One of the brash realities of turning a hobby into a business is found in the amount of work that comes along with building your business, especially if you decide to grow it on a part-time basis. 

The idea is simple: You love your craft.... You're scary good at it.... You know you can do it for a living and be completely satiated with life.  Heck, maybe you can make some good money doing it right away. 

But along with that want, maybe you have kids running around at home, a significant other to take care of, and a demanding boss at the 9-to-5.  Even if life seems to compound itself on your seemingly overwhelmed little shoulders, you can do it all.  Even better, you can do it all very well, if you have a system and a plan.

When I started iram-inal designs in late 2006 with my sister, we were both working full-time jobs.  As I've said before in this blog, we bankrolled our business by investing a few hundred dollars on juried art festivals, which quickly turned in to thousands for further investment.  Although we thought we had the process down-pat (we found a wholesaler from whom to purchase supplies, we got a production schedule in line), we found that as our business continued to grow, everything changed.  Time became less available, money became tighter as we spread our inventory to more locations, and marketing became an important element in helping to establish our brand.

Unfortunately, the truth of the world is that you have to spend money to make money.  Along with that ideal, it's doubly important to remember that your time is your most valuable asset.  You must equate your value with the time you spend to hone and craft your product, including how you forge your brand to the public.  So, the question is, where is it most important to spend the all-mighty dollar in creating your business?

For our business, my sister and I immediately took the plunge and saw the value in investing in every publishing program we could.  Instead of immediately hiring an outside company to do our work for us, we instead familiarized ourselves with how to use them.  Frontpage, Photoshop, and Publisher became our new best friends, and in learning how to use their applications, saved us a lot of money in the long run.  Our website, brochures, flyers, and catalogs were initially - and still are - all created by us.  The bottom line: Knowledge is Power.  If we cannot find someone to do exactly what we want for our marketing (even in the future), we have the wherewithal to do it ourselves.  And that ability in itself is irreplaceable.  

It is true that as you continue to grow, and your time becomes even more limited, you must take a step away from doing everything for your business and entrust your marketing, website, and other important aspects of your business to field professionals.  But until you reach that point, purchasing programs like those named above is an investment and step I highly recommend.  For us, learning how to use these programs was a trial-by-fire process, but saved us tens of thousands of dollars up front.

As our business continues to rapidly grow, we are beginning to craft relationships with field professionals, such as graphic designers and web builders, so that when we're ready, we'll call on them to take away this portion of our existing duties.  In the end, until we get to that point, we feel safe and strong knowing that we are sisters who can do it for ourselves.

Until next time, creative people....