You did it! 

Congratulations for completing the Handmade Business Bootcamp.

I know there was a lot of work in this course, so if you’ve done it all – wow, well done!

If you haven’t… don’t beat yourself up. You can finish it in your own time.

The blog posts will be up here on the site forever.

I’d love to know how you found the boot camp – please leave a comment below and let me know, or share your thoughts in the FB group. 

Did it help you? Should we do it again next year together? What was your biggest takeaway?

Now – go relax, celebrate, and congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Here’s to your best year in biz yet!

Action Steps

1. Congratulate yourself on a job well done!! 

2. Come over to the FB group and share your biggest take-away from this course. 

Welcome to our week of Promotion.

We’re starting at the beginning – with your Ideal Customer.

If you don’t know who you’re speaking to with your marketing, you’re just shouting in the dark.

You don’t know their interests, what tone of voice to use, or what’s going to move them.

Marketing is all about storytelling – and storytelling is all about creating an emotion in the listener.

You need to get clear on who you’re speaking to, and when you do, you’ll find your marketing starts becoming much easier and more natural.

So, it’s time to re-visit the Ideal Customer workshop, and work out your Ideal Customer Avatar – the imaginary person you’re going to start writing all your marketing copy to.

Knowing their demographics will also help you work out where you should target your marketing efforts.

Very importantly – don’t let this get too complicated. You might have a few different Ideal Customers. You might be unsure as to who they are.

Just work through the exercise, and do your best to put an avatar together that you can use for the rest of this week.

Action Steps

1. Do the Ideal Customer Workshop in the Circle.

2. Create your Ideal Customer Avatar.

It’s time to get PLANNING!

You’ve figured out your PURPOSE – now, let’s make it concrete.

This week, I’m going to walk you through the #Top3Priorities planning process I teach in this workshop.

I want to take you through the process – from the year level down to the week – step-by-step so you have no excuse for not getting your planning completed!

If you haven’t watched the workshop yet – go do that now. It will give you an overview of what the process is, and why I teach it (and use it myself).

If you HAVE done the workshop – lets get started!

Today, you’re going to decide on your 3 priorities for 2023.

Just THREE things that are going to be your guideposts for the whole year for your business.

(BTW, if you want to go through this same process for your personal life as well, I highly recommend it!)

Remember – priorities can be goals, but they don’t have to be. 

They can be process-focused.

For example, a priority for you might be ‘Turn over at least $50,000 in my business’.

This is both a priority and a goal, as it has a concrete ‘yes I achieved it’  or ‘no I didn’t result.

But you might choose something that isn’t a goal (that is, it doesn’t have a definitive point at which you’ve achieved it) such as ‘I will look for opportunities to say ‘no’ to other people’s priorities so I can carve out more time to work on my business’.

Or maybe you might choose ‘I will improve my product photography’ as a priority for the year.

There are endless possibilities, so your challenge today is to choose just 3 priorities that are big enough to span a year’s worth of development.

Action Steps

1. Brainstorm all the things you want to achieve in your business this coming year. Look for overarching themes and see how you can coalesce them into three main priorities for 2023.

2. Share your 3 Priorities with us in the FB group!

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!