The honest truth is that the more time you have to spend on your biz, the faster it will grow.

But we all have time constraints, and the worst thing you can do is set yourself up for massive frustration & failure if your expectations don’t align with reality.

Don’t over-commit. Don’t over-plan. Get realisitic about how much time you have, and how much time it will take you to grow your biz.

Take an honest look at your life – at what is happening in your life this year – and realistically decide how much time per day, week, and month you can actually spend working on your business.

Not how much you would like to spend, but how much time you can actually lock into your calendar every day.

For most of us, these numbers will be different. Chances are that in the beginning, you’ll wish you had more free time to work on your biz!

But you can’t manufacture more time. 

The only way to create more time for your business is to remove other obligations from your life.

If you can do this – great! Learn how to say no to the things that don’t really matter to you – things that you’ve gotten stuck doing for other people, to fulfil THEIR desires, rather than yours – and carve out more time to fulfil your own dream.

If you can’t create more time because you are already only doing what you absolutely have to with your time, that’s okay, too. It’s just the way it is, and fighting against it, or wasting time feeling frustrated, are both a waste of your mental energy.

Once you get clear on the reality of the time you have, the key is deciding what the most high-leverage activities you can do are, and focusing on them.

That’s what the next few weeks of this Bootcamp will help you to achieve!

Action Steps

1. Make a list of all the obligations in your life that take up your time. Are there any that you can eliminate this year?

2. Once you’ve gone through this process, and freed up extra time (hopefully), break your time down into weeks and days, and schedule in ‘work time’ where it fits every day.

If you’re full-time self-employed already, this is just as vital a task as for those who have limited windows of time – because if you don’t allocate work time and rest time, you’ll end up working ALL the time, and that is not a healthy way to be!

Have you ever really sat down and defined what ‘handmade’ means to you?

You would think that it would be pretty simple, but there are actually a lot of different definitions out there as to what constitutes ‘handmade’.

As someone with a handmade business, it’s important that you are clear on what handmade means to you, and what elements of that definition you want to make clear to your customers.

How important to the purpose and story of your business is the word and ethos of ‘handmade’?

Does it mean that you make all of your pieces yourself from raw materials?

What parts of your process are done by hand, and which parts are not?

Do you get your designs manufactured elsewhere, but still via hand rather than machine?

Are you a maker, or a designer, or both?

Is it your aim to always make your items yourself, by hand, or do you actually want to expand your business so that your designs are manufactured elsewhere?

If you do, it’s important to realise that that’s okay – it just means that you’ll move beyond the label of handmade sometime in the future, and you need to own that.

Getting clear on this will help you decide what elements of ‘handmade’ really matter to you – and therefore, the direction you’ll want to take your business in future.

For example, if it’s important to you that every one of your pieces is made by your own hands, you are making the decision that you’ll never be able to expand your business past a certain point.

However, if you care more that it’s made locally by hand – perhaps by others helping in your studio, or outsourced elsewhere – then you know that you have the potential for growth beyond yourself.

There is no right or wrong answer here – just what works for you, and your customers.

Action Steps

1. Come up with your own definition of ‘handmade’ as it pertains to your business. You might even like to write a paragraph that outlines your relationship to the handmade movement, and how your designs fit into the handmade ethos.

2. Share it with us in the FB group!

Welcome to Lesson 1 of the Handmade Biz Boot Camp!

And today we start at the beginning – what’s your why?

This really is the fundamental question you need to answer before you move forward with your business in 2023 – because it will underpin every decision you make.

Without a burning ‘why’, it is so easy to quit when the going gets tough (and it WILL get tough).

Today, you’re going to get clear on your why.

You’re also going to work out what your core values are in work and life, and how does/will this business fulfil them?

When you find your why, and clarify the core values that drive you, everything becomes much easier, because you’re being motivated from a place of passion and conviction.

Some of you may have gone through this process before – you may have done the workshop below previously, or gone through the process of working out your why and core values in the past.

Even if you’ve done it before (unless it was within the last few weeks), I strongly urge you to DO IT AGAIN.

The process we’re going through in this bootcamp is deliberately designed to be something you can work through again and again.

Reviewing our motivations and making sure we still hold the same core values as we did a year (or more!) ago is a powerful way of re-connecting with the passion and drive we need to keep our business fresh and moving forward.

If you have done this process recently – sit down and review your discoveries today, before we dive into the rest of this Bootcamp.

If you haven’t gone through this process before, I hope you find it as revelatory and grounding as I did the first time I did it!

Action Steps

1. Complete the What’s Your Why Workshop.

2. Come over to the FB group and share your 3 Core Values and your ‘Why’.

Today you’re going to create a weekly marketing schedule. 

Yesterday, you put together a bunch of ideas for the types and frequency of posts to different platforms.

Now it’s time to organise them.

There is no one ‘right’ way to do this, but I’m going to give you a few suggestions.

The key is: don’t make it complicated

And remember – this is your regular, every-single-week tasks.

You will no doubt have extra marketing tasks arise as you prepare for events – like markets and shows – but they are ON TOP of these regular, habitual tasks.

What you’re scheduling in today should be done every single week, without fail.

First – you could use a board on Trello.

You could have a separate board, with a list for each day, like this:

Or, you could have all your tasks in one list, within your weekly planning board.

This way, you can have a ‘Weekly Marketing Tasks’ list, and a ‘Marketing Tasks Completed’ list, and just move your tasks from one to the other as you do them, to keep track.

Then, move them all back at the start of a new week.

Of course, you may prefer paper – in which case, I’ve made this very simple print-and-fill pdf for you!

Simply make a note of your 2-3 tasks for each day, then stick it on your wall to remind you!

A plan is only as good as its implementation – so don’t over-commit.

Start by scheduling only what you KNOW you can commit to, then, if you succeed at that, you can start adding in more marketing tasks.

If you tend to forget these tasks, you might even want to schedule them into your calendar app so it reminds you each day!

When it comes to content ideas, it might help you to also have a ‘theme’ schedule.

So, if you’re posting to IG every day, have a bank of post types – such as:

• photo of a finished item
• work in progress
• videos of parts of the making process
• studio shot
• model/in-use shot
• cat photo (;D)
• selfie

… whatever works for you. Then, you can rotate around through these post types.

Or, you can be even more strict and have a theme for each day of the week.

The idea here is to make marketing as easy and choice-paralysis-free as possible. Do what works for you.

Action Steps

1. Create your daily marketing calendar, using whatever method works for you.

So you’ve locked in the big events for the year, which is a great start… but successful marketing comes down to routine and repetition.

Today it’s time to make a list of the regular, habitual marketing tasks that you are going to be undertaking every week.

Start with the marketing tools you decided on lesson 17.

How will you use each of these tools on a weekly basis?

Here are some possible examples.

Email marketing: commit to sending one email per week.

Instagram: decide to post a Reel 3x per week.

PR: send two emails to bloggers per week.

SEO: Update 2 listings per week.

Pull out your list, and decide how much work you can commit to on a weekly basis for each marketing platform.

Make a list of the exact tasks you are going to do. Bonus points if you do a bit of research on content ideas, too!

Tomorrow we’re going to put together a day-by-day marketing plan, using the commitments you make in today’s lesson.

Action Steps

1. Using the marketing tools you committed to earlier in the week, make a list of the exact, actionable tasks you are going to take each week.

2. Bonus step – make/find a list of content ideas for each platform – for example, a list of the types of posts you can make to FB, or ideas for your mailing list. Check the workshops page – there are a number of workshops that may help you with this.