Storm Outside - Knit the Sun
Guess what happened to me?
When someone says ' are you still running your little knitting business? Quite apart from smashing them in the face, I'd really like to say don't patronise me you toad! I'd like to see you do everything I do on a daily basis. In fact, I doubt whether people who have never run a business have any idea about the amount of hours that go into running a small business ... let me tell you... you never switch off ...
So if I'm not updating and amending the website on a daily basis, I'm buying from Reps and second guessing the fashions and colours which will be derigeur a season and a half ahead. As we in the real world have just finished Christmas, I've already ordered my Spring/Summer 2020 yarns and I am thinking about next autumn. Second guessing what my customers will want to buy. Then I am ordering packaging in an eco-friendly way (yet protecting the yarn from the lovely British weather!) I'm organising advertising and dealing with the magazine companies. I'm budgeting so that I don't overspend on adverts or in fact anything that is needed year round. I'm emailing customers and dispatching and packaging their orders. I'm organising the stock levels and the stock room so that items can be easily found - constantly looking at new storage and space saving solutions so that I don't take over the whole house.
Running the local knit and natter group - teaching people to knit as paying the skill forward is just as important as the sales! Thinking about patterns and yarns and things you'd like to make for yourself as well as others - honestly you will rarely see me in anything knitted as everything I knit is for a gift for someone else.
AND don't even talk to me about the tax return and the accounts. I'm blogging, Instagramming, Facebooking and Twittering all over the place, because that's what you have to do these days to self-promote ... which I struggle with as a child of the 60s where saying how good you were at something would gain you a whallop across the back of your head or the top of your legs!! So lovely, you just run off to your little 9-5 job, where there is little commitment or thought about what you are actually doing!
So me and m 'little business' are going just fine thank you ... GRRR!
Until next time my lovely woolly friends x
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