{This post is part of a FREE 5-part e-course on growing the profits in your online handmade business, running on Create & Thrive this week. Subscribe to our email updates to make sure you don’t miss a lesson.}
Welcome to Day 1 of our 5-day course!
This week I’ll be taking you through five simple steps that you can take to quickly and (relatively) painlessly increase the profits you’re bringing in in your online handmade business.
Let’s start with a fundamental – something you may never have considered is eating into your profits.
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Let’s get it out there straight away – I’m going to take a big bet that your workspace looks a tad messy right now.
Am I right?
Creative people tend to be a bit messy by nature – we have idea after idea, and we jump from one to the other – often forgetting to ‘clean up’ after ourselves as we go!
I am the queen of mess.
One of my best friends even calls me ‘Messy Bessie’. Yep.
My whole life I’ve always had a messy desk, messy room… but a while back I decided enough was enough.
When I realised that I was spending twice as long trying to find a component or tool than it actually took me to make a piece of jewellery, it hit me that this was a problem!
One way to increase profits is to decrease the time spent to earn the same amount of money.
The time we spend shuffling things around in our studios is time wasted. Time we could be spending more profitably – by making more product, blogging, marketing, designing… you name it.
But – I hear you say – I love having everything right in front of me! I gain inspiration from having beads/yarn/pencils/paints strewn all about!
You know what, I do too! But there’s no reason we can’t have them all strewn around in an organised fashion.
ACTION STEPS
Step back and take an objective look at your workspace.
1. Can you organise it right now?
2. Do you need to invest in buying/making storage solutions?
3. Do you need to re-arrange how you use the space?
4. …Or even find a new space altogether?
Work out what storage you need to make your space organised and easy to use. Consider your working style and position.
For example – do you work sitting down? How can you organise your tools/materials so you need to move around as little as possible – basically having as much at your fingertips as possible?
Do you have a bin? If not, get one, and put rubbish in there straight away. And then empty it! (So many times my poor husband Nick has gotten fed up with my overflowing bin and emptied it for me…)
For a little inspiration, here’s a picture of my current workspace. This was taken over a year ago (by Paul Harris for an article in Smarter Business Ideas), but it’s pretty similar still.
