You have your Embroidery business started, you have spent a lot of money getting all of your equipment and learning how to embroider, now it is time to really get that business going. You may also be buried in work and still you really do not feel like you are progressing. Growing your business in many ways is just like starting your business. You must create a plan to move forward. Planning is the most important part of your business. Proper planning will save you many hours of execution and redoing unnecessary steps. If you do not have a business plan in place that you are currently using, you must create one. You cannot really grow your business to any significant size without a plan.
Before you start doing any type of planning sit back and look at each area of your business. Do not try to look at it as a whole, go to each part and take a real good look at it. You have many parts to your business.
- The Office
- Design Center
- The Hooping Area
- Machine Production
- Finishing
- Shipping
These areas are the least amount that you have in your small business. If you are offering other services or have a showroom, you will have even more areas in your business. Look at each area, the way that you have it all set up, think about the way that you move around in it to do each one of your jobs. Think about the entire procedure of doing each job.
- It is all set up the way that you want it to be?
- Is every area organized and running smoothly?
- Do you have a step saving organized workflow?
- Do you have a good paperwork flow?
- Do you have a step by step process written up for each procedure in your business? This includes each item that you have to do starting with taking an order all the way through to shipping out your finished product, invoicing it and taking the payment. When you have all of these in place it is much easier to train a new person to help you. You want to make sure that each person is doing the procedure in the same manner. Without a step by step process, this is not possible.
- Do you have Procedural Manuals written for each area of your business?
3 Important Steps To Grow Your Embroidery Business!
There are 3 very important steps you must have in place before you can start growing your business.
- Make sure each area is organized and running smoothly
- Create a Business Plan
- Create a Marketing Plan
Organize Each Area Of Your Business
To be able to grow your business, you must have help. Your business has no chance of growing if you are trying to do everything by yourself. Hire some help to take over the simple jobs so that you will be free to spend some time on growing your business. The first person to hire is someone to take care of your bookkeeping for you. This can be a part time person or someone that does it on contract and charges you for however many hours a week that they are working on your business. I have been having my bookkeeping done on line for the past 3 years and it works out great.
The next person to hire is someone to do your finishing for you. This included the trimming, removing backing and topping, steaming, folding and packaging of your products. This is a huge job that can be done by a minimum wage person and it does not have to be a full time job. Depending on the amount of work that you are trying to put out in a day, a 4 hour person may be more than sufficient or maybe a couple of days a week.
It is extremely important to go through each area of your business and make sure that it is totally organized and running smoothly. If not this is the first place to start. Start with your office and go through each department and create a plan for each one.
- Get your work flow organized and running smoothly
- Make sure your paperwork flow is running smoothly
- Write up your step by step process for each job
- Create your Procedural Manuals for each area.
If you will take the time to get all of this in place, you will begin to see more production at the end of each week. This first step alone will help your business to grow.
Creating a Business Plan for your Embroidery Business
Creating a Business Plan that you will be using on a weekly basis to actually run your business is the very next step in growing your business. The main purpose of having a business plan is to give you a clear direction and guidance of how you intend to run your embroidery business and plan for future growth. With this plan you will be able to analyze and measure each step along the way to ensure that you are truly on the right path. Measuring your results is extremely important. Without measuring, you really do not know how you are doing.
Writing a business plan is not hard; the hardest part is getting started and knowing where to start. Many business plans look great on paper, but do not succeed in real life. Make sure that you are writing a plan that will work for you in the real world!
Do not try to use one of those template programs on the internet for your business plan, they are not designed for embroidery businesses, and they are far too complicated. I know that there is one out there that advertises that it is for embroidery business, but it truly is not. It is a generic business plan that is marketed to every type of business. How do I know this, I purchased it. The only true business plan program out there is one that I wrote myself. If you want to check it out, go to EmbroideryBusinessPlan.com. That is a program that I created to teach you how to write a business plan for your business, how to create all of your projections, cash flow statement and how to plan out every area of your embroidery business.
Your plan will be revised many times and will always be a work in progress. This is not a done once and you are finished process. If you will use your plan properly to run your business, you will be revising it on a monthly basis.
It can be a simple 5-10 page plan that will work for most small to medium sized embroidery businesses, or as complex as you want it to be. This all depends on your situation and whether or not you will need financing.
Create a Marketing Plan for your Embroidery Business
As part of your business plan you will need to create a Marketing Plan that you will follow.
You need to create a simple plan that you will follow for 1 year.
- List all of the events during the calendar year that your target market will participate in and events for you to participate in that will take you to where they are. It is very important to be present where your market is hanging out!
- Create Promotions for the lean times in your business and for all of the special days and holidays.
- Create a great business card, I wrote an article about creating a business card What Does That First Impression Say About You And Your Embroidery Business? This will leave a great first impression when you meet people and will go a long way in creating relationships when you are networking. Networking is by far the best way to start building up your business.
- Join at least one networking group and it is better if you can belong to a couple of different ones. The Chamber of Commerce is a good one in most areas and the BNI and Meetups are also good. Yes each one of them cost money to join but it is well worth it. You can get a lot of referrals when you are part of these groups. And yes, I mean a part of these groups. You must participate in the functions, not just be a member. Being a member but not attending the functions is a waste of your money.
In my book, The Truth About Embroidery Business Success‚ 7 Elements To A Highly Profitable Home Based Embroidery Business I have an entire chapter on Marketing your Business.
Without Organization, a Business plan and a Marketing Plan, your business will flounder! I have had that experience, it is not fun!
Here is a wrap up of the 3 steps to help you grow your embroidery business.
- Plan out and organize each area of your business
- Create a Business Plan
- Create a Marketing Plan
If you will follow these steps, you should see a massive growth in your business. It is very important to be growing your business on a daily basis. If you are not growing, you are moving backwards. For more information about how to your embroidery business, go to 9 Steps To A Profitable Embroidery Business!