The And She Looked Up Podcast
Every other week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits 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. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Your host, Melissa Hartfiel, left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, illustrator, writer, community co-founder and has owned and operated a multi-six figure a year creative content business. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
The And She Looked Up Podcast
1024 Subscriber Soundbite: From Puppy Chaos to Bold Business Decisions
Getting it in under the wire this month! A little behind the scenes with my fluffy new studio intern and then getting into some words about making strategic investments in our creative businesses and how taking very calculated financial risks in our business can really pay off. Some things to think about over the next few months while you noodle around plans for 2025!
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And She Looked Up Creative Hour Podcast
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits 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. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Hello everyone and welcome to the October edition of our premium subscriber podcast episodes and, as always, thank you all so much for supporting the podcast every month. It means so much. I do truly appreciate it. I'm cutting it close to the wire this month with the October episode, but if you have been following along on Instagram or you get our newsletter, then you know we have a new intern in the studio. His name is Joey.
Speaker 1:He's a very fluffy 12 week old yellow lab puppy and he's chaos. He's chaos and a fluffy ball. So right now my studio has puppy gates up against all exposed areas so he can't get to anything on my lower shelves. But he is growing like a weed and he is already big enough that he can jump up on the gates and get on to countertops and things. So that's a whole new era of fun.
Speaker 1:He's a really sweet dog, though he's just full of beans and at the shark stage and I'm not getting much work right now because it's just constantly chasing after him, taking things out of his mouth without getting too many flesh wounds in the process, and I just this is my first time raising a puppy completely on my own and, gosh, it would be nice to have an extra set of hands. It's really hard to clean up a mess with a puppy trying to help you and nobody to kind of remove them from the situation. But he's a very lively little fellow and I'm sure he'll make his presence known on the show sooner than later. He is blessedly sleeping right now on my feet, so I'm taking this opportunity to catch up on a few things, which brings me to this month's episode, because we are getting ready to head into November and, as busy a season as November is for most of us who create for a living, we're also getting to the point in the year where we start to think a little bit about what we want to do next year, and I have actually canceled all my markets this year because of Joey. He's just too little to leave for an entire day at this point and so he's also not fully vaccinated yet and so he can't go to like puppy daycare or to friends with other dogs or anything like that.
Speaker 1:So I have had focus on for next year and it's all got me to thinking about how I want to invest in my businesses next year, both my handmade business and my services business, because I have both, and I think this is something we don't maybe think enough about, because it can sound a little bit scary, taking money and investing it into something, maybe even money that we don't have. I don't want to say that we don't have it, because if you don't have money to invest, you don't have money to invest, and I'm not encouraging anyone to conjure up money out of thin air to borrow or anything like that where it's not appropriate. But I do think there is a time and a place for calculated risks in your business, and investing financially in your own business is one of those risks. So, from my perspective, I am single, so I am responsible for all my bills. I don't have a spouse or a partner that I can lean on a little bit to help cover some of the costs or to the lost income that I might not be bringing in and I know not everyone's in that situation, but I know a lot of you are in that situation. Or you're a single mom, or you are the breadwinner. Think about taking a little bit of extra money and investing it, but because of that, I'm also not in a position to not pay myself, like I have to pay myself every month, because that is how I pay my bills and I don't have a choice, so there has to be revenue coming in in order to do that, and paying my bills comes first before investing in my business. But I think when you think carefully about the direction you want your business to go in and how you can get it there, I think there is a place for making calculated investment risks in your business. Now, to be clear, I am not talking about hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, or not even necessarily thousands of dollars, but thinking very strategically about what you could do with some extra money to invest in either growth or building or brand recognition or creating ease in your business. I think there is a time and a place every year for all of us to sit down and think about those things, and it always reminds me of in my previous business.
Speaker 1:When we first started. We knew that in order to grow the business, we were going to have to get in front of more brands and explain to them what it is that we did and how we do it, and show them how we could help them. Most of the brands and the PR agencies that we wanted to work with were based in Toronto and we were based in Vancouver, so getting those face-to-face meetings when you're on the other side of the country was very difficult. So we made the calculated risk and it might not sound like a big deal, but for us it was a huge deal. It was an awful lot of money for us at that point to book a one week trip to Toronto to try and drum up that extra business. And we knew that if we could finagle meetings with five or six brands or agencies, that would give us a really good shot to get in front of the clients that we needed to get in front of. And we knew that if we booked one project it would pay for the trip. And when I'm talking about paying for the trip, all it needed to pay for was the return airfare for two people and our food.
Speaker 1:We decided to stay with a friend of mine who lived in Etobicoke at the time and was right on the streetcar line, right at the very end of the streetcar line, but the streetcar left right from in front of his building, so we slept on his couch and his floor for a week. So we were not this was, we were roughing it. We took public transit everywhere. Google Maps and public transit were our best friends and we would take transit into the city and we would go to our meetings. Before we went, we made sure we had enough interest that we could book those meetings that we needed to book. We also picked the time of year to make sure that the people we needed to see would be in the office. Going in the summer would have been a mistake, so instead we went in the fall when people are in their offices busy working and you know what.
Speaker 1:I think it cost us in total about $2,000. $2,000 we didn't really have and it was a gamble, but it paid off. And it didn't just pay off. In booking one gig, which we did, we actually I think we booked four, but that face-to-face contact and seeing those people in person paid off for years to come. I think the return on investment on that $2,000 was well into the six figures. It was life-changing for our business and I think the thing that I'm trying to say here a very different business than a handmade business, but not necessarily for a services business, for those of you who are in creative services when I say that we took a calculated risk.
Speaker 1:We knew that this could pay off for years to come. We knew the value that these particular potential clients put on those face-to-face meetings. We knew that if we planned out in advance who we wanted to see and we started forming those relationships before we booked the trips, that it would make it easier to get in front of those people when we were in town. It's not like we just flew to Toronto and showed up or called that day and said, hey, we're here, can we see you? We didn't. We started planning this well in advance and we started thinking it through to be as strategic as possible, to make this $2,000 strategic as possible, to make this $2,000 provide us with a long-term growth plan and it paid off. So I am not a particularly risky person when it comes to money, but I am a pretty risky person when the risk is very calculated and very strategic.
Speaker 1:And that's the point I'm trying to make with this and why I told that story is that you need to sit down and really think ahead. Maybe you are a maker and you want to get your product in stores or do more wholesale or whatever the case may be, and maybe that means sitting down and planning out a road trip to visit some boutiques that you think would be a great fit for whatever it is that you make or create, and start planning that road trip out when would you go? Start researching the shops that might be a good fit. Look outside of your local area and think about who else in the province or even out of province might be a good fit, or even out of country you could. If you live close to the border, you could be looking at going down to a few states and making some in-person calls. If you're in the US, look outside your state. Once you've identified some of those boutiques, start following them on Instagram. Start interacting with them on social media. Start laying the groundwork so that you can contact them directly via email or whatever is their preferred method of communication, which you're going to find out in your research process. Look on LinkedIn, use the internet, do some googling there's so many ways to find these types of businesses that might be interested in working with you and then start plotting out a road trip.
Speaker 1:Another great way that you can do this is look at the stats of where you sell to. Do you sell a lot of product to a particular area? Do a lot of your customers come, like when you're, if you're looking on your own website, you can see where people are visiting your website from. Is that an area that you might want to put on your potential road trip to go out and meet potential wholesale accounts? And think of how you can approach those wholesale accounts and let them know like 25% of my online traffic comes from your area already. Wouldn't it be great if they didn't have to, if they could come into your store instead, do all of that kind of research and then start plotting out and start reaching out and letting them know that you're going to be doing a road trip to meet potential wholesale accounts or existing wholesale accounts and you would love to book an appointment to visit them and then do it. You can plan a road trip relatively inexpensively and, again, if it's a strategic and you're able to book several wholesale accounts on that trip and they become recurring wholesale accounts, think about the projected revenue that you could bring in from that type of trip. So that's just one way projected revenue that you could bring in from that type of trip. So that's just one way.
Speaker 1:Another way that you might be investing in yourself is thinking about a new piece of equipment. Is there a piece of equipment in your studio, or a product or something that could really make it easier for you to produce more or better quality, so that you could potentially raise your prices to do things faster. Those are all valid ways to invest to eventually save money over the long term. Another investment that you could look at is bringing in somebody to help you. That you could look at is bringing in somebody to help you and I've talked about this before. It could be. It doesn't have to be an employee per se, but perhaps it is a freelancer or a contractor who comes in to help you once or twice a week with social media or helping you get your systems, or maybe that is actually something that could be.
Speaker 1:A very good investment is investing in somebody who comes into your business and helps you set up systems. They are not somebody that you work with long term. They are somebody that comes in, looks at everything that you do and shows you how you could refine things to make things easier for yourself in the long run, and what this can do is help you buy back your time, so that making that investment can help you buy back time. And time is precious and we know that, and what you do with that time is up to you. It could be to spend with more more time with family or friends, but it could also be to buy back time so that you can spend it making more strategic decisions in your business.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes, as creatives, this is stuff we don't think about as much because what we love to do is create the thing. But maybe that's the time you want to buy back. Maybe you want to buy back time so you can do more of the actual physical hands on creating, because you've got these systems running in the background that make it so easy for you to fill your orders, get to the post office, respond to queries, those types of things. Maybe an investment is building your own website this year. Maybe you want to build a site on Shopify or Squarespace or Wix or one of those platforms, but you're not particularly good at that kind of thing. Maybe this is the year that you invest in yourself and hire somebody to help you make a site that looks great and that is optimized to convert browsers into customers.
Speaker 1:So that's what I wanted to talk about this month is just the idea of sitting down and taking the time to think about where you could make these investments, and maybe you're spending $100, maybe you're spending $500, maybe it's $2,000. But thinking about how that could pay off for you in the coming year and in the coming years plural but also laying the groundwork so that when you do spend that money, it's worth it. And that means doing your research, planning things out, thinking strategically. So it's a different type of mindset for a lot of us, but it has the potential to reward you with tremendous growth or with ease in your business, or with buying your time back or so many ways, or buying your time back or so many ways. So that is something I'm hoping that all of you will think about at some point over the next two to three months as you're doing your planning and plotting for 2025.
Speaker 1:Can you believe we are 25 years, almost 25 years into this century years, almost 25 years into this century. That is just wild, because it feels like it was 2001, like four or five years ago Crazy. Anyway, that is it for this month, and I hope that you all have a very successful selling season in November. However, you are getting out there to sell, whether you are emailing people, whether you are going to markets, whether it is on your website or on Etsy or however. It is that you sell what it is that you create. So, as always, thank you all so much for your ongoing support. It means so much to me and I'm looking forward to talking to you all in November. In the meantime, have a great month.
