by The Embroidery Coach | | Embroidery Business Marketing
The No. One strategy that may be hurting your embroidery business is your mindset! Many times our thoughts are what hold us back from succeeding at what we want to achieve and may really be hurting our chances of having a successful embroidery business. I wanted to charge higher prices for my embroidery work when I first started my business but then the negative talk started. I had been told so many times that there was no way that I was going to be able to make a living with an embroidery business and then I actually started believing it.
We second-guess ourselves and we have doubts when this happens. With all of the negative thoughts and other people‚’s opinions, we soon tell ourselves that we aren‚’t good enough, smart enough, talented enough, or whatever to be able to charge the prices we want or need to for our work. So we end up just settling for what we think we can get and really create a tough struggle for ourselves.
This was a huge struggle for me when I first started my embroidery business and it lasted for almost 15 years! I was convinced that I had to be the lowest priced embroiderer to get the work and stay busy! That mindset almost cost me my entire business!
As a woman, I did not value my time! It was hard for me to ask for the money and price my embroidery as it should have been priced because of all of the negative talk. I collected everyone else‚’s price list and priced my embroidery to match or just a little lower. I almost lost my entire business as a result of it!
I was determined to have the highest quality embroidery of any one that I knew of that was in the embroidery business and I was told many times that I had accomplished that. I was offering this very high quality embroidery at a price that was as low or lower than the embroidery businesses that were offering low quality. How stupid was that!
I did not realize that what I had to offer was a product that I could have priced much higher right from the beginning of my business but my mindset had blocked my ability to see that. It took my accountant practically batting me in the head to get this point across. Either I price my embroidery as I should or close the doors! I was not making any money and I was never going to make any money if I did not change my mindset and my prices. I just knew in my own mind that people would not pay those high prices!
I was so wrong! With my accountants help, I created a whole new pricing structure that was much higher. It was very freighting to me to do this because I just knew that I would lose most of my customers. I did lose some of my customers but they were only the customers that wanted the lowest price.
It was a struggle for me to change that mindset but with his help I was able to do so. I guess you would say, he was my first business coach. When I changed my total mindset and started promoting my quality product and excellent customer service I had plenty of work! Most of my customers were already coming to me for my quality and service and when I raised the prices, they were OK with that.
I found that the secret is not to project your thinking & feelings onto your customers! This mindset held me back for 15 years! Since everyone else was charging low prices, I thought that I had to stay in line with them or charge less to get the customers.
Do not let this happen to you. I would love to be able to convince you and all embroiderers that you need to charge for your expertise. We are not or should not be struggling artists! We are highly skilled professionals and should be paid accordingly and you need to develop the mindset of a professional!
If you are not sure whether or not you have the skill level to be able to charge high prices, get a coach that will help you develop the skill level that you need. Sometimes I just cringe when I see designs that come into to me for a critique. Many embroiderers do not even know that their skill level is not high enough.
I know that I am talking about skill level and charging more for your work, but this is all part of your mindset. If you develop the skills that you need to be a highly skilled embroiderer, then you have earned the right to start charging what you are worth! If you need help in this area, please contact me at joyce@theembroiderycoach.com.
If you have anyone telling you that there is no way you are going to make any money with your embroidery business, close your ears. Learn to block them out. Everyone that teaches about a positive mindset tells you to stay away from negative people. This is not always possible, especially if it is a loved one but you can learn to block them out. That is what I had to do and the negative talk will no longer bother you.
Just stay on your path to creating your highly profitable embroidery business and keep thinking the positive thoughts that are so necessary to have a successful embroidery business.
Without it, you will have a very tough road ahead of you! Stay off that road! Do not travel it at all!
by The Embroidery Coach | | Embroidery Business Marketing
When you look at your life and your embroidery business as it is today, are you where you want to be or are you miles away from your dreams and goals? It can cause such a feeling of frustration when you realize that no matter how hard you work you cannot seem to move forward toward your dreams or goals! Working hard is not always the answer. You have probably heard the saying, “Work Smarter, Not Harder!” But how do you do that?
First of all, you need to find out what is actually keeping you from moving forward. There are many factors that may be holding you back but here are 7 of the most common factors or even traps that I have found.
- You don‚’t know what you really want out of your embroidery business.
I am sure that when you started your embroidery business, you had no idea that it was going to be so hard. Having an embroidery business sounded like a great way to make some money and even a fun way to make a living but did you really think about what you actually wanted to achieve as a result of your business? You must have a reason; one that is much larger than just making money. If it is all about money, it will be very difficult to stick with it when the times are tough and you probably have already discovered that there are those rocky times.
Take the time to think about what it is that you want out of your business and write it down. Be specific when you are writing it down. Where do you want to be 5 years from now? How will your life be different as a result of your embroidery business in those 5 years? Being specific helps your mind to draw that mental picture and is very important before you can take the next step of setting your goals and then planning.
- You set Goals in your business but do not seem to be able to reach those Goals!
Goals by themselves are only a wish-list or a dream of how we would like to see our business or situation in the future. Many people set pie in the sky goals but have no idea as to how to reach them. Setting large goals that are totally unreachable just sets you up for failure. You want to be realistic when you are setting your goals and then Plans and Actions on those plans must be put in place in order to reach any type of goals.
Start setting small goals. Set a goal for the week and start planning on a daily basis for what you must get done this week in order to reach that goal. Once you get into the habit of planning weekly, start planning for the month. Planning to reach your goals is a habit, a very important habit that you must build. Without planning to reach the small goals you may fall into the third trap that can be holding you back.
- You don‚’t have any type of a plan to get you where you want to go.
Most embroiderers do not have any type of plan for their business. Your embroidery business is just like any other journey. If you do not take the time to lay out a plan, you have no idea as to where you are going or how you are going to get there.
You would not dream of taking a vacation without some type of a plan or roadmap; so why in the world would you try to run your business without a guide to get you there. Your business can be the vehicle to provide the funds for some great vacations, but if you do not have a plan or lay out the steps that it takes to run and grow your business, this is usually not possible. Not having a plan is a huge roadblock in your embroidery business and without one, it is very difficult to achieve your goals.
- You do not have the money to advertise.
Are you not moving forward because you do not have the money to advertise? I hear this a lot from embroiderers. They do not have the money to advertise so they feel like they are locked in their position of just waiting for the work to come into them. There are many other ways to get the word out about your work that costs very little. Asking all of your friends and family to hand out good business cards or brochures goes a long way in helping you get your name out there.
Attending network meetings and mingling with other people is just about the best way to let everyone know about you and what you have to offer. Attend the fund raisers and trade shows in your area and mingle, mingle, mingle! Networking is the most cost effective way possible to advertise and will bring you in more work than any other form of advertising. You must get your face out there and let people know that you exist.
- Your family or loved ones don‚’t understand or support you.
If you are anything like me, my family thought that I had lost my mind when I said that I was starting an embroidery business! How could I possibly make any money doing that? It was hard, but I wanted it so bad and I was determined to prove them wrong! I had sewed all of my life, made all of my own clothes, the clothes for all of my children and beautiful gifts or any type of occasion for all of our family and friends. Everyone thought that was great, but when it came time to try to actually make a business out of it, that was a different story.
Your embroidery business is just like any other business but it is very hard to make other people understand why we want to do this or why we would waste our time and money to even try to do this. If you have the determination and the will to do it, You can do it even without their support. It can be harder, but it can be done, trust me on that!
- You do not have the skills you need to move forward.
In order to move forward in your business, you must have the skills to do so. Some of the skills take time to learn; and to learn others, you will need to invest some money into learning them. Your next step then is to practice what you are learning. You cannot increase your skill level without the study and then a lot of practice on the new skill that you are trying to learn.
I have found that by working on a new skill for 30 minutes every morning, it helps me to up my skill level very quickly. Investing the money for new programs or a coach to teach you new skills will help you move forward much quicker without the huge learning curve that it takes when you are struggling to learn everything on your own. Continuing to struggle leaves you feeling discouraged and sometimes you just want to quit!
- You do not think you can do it.
Many of us grew up with a low self-esteem and a lack of self-confidence and we carried this over into our adult life. It is so sad and it keeps you from believing in yourself or believing that you can do it. You may have someone that continuously tells you that you cannot do it or that it is a stupid thing to do and it re-enforces those feelings of self-doubt.
There is no shortcut to self-esteem or self-confidence. No one can give it to you and the only way that you can build confidence in yourself if to step out of your comfort zone and do something that you have never done before. Sometimes you will fall flat on your face the first time, but when this happens, you just get up and do it again.
“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
If you will take some time out to really think about where you are in your business or even in your personal life and assess your entire situation, think about each one of these factors and see if any of them are holding you back. You may find something else in your life that is holding you back. If that is the case do whatever it takes to change that so that you can move forward and have the kind of a life or embroidery business that you have always wanted! It is totally possible! If you set your mind to it, there is nothing that you cannot achieve!
If you need help in moving forward, don’t hesitate to contact me at joyce@theembroiderycoach.com
by The Embroidery Coach | | Embroidery Business Marketing
Sabotaging your business and even yourself can be totally avoided but so many small business owners get caught in a trap of not knowing exactly what to do. Self-sabotage takes on a variety of guises and affects small business owners of all ages, of every economic level and of all walks of life.
But it always leads to our not living the life we want for ourselves. Habitually being late with customers‚’ orders, extreme disorganization in your business and not following up with sales leads can be indications that you are unknowingly sabotaging yourself or your embroidery business. Here are a few questions that you can ask yourself to see if you are sabotaging your business or even yourself:
- Do I spend at least 30 minutes locating paperwork that I need for an order?
- Am I indecisive and fearful about pricing; as a result, I often lose an order?
- Do I tend to start projects with great enthusiasm, but have great difficulty finishing them?
- Is my financial situation always chaotic leaving me with an uneasy feeling?
- Do my actions often jeopardize my relationships, and leave me financially unstable?
- Do I worry a lot about what others think of me and my business?
- Am I always struggling?
- Do I often put off the things I need to do? Procrastination and reliability are huge problems for me.
- Is my business ever going to change? I‚’m still not living the life I truly want, and I‚’m starting to lose hope that I will ever have the business that I want to provide that kind of life.
- Do my customer relationships tend to eventually fall apart?
- Do I avoid confrontation and give in to others in order to be liked and win their favor?
I know I have the potential to do more with my life and my business, if only I could just get out of my own way.
Self-defeating behaviors often mask a fear of change and of growing personally as well as in your business. Join me on September 9th to start a 12 week Group Coaching program,“9 Steps To A Profitable Embroidery Business!” This course is going to help you eliminate those self-defeating behaviors and set you and your business up for creating the lifestyle that you deserve.
This is a program where you will be able to interact with the other members of the program and you will be able to ask whatever questions you have to help get your business become more profitable during our weekly Q & A calls.
When we deliberately hinder our own efforts, we get to avoid the knowledge that our life is up to us, and that we do, indeed, get to choose how we want to live our lives. You can stop sabotaging your business and yourself, make the changes you need to make, and start living the life you want to live!
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
