As you may know, Steve and I have a home business, Batty4Arts, that we sell our arts and crafts through. For me, it's my full time job. But it's a constant struggle, and let's face it, the economy is not in the best place right now which makes selling things that really have no functional reason. We still put in the effort, though, and hope that some day it will pay off.
I've tried doing what I'm "supposed to do" with this whole thing. It was suggested, multiple times, that joining support networks would be helpful while figuring out the basics of running a small business, so I did. I'm not really finding it very helpful, though. A lot of the "information" is around tax issues- because April is tax season and people are stressed about it- but those tax issues don't apply to us. As an arts and crafts business, the taxes are pretty straight forward. And we have to file each quarter, so it's just not a big deal.
The issue I'm having with the support networks, the magazines, the blogs, etc. is they keep doing theses success profiles. They interview someone who's made it: an artist who's in high demand, a handyman who has to turn down jobs because he's so overbooked, a writer who's been on the best seller list for months now. Am I the only one who's not inspired by this?
For example, the most recent was a jewelry designer that, on a whim, decided to make some pieces, go to a random market, and see what happened. She claims to have had a constant group of people "drooling over the pieces" and made $600 that day. So, she decided to make it her full time job. Or the doll artist that submitted a doll into a doll magazine, was contacted by a convention and asked to teach a class, and now can't keep up with demand. Or the picture hanger- seriously, he hangs pictures, not frames them, they have to be already framed and ready to go, he just puts them on the wall- who is in such high demand despite raising his rates that he has to schedule his time off. This is not inspirational when we've been struggling to make this thing work for years. In fact, it's just depressing and disheartening.
Is it just me?
No comments:
Post a Comment