Prep for the Holidays EP9: Plan Your Calendar by Working Backwards.

It's Week #9 in our Prep for the Holidays series! To make sure you're on top of all your key deadlines and dates this holiday season, start by working backwards from December 31st. I'll walk you through key dates to make note of and how to ensure you've got enough time for making, marketing, selling and shipping!

Whether you’re an artist, maker, or creative service provider, this episode is jam-packed with strategies to keep you organized and ahead of the game. Let’s make this holiday season not only manageable but also wildly successful for your creative business!

This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout

You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the and she Looked Up podcast. Each week, we sit down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. I'm your host, melissa Hartfield, and after leaving a 20-year career in corporate retail, I've been happily self-employed for 12 years. I'm a graphic designer, an illustrator and a multi-six-figure-a-year entrepreneur in the digital content space. This podcast is for the artists, the makers and the creatives who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. As always, I am your host, melissa, and this week we are back with week number nine in our prep for the holidays mini-sode series. So for those of you who might just be tuning in or have just stumbled upon us, over the last nine weeks and for probably the rest of the year, we have been doing short, 10 to 15 minute episodes where we tackle one task to help us prep our creative businesses for the busy holiday season. The series is designed to be helpful for artists, makers, creative service providers and even content creators, and so this week, we are up to task number nine. If you want to go back and listen to all the other tasks, if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, just look for the PFH or prep for the holidays in the title and you'll be able to see what week it is. If you are watching or listening on YouTube, we have a YouTube playlist for the prep for the holiday series. I will put a link to it in the show notes for the YouTube video and I'll put the link for the YouTube playlist in the regular show notes as well if any of you want to go catch up. But it's kind of nice. Youtube lets me create like a special place to keep them all, and I can't do that for the other podcast apps out there as easily. The other podcast apps out there as easily.

Speaker 1: 2:28

So, having said that, yes, we are on week number nine, and today's for the holidays tip or task is to start working backwards. Now, working backwards might sound a little bit strange, but essentially what you're going to be doing here is pulling out your calendar, and I find the easiest way to do this is to actually print off physical calendar pages. So if you're watching on YouTube, I'm holding up a copy of one of my calendar pages, and so what you want to do is print off or get together a series of calendar sheets for each month from now until December. So you'd be looking at September, october, november and December, and the first thing you want to do is you want to put the important dates in the calendar. So obviously you want to have Christmas and any other holidays that you sell for. So if you do Hanukkah and Hanukkah aligns with Christmas very closely this year, I believe so Hanukkah. If you do other, you know Diwali isn't really I don't think. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think it's a gift giving holiday, but there are still a lot of celebrations that happen for it. That is again a late fall celebration. So if you do any of those types of things, you want to make sure you put them in the calendar.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Don't forget Black Friday. Don't forget Cyber Monday. Don't forget Giving Tuesday or no Spend Tuesday there's different names for it. Don't forget Boxing Day. If you plan on doing something for Boxing Day, you want to get those all in your calendar. You also want to start entering in any markets that you're going to be doing, because those are going to be weekends where you're not going to be able to do as much making or shipping and packing. So you want to keep those in mind.

Speaker 1: 4:12

The next thing you want to do, particularly if you sell online so if you sell through Etsy or through your own website is you want to look at shipping deadlines. You can head over to Canada Post website If you're in the United States. I'm sure USPS has something similar to this. I'm pretty sure any postal system around the world has something similar to this and I'm pretty sure most courier system companies will also have this. But they will give you shipping guidelines to hit the holiday season. So you want to be able to make decisions about when you are going to cut shipping off for things to get there in time for Christmas, and you're probably going to want to have different deadlines for international, for the US and for domestic based on how long they take. So that's something you want to put in your calendar now. It's also something that you're going to want to put on your shop in your shipping section, and it's something you're going to want to put on your Etsy store. On your Etsy store, at the top we have that section that is for shop updates or shop news and stuff. You want to put that in a very visible place there so that you can let people know. You're also probably going to get people contacting you asking about shipping deadlines. If that's the case, you want to be able to just let them know. So having that information handy and not having to scramble for it every time somebody asks you is going to be a good thing.

Speaker 1: 5:44

As of right now, there are 16 weekends between now and Christmas, so you need to think about how many of those weekends are already spoken for, not just with markets, but with any family obligations that you may have. Do your kids have Christmas concerts or holiday concerts or anything like that? Start putting those in your calendar as soon as you know about them, because you're going to have to make time for them. So now that you know what all the important dates are, you need to start working backwards to figure out when you are going to do all your making, when your markets are. If you have a market at the beginning of November, you need to have enough stock on hand, made and created and ready to go by that first weekend in November, and if you've got markets every weekend after that, you are also going to make sure you have enough stock to get you through those markets, because you might not have a lot of time during the week, depending on what other obligations you have. If you have a full-time job or a part-time job or something like that, you may not be able to do as much making as you think. So you need to plan ahead, like when you're going to do your making.

Speaker 1: 6:58

You also need to plan ahead for your advertising and your marketing, particularly if you only sell online and you are not doing in-person markets, or if you're a creative services provider and your big sales weekend is going to be that black friday, cyber monday weekend. So you need to start thinking now about when your promotional materials need to be published. So how are you going to promote? Are you going to promote? Are you going to send emails? Are you going to do social media? What ways are you going to promote, and when do those things need to start being posted? Because if you can start creating those things now and we'll get into this in a future episode but if you can start creating some of that stuff now, then you can start scheduling it and getting it out of the way, so you don't have to worry about it, it's just all taken care of.

Speaker 1: 7:49

But this is the kind of stuff that you really want to think about. And the only thing with this time of year is time moves incredibly quickly and we always think we have more time than we actually have and we always think that time is going to pass slower than it actually does. So when I say we have 16 weekends, it sounds like a lot, but it doesn't sound like a lot, and that's because it's really not a lot when you actually think about all the things that have to get done in that timeframe and the fact that it's 16 weekends until Christmas. But a lot of your selling and shipping and all of that stuff is going to happen probably more like in the 12 to 14 weeks before Christmas. So that's how you have to kind of work backwards. So that is your task this week is to sit down, get a calendar, plot out all your dates and then count backwards to see where you need to be doing certain things so that you can make sure that you're on track.

Speaker 1: 8:48

And next week we're gonna be talking about some ways to make it easier to stay on track so that you are able to produce enough, make enough so that you're able to make sure that your promotions get out there and that you are marketing enough, and to make sure that you also get to have a bit of a break in there. But the first thing you need to do is to mark your dates down, investigate those shipping deadlines and put in all the holiday markets that you're going to be taking part in so that you can make sure you have everything accounted for and then you can work your way backwards. So that is it for this week. This was a very short but sweet tip, but it's probably one of the most important tips that I am giving you and a friend of mine actually Lisa Bolton who was my original co-host on the podcast. She used to call it reverse engineering and this is how she did everything. She reversed, engineered all her projects, and when she introduced me to that it was a game changer, because it really does make you put a lot of thought into what you're doing and to realize just how much or how little time you have to get things done. So that is it for this week.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Just a reminder that next week is actually the season opener of season six of the show and I will be back with my lovely semi-regular co-host, heather Travis. It wouldn't be a season opener without Heather, and if you have just found us in the last few weeks and you're not familiar with Heather, heather is, as I said, she's my semi regular co-host. She is a an artist and muralist based out of Ontario and she's also a PR professional and she joins me once a month on the show and we always have a great time. We've already recorded the season opener. It is going to be uh, we did record a video for it as well, so it will be on YouTube as a video and it will also be on your favorite podcast app. So very excited about that, very excited for what season six has in store.

Speaker 1: 10:48

We will, as I mentioned, still be running the prep for the holidays mini-sodes, but they may switch to a different day. I may switch them from Mondays to Wednesdays I haven't quite figured that out yet because I don't want them to interfere with the big episode day but they will still be happening until we get through the entire checklist of items that we need to do. So I'm not going to be abandoning you as we get closer to the really busy period. That is on its way. It's on its way as soon as September hits. That's it, and we're in September now. It is full steam ahead until the end of the year. So that's it for this week. I look forward to seeing you all next week for the season opener and until then, thanks for listening.

Speaker 1: 11:36

Thank you so much for joining us for the Anchi Looked Up Creative Hour. If you're looking for links or resources mentioned in this episode, you can find detailed show notes on our website at andshelookedupcom. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more business tips, profiles of inspiring Canadian creative women and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the show via your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. We always love to hear from you, so we'd love it if you'd leave us a review through iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Drop us a note via our website at andshelookedupcom or come say hi on Instagram at andshelookedup. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.