herself. One of the mothers asked Captain Mooney how she came up with this clever idea and how long she had been doing this. "Hmm, well, it just came to me about a year ago. The industry I was in had changed and I decided I needed a change, too." "Well, we're glad you did - this pirate party at sea was so much fun for the girls".

Mooney waved good-bye to the party-goers and headed down to the pub for a drink. She looked over at the Etsy Marina sign. Mooney didn't dock there anymore, but she knew some of the old-timers who were still there and doing OK - and she was happy for them.

She didn't see any new faces - the fishing boats were mostly guided electronically now that hands were not required to be on the ship's wheels and although she saw customers boarding those boats, there were still some customers who wanted a real-deal fishing boat captain with her hands on the wheel of their charter boat. The bad news for the old timers was that it was harder for the customers to find them, the good news was that all the competition looked the same.

The place was different, but this was ok because Mooney was different, too.

It was almost a year since the night she had been in the bar with Sully and the other Captains. She must have had too much to drink because all she could remember was a HUGE moon and looking at a crazy treasure map Sully had found and seeing ... something about treasure ... she could never remember ...

She remembered waking up the next morning feeling slightly hungover and well, let's just say it, Mooney thought to herself, "pretty freakin' fearless." Like, she knew her future was totally in her own hands and instead of that thought scaring the hell out of her like it used to, it made her totally anxious to get started. They were the hands that had held the wheel until now after all. She just knew her treasure was out there, hell she'd seen it! Or she thought she had, she wished she hadn't drank so much ...

She had only talked to one other fishing boat captain about the night Mooney had blacked out and Captain Jim hadn't remembered anything either. He did tell Mooney that night was when he decided to start his own little marina and Captain Jane had decided to take that job with the local company, the one who's stock had exploded and she bought that alpaca farm up in Maine. "I can't believe we were all so worried last year Mooney", Captain Jim had said, "it seems like all our sea legs landed on stable ground. Even the marina people who jumped ship have landed safely, I hear."

The only thing Mooney still worried about was Sully. She hadn't seen him in almost a year - not since the night with the map. People did catch sight of his boat now and then - Mooney had heard he had a pirate flag on his mast now - and that was enough to let them all know he was ok - they knew his hands would always be on that wheel.

Mooney finished her pint and headed for the door looking at the faded fishing rules sign on the pub wall - it's funny she thought, I wonder if the marina people had seen our rules before they changed theirs, if we had been able to get them to understand us, if that would have made any difference.

Outside, the moon was shining brightly and a newspaper reporter was interviewing worried people about the latest wash up of 'hands' down at the marina. These guys are here every month, Mooney thought shaking her head.

"What are they this time?" Mooney asked him."Female, maybe a size 10, leftie", the reporter answered before catching sight of the marina spokesman and taking off after him. As Mooney pedaled away on her bike, she could hear the marina spokesman saying:

"This is no cause for concern people. Hands are not as needed as they used to be. Machines can do the hands-on part for us all now. This is not a problem."

Mooney couldn't help noticing the spokesman had a metal hook where his right hand should have been. For a second Mooney thought she caught sight of a pirate flag on a ship heading out to sea ... no, she thought to herself, it couldn't be ...

(disclaimer from Olive -  all characters and companies appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or companies, living or dead, is purely coincidental)