Are your controlling your Embroidery Business or do you feel like your Embroidery Business is controlling you? Do you feel like your embroidery business is choking the life out of your personal and family life and you just cannot seem to get control of it? Many embroiderers feel very overwhelmed and are very disorganized in how they have their business set up. This can cause so much pain and frustration that it makes it really hard to think straight and then in turn it can create a lot of tension at home and drastically affects every area within your family life.
Do You Have Systems Set Up?
Do you have systems set up for your business that helps you run your business on a daily basis? Are you doing so many tasks at one time that you cannot even think about how to get someone to help you? Do you have an easy way to train someone else to help you out when you are buried with work?
If you cannot answer yes to these questions, you need to do some serious thinking about your business.
The next question is how do you stop it? You are so busy during each day of your business trying to get all of the orders out, how do you change this? Is there a quick fix to this problem? No the answer is there is no quick fix, but in order to change this, you must take a step back and take a good look at your entire business.
Where do I Begin to Reorganize my Embroidery Business?
You must take some time out of your business, go through each area within your business, get systems set in place for each function of your business and totally reorganized it. This is the only way that you can grow your business, move forward in an organized manner and get back control of your life.
If you continue on as you are, you will just continue on as you are! That may not make sense to you, but stop and think about it. I know exactly where you are coming from. I had no idea as to how to really set up systems for each area of my business until I brought in some help. Thankfully, it was my accountant that could see what my issues were and where my bottlenecks were also. He had been inside of my business and helped me create a good pricing system for which I was very thankful. After doing a lot of observing in each area, he could see what was really happening. Did he do it for free? No he did not but it was some of the best money that I had ever spent. Sometimes you need an outsider, but someone that is familiar with your type of business in order to be able to see what is really happening.
You CAN do this yourself but you will have to be very objective and look at it from an outsider's perspective. You must take off your business owner’s cap, step back as if you were a consultant, and take a look at each function of your business that you go through on a daily basis.
- What could you do to make each step easier and more organized?
- What steps could you eliminate?
- What steps do you need to add?
- Do you have all of the steps to each function written down to make it easy to train someone else?
- Can some of your equipment be moved to cut out some time going from one area to the next?
- Can some of your supplies be moved to save steps?
- Is your order-taking process easy?
- Do you have a system in place to keep track of the goods that you have ordered?
- Do you have a way to keep track of the jobs that come in on a daily basis?
- Do you have a system in place to help you schedule your jobs?
- Do you know exactly how many hours of work you have in your shop at all times?
- Do you have a systemized approach to your hooping?
- Do you have a system set up for trimming, packing & shipping or pickup?
- Do you have the process written down for taking an order from a customer?
- Do you have the process written down for creating an invoice?
These are only a few of the items that you need to take care of to make your business run smoother and make it easy to bring in someone else to help you in your business. If you do not have systems in place, it is very difficult to train someone else because you are so scattered in your thinking about how to do the different steps each and every day.
You get into the robot habit every day of doing the same thing over and over without even thinking about it but you cannot train someone help to help you when you are like this. You must take time out, even if you have to close your shop for a few days, and re-evaluate your entire system and how you are running your business.
Your first step is to look at every aspect of your Embroidery business and write down what needs to be changed. Then you need to create a plan as to how you are going to do it. Maybe it means bringing in someone else that is not working with you to see if they can see where you need to make some changes. When I brought in my accountant, he walked with me through every step of my business and told me what I had to do to make the changes. This took some time, but I took each area, started writing down all of the steps to each process that took place in that area and created process manuals. This was a huge help and made it so much easier for me to train someone else to help with that part of the business.
This is not an overnight process, it takes weeks to get this done, but it is such a huge time-saver in your embroidery business and helps you to gain back some of the control in your business. You cannot do everything in your business by yourself. It just does not work. You need to have someone that you can call on to help you from time to time if you are working alone. If you have the processes written down, it makes it so much easier and saves you a huge amount of time. You need the assurance that whomever you have to help you is going to do the same job the same way that you do. Without written processes this is impossible.
Take the time out and take a good long look at your business and see what you can do to make your business run a little smoother. This is going to give you more control, help save you a lot of time and help you grow your business much easier.
If you would like to set up a strategy session to talk about your embroidery business I would be more than happy to answer some of your questions!
Joyce Jagger
The Embroidery Coach