“9 Tips To Help You Plan Efficiently In Your Embroidery Business!”

by The Embroidery Coach | | Embroidery Business Planning

Let‚’s face it, we all want to have a business that we love! We all want to start each day with a feeling of I can‚’t wait to get started today! I am going to share with you 9 Tips that will help you plan efficiently in your embroidery business to give you that feeling of excitement to get started each day! Every business needs a plan to be able to run efficiently and each and every day needs to start with a plan.

Tip #1 Set Your Goals

What are the goals that you have for your business? Do you have a specific time frame that you want to reach a certain monetary goal? Setting your goals is the very first step in creating your plan. Without goals you do not have anything to use to measure your progress!

Do not set goals so high that you cannot reach them and do not set them so low that they do not mean anything. Set your goals a little out of your reach so that you do have to stretch in order to reach them.

Write down your Goals. I have found that if I commit to them on paper, not just on the computer, but actually writing them down they mean a lot more and I am more apt to follow through and reach my goals. You must create a plan for each one of your goals in order to be able to reach them.

Tip #2 Reach Out For Help!

I create my plans in cycles of 60 days and to reach my goals and get everything done that I want done at the end of this 60 day plan, I have to reach out for help. I have hired someone else to help me and have given them instructions as to what I need done.

When you are the main person in your business and the only one running it, trying to get everything done is impossible. There are tasks that you can hire out to take some of the big burden off of your shoulders. This may be simply having someone come in and clean your home for you periodically. It may be someone that can run errands for you.

Before my husband retired, I had someone do small errands for me each week, like go to the post office and make my bank deposits. This freed up a lot of time for me.

I have someone that does all of my books for me. I found that this was one of the areas that was really bogging me down.

I have heard embroiderers say, as soon as I get enough money to hire someone I will and it will be easier. This is the wrong way of thinking. Thinking like that will not be productive for you and you will find that that day will never come. You cannot get ahead and do everything yourself unless of course you are just starting out and you do not have much work.

Once the work starts coming in, you cannot afford to try and do everything yourself because some of the other areas of your business will suffer when you are trying to get your embroidery work done.|

Tip #3 Find Out Where You Stand Financially

Before I hired a bookkeeper, I was always behind with my books and before I knew it, the year was half gone and I had no idea as to where I was. I did not know if I was making a profit or losing money. I had a vague idea and I knew what was in my bank account, but it was very frustrating for me not knowing where I stood. If you do not know where you are financially, it can really put your whole business in a tailspin and it is usually a downward spiral.

You need to know where you are at all times, so that you can make the proper adjustments to change whatever needs to be changed. You must also be willing to say NO! This is another area that is a hard one for most of us embroiderers! I know that is a hard one for me, but I have come to the conclusion that I cannot do it all and what is not creating the most profit for me is gone!

You need to know which area of your business is profitable and which area is not. This is the only way that you can realistically make the right course corrections.

Do you know which months in your business are your slow times? You must be prepared for these times.

I was talking with an embroiderer a few months ago that was about ready to go out of business because she did not have enough work in the shop to be able to continue with her business! This was a situation that had been going on for months and it had come down to the wire where she basically had her back against the wall. This is not a good place to be and it is all because of the lack of planning.

When I asked her which area in her business was profitable and what area was not, she could not answer that. She had no idea! Big mistake!

Tip #4 Start Planning Small

If you have not been in the habit of monthly, weekly, or daily planning, you need to start today, but start small. I know that in all of the books about planning it says to start out with your entire year first, then your month, then your week and then your day! To me this was impossible. I could not relate to that because I really did not know what I was going to be doing in a year and I did not have any type of a plan in place.

I started by planning out my day at the end of the day before. I worked hard to try and complete what I had on my list to do. I also found out what I could realistically do in a day‚’s time. Once I got used to that and saw how much more smoothly my days started running, I planned out my entire week on a Master plan and then created the daily plan from there.

Now I have a basic plan for the year, but my Master Plan is mainly a plan for 60 days at a time. To me that is much more realistic. I have specific goals that I set for each 60 day cycle and without my Master Plan, I would never reach them!

When you are planning out your day, do not create a to do list that is a foot long with so many items on it that it is impossible to get done. This is a recipe for failure. I only put 3 major items on my list at the most. Sometimes if it is a big item, there is only one thing on the list.

Planning out a webinar or a teleseminar is a major item and I can only put that one item on the list. That takes me many hours to do so it would be foolish for me to create a list with more items on it and then not be able to get to them. I need to focus on that one item in order to get it done. Without that single focus I would not be able to accomplish it. If I stopped in the middle of it to do something else, it would take me a long time to get back to where I was when I left off and that is a huge waste of time.

Tips #5 Time All Of Your Actions

Start timing all of your actions. This was huge for me when I started this. I found out that I was wasting a lot of time on mundane items and by timing myself, it made me work a little faster with a totally different mindset. I was taught this by another internet marketer and I found out that many of the top marketers were using this method so I decided to give it a try.

In my Embroidery Pricing program I teach you about timing all of your production and artwork but I have not talked about timing all of your other tasks. This is just as important. Timing each one of your tasks is a big step toward creating more efficiency.

Tip #6 Create A Master Plan

Planning out your business takes time, but once you have a Master Plan in place, it is a huge time saver! When you are creating your Master Plan, you need to be off by yourself and not in the middle of your business. This may require that you go away for a day or lock yourself in one room with strict instructions to leave you alone!

I find that creating my Master Plans in 60 day cycles works great. This is not a huge chunk of time and it makes it easy to plan out 8 weeks instead of trying to plan out an entire year. I have basic goals for my year but it is just too difficult to try and plan out an entire year. There is one exception to this and that is Marketing, but we will touch on that later.

Tip #7 Plan Each Area

After creating your Master Plan it is very important to go back and start planning out each area of your business. You have many individual departments within your business, even if you are a 1 person business.

To start planning each area, you will go through each of your processes, 1 by 1 and write down your process step by step. As you are doing this, think about what you are doing and ask yourself a question. Is there an easier or quicker way that I can perform that same task? Write it down in a step by step fashion and create an actual process manual out of it. A process manual needs to be created for everything that you do from taking an order from a customer to shipping your products out the door and even creating that invoice and sending it out.

Every function that you have in your business has a certain way that it is done or needs to be done to be efficient. When you are finished with your manual, give it to someone that is not familiar with the process and ask them to read through it and try to duplicate that process. If they can, it is complete. If they cannot, you need to go back and rewrite it until they totally understand what it is that you are trying to do. Make it so simple that anyone can pick it up very quickly!

Go through each area and each function and repeat this same process. Now this is going to take some time, but when you are finished you will have a complete plan for each area of your business and it will be much easier when it comes time to hire and train someone else for any area of your business. This will help to make the entire department run smoother and more efficiently.

Tip # 8 Create A Marketing Plan

Now I want to talk about creating your Marketing Plan. Most embroiderers do not even have a marketing plan and really do not know how to create one. One of the biggest mistakes that embroiderers make is cutting back on marketing during the slow periods.

The slow times is the time that you need to ramp up your marketing efforts. Most embroiderers think that when the business is slow, this is the time that you have to cut back on everything. How is that going to bring more work in the door? That makes no sense to me. I have embroiderers even say to me, I have to stop your membership site because things are slow. What they should be doing is reaching out to me for help so that they can avoid those times.

You should create a Marketing plan for 1 year in advance. You need to create a plan around the entire 12 months calendar, this would be holidays, sports events, business events and any other type of event that you can think of. If you know ahead of time when your promotions are going to be, it makes it easy to plan out each one in advance of the promotion and be ready for it. This will help to avoid those slow times. This is very important. I know that it sounds like an impossible task, but it really is not. You know when your slow periods are, you know when the holidays are, create programs to ramp up your sales for all of these times. It is not as hard as it seems or a lot of people make it out to be.

Marketing is the most important part of your business besides your skill level but even if you are the best embroiderer in town, if you are not marketing your business, you are not going to have any!

Tip #9 Use Tools To Make Your Planning Easier

Without the proper tools it is a lot harder to create a plan or even know where to start in creating your plan. You need to create a good Business Plan as your foundation and then you can start planning each area from there. I have a program that I have created that will give you all of the tools to help you create the type of business plan that you need and will be able to use on a daily basis.

I have a 9 week 9 Steps To A Profitable Embroidery Business  Program! This  program is going to help you:

• Organize and Plan
• Create your Pricing Structure
• Create an Instant Quoting System
• Create a Marketing Plan
• Create an Automatic Follow up System for your customers and prospects!
  

During this course you will be able to create your own Profitable Embroidery Business! Go to http://9StepsToAProfitableEmbroideryBusiness.com