Is Your Jewelry Making a Hobby or a Business?
Jewelry making often starts as a hobby, but people with talent and a flair for salesmanship often switch from hobbyist to home-based business owner. However, because you make and sell jewelry from your home, doesn’t mean that you made the crossover from hobbyist to businessperson. The successful home-based business person realizes that they are no longer making jewelry just for fun. Instead, they own and operate a business, and treat it as a business, with their studio as their place of business. This doesn’t automatically happen when you hang your shingle. Instead, you must discipline yourself, and often friends and family to the fact that you are running a business and are no longer a hobbyist.
Having the right business attitude will show others how serious you are about it and help them realize that making jewelry is no longer just a hobby. Explain to family and friends that you need certain hours each day during which you can work undisturbed in your studio, but you will still have time for them and your home life. You now have a business to support, and you can no longer afford to be distracted from you set work time by household chores, people dropping by or calling just to visit. At the same time, you need to keep open communication with all your people, including your children, and let them know that you still want to spend time with them, but only when you aren’t working.
Setting and maintaining a dedicated work schedule is another facet of treating your business as a business. Your productivity is the life’s blood of your business, and if you are unable to commit to a set production schedule, your business will suffer for it. Here are a few suggestions to help you work at your peak performance.
- Set up your workspace so you will have enough privacy to work undisturbed
- Create a weekly work schedule and post it outside your workspace so your family will know when you are working.
- Allow time in your work schedule for checking your e-mail and making phone calls, preferably at the beginning and end of each work period.
- Schedule set days for doing paperwork, such as bookkeeping, ordering supplies, paying bills.
- Set a time limit within which to complete each project
- Discipline yourself to keep your schedule!
When you treat your jewelry making as a business, so will others. Eventually everyone will become accustomed to the changes you make to accommodate your new business schedule, and honoring your work time will become part of the daily routine. As your business grows, you almost certainly will need to readjust your work schedule to keep up with the demand for your jewelry, but if you worked outside your home before turning your hobby into a business, it will be like going back to a former routine, and won’t seem such a drastic change to your family.