If you ever crack open the business pages of a newspaper you'll see stories of wildly successful "small" companies cracking the several million dollar sales mark, hiring another 20 people, maybe floating an IPO. In fact, a small business in Canada is typically defined as a for-profit enterprise with annual gross revenues of $5 million or less.
$5 million. Do you know how many mugs you'd have to throw? How many earrings you'd have to make? Stickers? Sweaters?
No wonder so many creatives want to run screaming for the hills when someone tells them to think of their work as a business. We don't fit the typical small business mold. It can make us feel like we have no place in the business world.
Does that mean a handmade business can't be successful? Absolutely not. We just have different metrics and different values.
Most of us are not in this purely for the money. Yes money has to be part of the reason, we do need to cover our costs and pay ourselves properly, but for most makers there's something else driving the bus.
In a previous life I worked at a software development company. It was fun for a long while, and then it wasn't. Around the same time we'd bought a sailboat and I was craving a life beyond the 9-5 cubicle. I decided life was short and should be lived well and joyfully. Sailorgirl Jewelry was born twenty years ago. Part of my company mission is to take four months off every year and go sailing. I do that every year. By my own definition I have a successful company - even though, frankly, I would have been financially better off staying in that cubicle.
When I led my "How to Start a Successful Micro-Business" class, one of my first questions was always "why are you here?" The answers were as varied as the work people made. The most common reason was to cover the costs of a hobby and have an excuse to make more. The second most common was a second income - kids heading to university, an expensive sport, piano lessons, a kitchen renovation, an annual trip to Europe. Some people just wanted to spend time with other makers. To live a more creative life. That's a big one.
Whatever your reason, it's personal. It's yours. You can't borrow someone else's why, you have to know your own.
Here is a truth. You are going to pour a piece of yourself into this venture, it will suck up your brain cells 24/7. Your time, your energy, your creativity. You need your WHY close at hand on the days it feels hard, and some days it will feel hard.
The bottom line is if you haven't defined what success looks like for you, how will you know when you get there? So I'll ask you the same question I asked every student who walked into my class.
Why are you here? What do you want from your small business? What does success mean to you?
If you haven't defined your version of success, how will you know when you are successful?
Write down three things that would have to be true for you to call your craft business a success. Not what someone else's success looks like. Yours. Write it down, stick it somewhere you'll see it, and mean it.
— Catherine