Bead Jewelry Profits Interview

This interview is brought to you by Dionne Payne – Author of Bead Jewelry Profits

In this interview Dionne Payne talks to Gary Capps of Beading-Software.com about ways to maximise your jewelry business revenue.

Dionne Payne is the author of the ebook Bead Jewelry Profits.  Her ebook has helped jewelry makers around the world improve their jewelry business income and profit level.

Gary Capps is the creator of Bead Manager Pro the leading Jewelry Software program used by thousands of jewelry makers to keep their business running and on track.

You can read the full interview below as well download a pdf copy of this interview or listen to a recording of it here;

Dionne Payne Interviews Gary Capps of Beading-Software.com

Dionne: Hi everyone and welcome to the Bead Jewelry Profits Interview series. My name is Dionne Payn and I’m the host for the interview today. During this series we’re going to be exploring some of the challenges that face bead jewelry artists as well as talking about some of the strategies that we can use to overcome them.

Now today I’m delighted to introduce Gary Capps the creator of Bead Manager Pro which was designed to help bead jewelry artists automate their business and also price their jewelry creations resulting in more profit – which I think is always a good thing!

So welcome Gary, it’s really good to be talking to you and I’m sure the listeners to this call are going to get a lot out of our interview today.

Gary: Hey Dionne thanks for having me.

Dionne: Thank you very much. Now Gary before we start on the meaty stuff I just wanted to ask you a bit about your background and how you got involved in the bead jewelry industry.

Gary: Well my actual background is in PLC programming. I used to do programming for buildings so setting them up to run anything that you want in a building off of a computer basically. And I got involved with, I started developing the Bead Manager Pro software with my wife. She was actually creating jewelry and doing beading and through some of the forums that she was on she found some people on there who were asking how they could do certain things with software and they couldn’t find software that would help them with their inventory and pricing their jewelry primarily. So she came to me and said, ‘Well what do you think about this?’, so we created something we did a bit more research then we created a demo piece of software and really it went from there. That was a few years ago now and it’s developed into the software package that we’ve sold now to hundreds of people all over the world.

Dionne: Wow. So I guess during the few years that you’ve been running the software you’ve had a lot of input from different bead jewelry artists. I just wanted to get your opinion, what would you say was the best piece of advice for somebody that’s looking to grow their business from a hobby to create an income?

Gary: Well going from a hobby to income you need to really stop first of all and decide if running your own business is the right thing for you. To a lot of people, especially if you’ve given up a steady pay check to run your own business find that can be pretty daunting especially if you’ve got financial commitments which most people do have. So I’d suggest proceeding with some caution first of all and do a bit of research on yourself. Figure out if you’ve actually got what it takes to run a successful business.

You know how to make jewelry but do you know how to keep the books, manage your inventory, manage cash flow, do marketing, advertising and everything else that a small business person has to do. You’ve got to become the master of everything in your small business.

But if you’ve not got those skills, you can leverage off someone else who’s got those skills you need. Just get a clear plan in your mind of what you want to do and where you want to go and then really you’ve just got to work hard to get something up and running ‘cause there’s not too much substitute for good old hard work when you’re actually trying to start something. But once you’ve got it started all of these things start to gain momentum of their own and it does get a lot easier as you get going.

Dionne: Absolutely. And often its taking that first step, which is always the hardest but once you’ve got the first step you just have to take another step, another step and before you know it you’ve actually gone quite far, it’s a bit like starting your own business isn’t it?

Gary: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Dionne: So when you start out in a business venture, i.e in your bead jewelry business, what would you say are the top 3 tips that you should know.

Gary: I’ll tell you number one – have some sort of plan anyway. I mean a lot of people I’ve seen follow business plans and a lot of people advocate having that rigid business plan of what you’ll do, work out your revenue that you expect to make every month and plan out your activities.

For me personally. in the businesses that I’ve started and run and I’ve started and run a few, being too rigid doesn’t work for me because I’ve always found that the business will change as you develop. I tend to have a plan of where I’m starting and where I want to go with steps along the way but I keep it pretty fluid because a lot of things that will turn up that you’ve never really dreamed of actually happening.

But as long as you’ve got a clear goal of what you want to achieve and keep focussed on that and then adapt what you’ve got on paper to make sure that you actually get there.

And I also think you’ve got to try and remember what you’re doing this for. By that I don’t mean how much money you want to make but what’s the real goal that’s actually driving you. So it might be that you just love making jewelry so that you’re happy making all day long so that you’ve got enough money to pay the bills and pay for some groceries which definitely beats working 9 to 5 in some kind of office cubicle.

But maybe you want to run your business from home to have time with your kids but you actually want to grow that business as well so that’s a good financial provider so that one day you’ve got enough money from your business to provide for your kids college fund. So working out what’s the motivator for you to run your own business I think is very important and then working towards that. Sorry we had 3 things didn’t we?

So number 2 I think you definitely have to have some cash behind you, starting now in business, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got enough money to fund yourself ‘cause generally that might mean if you’re starting your own business you’re giving up some kind of regular income.

So you’re going to have to budget right to run your business, pay for your stock, advertising, attending fairs, functions and so on. But just because you’ve stopped having the money coming in from your regular business doesn’t mean that the bills won’t stop so you’ve got to make sure that you cover yourself, don’t get yourself into any kind of financial debt really if you can help it.

And then number 3 I think it’s really important to make sure that you get the support of your family and your loved ones. It is hard work, generally when you start out on any new business venture and I definitely know that myself that from working till the early hours of the morning to get stuff done because like I said earlier you have to become the master of everything in your small business when you begin, until you can
branch out and get people helping you.

It can be very hard work so you’ve got to have a partner that understands and gets on board with that. And if not a partner then hopefully if you’ve got a family member or friend or someone who can actually support you at times.

But then with any hard work that you go through then you need someone to actually celebrate the rewards at the end of it because there’s always good things that happen. I know myself with my business with BeadingSoftware.com. I also work my wife, she’s a published author and she’s franchised her own company. So we both share in the businesses, the good things and the bad things but we try to make sure that we always celebrate the good times and reward ourselves for a job well done and that can be anything simple. So make sure you reward yourself and it might just be having a night off with a DVD, going out for dinner, whatever it is but celebrate the milestones along the way in your business as well, make sure that you realise what you’re doing it for.

Dionne: That’s really good advice Gary. So just to sum up, decide what motivates you, which is so important because when the hard times come you have to have that behind you to say, ‘ok well this is what I’m doing it for, this is the higher purpose.’

Gary: Yeah absolutely like a lot of people think they’re doing their business for money and obviously money is very at the forefront of your mind when you start a business but really what’s the reason what you’re trying to earn that money for and it might be for your kids, to pay for your house, to buy a new car whatever it is there’s always something underlying there that you are doing that for.

Dionne: Absolutely. And to summarise point 2, make sure that you’ve got some cash behind you because yeah when you start a business it often takes a while before you get regular cash flow.

And also to make sure that you’ve got your family and friends support. I liked what you said about celebrating your successes as well. Often we don’t do that we just move from one thing to the other and its like oh yeah we’ve done that! But definitely celebrating your successes – that’s a big thing because that feeds into that motivation loop as well.

Gary: Yeah absolutely. If something is done well if you’ve just started out your jewelry business and you’ve made some good sales that week go out and spend a bit of money on yourself, have a good time and enjoy it because that was the whole point. Don’t just go, oh worked really hard that week and I’ll work hard next week – try and have some fun at the end of the day.

Dionne: Now there’s a lot of talk in business about finding your USP or your Unique Selling Proposition. Why do you think that’s so important?

Gary; Well I think having a USP really is just so that you’re actually memorable. At the end of the day, there’s a million choices for absolutely everything out there. So if you don’t stand out from the crowd you just become part of it. So if you can find even a simple way to differentiate yourself, that can really help to get people talking about you and your work.

Dionne: I agree with that too and in Bead Jewelry Profits, the e book that I’ve written, I talk about the importance of finding your niche. With that it means that you can charge more for your products because you know the group of people that you are specifically targeting and you know that you’re going to be the best in that niche which is a really powerful tool, I mean once you’ve got the niche yeah you can charge more because you are the go to person, people really respect that.

Gary: Yeah absolutely, you can build a fan base around that which is very important.

Dionne: Exactly. So if you were going to advise a bead jewelry artist who was looking at starting or had a hobby and wanted to move that into a business, how would you recommend that they go about doing it?

Gary: Well someone once told me, they said if you treat your business like a hobby then it will pay you like a hobby, but if you treat your business like a business it will pay you like a business. So I guess that really means just take it seriously.

Making jewelry it might be lots of fun for you, you might really enjoy it and that’s great but if you’re flat broke then how much fun is that going to be. I know we did say that the money is not the major motivator here but at the end of the day we’ve still got to eat and pay the bills. So if your hobby is making jewelry then your business really needs to become selling jewelry and that can be quite different.

Dionne: That’s really good advice actually, yeah I agree with that. While we’re talking about selling jewelry, one thing that my clients often say to me is, ‘oh I just don’t know how to price my jewelry’. It almost seems to be a psychological thing because they feel that, ‘oh well nobody is going to pay what its worth’. So what would be your suggestion as to finding the best way to price your jewelry?

Gary: Yeah this is a really interesting question because this is one of the main reasons why we actually developed Bead Manager Pro in the first place. And we have so many customers that prior to using our software actually had no idea how to price their jewelry and this is part of what my wife actually found in the forums when we decided to create Bead Manager Pro.

So many people just guess at what their completed piece is worth and they forget to factor in all the actual parts that went into it plus the time. And practically no one thinks about the overheads because you’ve got to pay for electric, rent, phone, the internet and all that kind of stuff which you have to account for if you’re going to actually be a business. So you need to actually be able to work out all these things accurately to price your jewelry or you might as well just be running a hobby.

And that’s something you can actually do with Bead Manager Pro really easily. You can just enter in your salary requirements and your overheads when you create pieces and Bead Manager Pro works out all that for you and just factors in the cost of the parts, your hourly rate and your overheads. Again overheads are a very important thing, like I say that’s something a lot of people just forget. They’ll think about maybe how many parts went in there, how many beads, the string, the clasp and so forth and they’ll figure out well I spent half an hour actually making this but your half an hour is not just the time it takes to create your jewelry you’ve got to pay for a lot of other stuff on top of that and you shouldn’t forget that as well.

Dionne: I remember I referred one of my clients to the Pricing Calculator that you have that’s freely available from your website and I remember she came back and she said, ‘oh well I was really surprised, I’ve been way under pricing ..’

Gary: Yeah we get that quite a lot from people. They have a look and they just didn’t realise what they’re doing and people can be working for almost the minimum wage or even below because they don’t realise that their time is worth a lot more than they’re actually valuing it at. So that’s a really important thing to do if you want to move from a hobby to a business you’ve got to look at that and say well this is what my time is worth and this is what I need to do.

Dionne: There’s also a psychology behind it as well. Now maybe I’m going to get flamed for saying this, it’s a bit controversial. But there seems to be almost a starving artist mentality and anybody that wants to break out of that – anybody that actually wants to make money from their bead jewelry seems to get everybody else’s back up. Have you noticed that as well?

Gary: Oh absolutely, I mean there’s always that we call it over here the Tall Poppy Syndrome, you stand up too high someone wants to lob their head off and so its always it can be easier to just hunker down and try not to stand out too much and charge too much for your pieces.

But if you’re making good quality pieces then that’s worth something and you shouldn’t be afraid to actually go for the price. There’s been a lot of cases in other businesses I know of where… this is actually going slightly off topic here. Now Donald Trump, he was selling some apartments, they wouldn’t sell, he raised the price on them by, I can’t remember the figures now but fifty or hundred thousand dollars whatever. Everyone suddenly went, ‘oh my God, these must be exclusive ‘cause they’re so much more expensive’ and he sold them all. So you can price stuff, people will pay for it because it’s got an exclusivity to it and it’s got to be worth something if you’re charging that much. So don’t be afraid to charge for what your stuff is worth.

Dionne: And if Donald Trump can do it so can we!

Gary: Absolutely. Slightly different there sorry with the luxury apartments and making jewelry but the case is the same.

Dionne: It’s having the self confidence and I think it ties really well in defining your niche and defining your unique selling proposition. Once you’ve got that in place, once you know how you can differentiate from other people then you can charge the money for it.

Gary: Sure.

Dionne: Now one of the things about creating bead jewelry and especially selling it online as well is that it’s a lot different to going to a craft fair or wearing your pieces so that people can see them.

So taking really good photos is important. Do you have any advice on how to do that how to take good photos of jewelry?

Gary: Yeah I mean I don’t pretend I never have pretended to be an expert in making jewelry but actually showing off to sell it is a little bit of an art in itself. So there are few basic things that you kind of need to follow.

So number one try and fill the frame so the frame of the picture that you’re actually taking with the piece that you’re trying to showcase they don’t have a big picture that just has a tiny little piece or earring or something in the middle of it that you cant really see. Make sure you fill it up. If you’re putting stuff in a catalogue or on your website, then make sure everything is in the same alignment, keep it all horizontal or vertical. You don’t want to trying to flip pages round from one to the other as you’re going through it. Obviously make sure that your pictures are clear, they’re sharp, don’t have fuzzy images, that’s not going to help them sell at all.

Try and have a background that complements what you’re photographing so if you don’t have like a multi colour background with a multicoloured bead necklace cause that’s not going to stand out, you’re not going to see it. Definitely don’t do that famous EBay shop where there was a guy who was selling some cutlery. What he actually did he laid it out on the toilet seat to take the photograph and then he took that photo of his cutlery on the toilet seat and he put that up on EBay to sell it so don’t do anything like that.

And there’s one very simple thing which instead of actually taking photographs which can be a little bit difficult ‘cause you’ve got to line yourself up, you might need some kind of tripod or overhead system for laying your camera, keep it horizontal and lining up. Just use a flat bed scanner. If you’ve got a flat bed scanner, and they’re very cheap to buy, then just put your pieces on there and scan the images in rather than actually photographing them ‘cause that will keep them perfectly still and with most flat bed scanners now as well they come with some kind of software so that once its scanned it in you can crop that image you can rotate it you can resize them very simply and that can give you really good clear images.

Dionne: That sounds like a great idea. Thanks for the advice Gary. And so we’ve spoken about finding your USP and pricing your jewelry and also taking photographs. So you’ve got your jewelry piece, where would you start with your marketing at first.

Gary: I would definitely start with friends, maybe current work colleagues as well if they’re reasonably good friends at work because its so easy these days with friends to give recommendations for you. Especially with all the social networking now not just regular word of mouth but with Twitter and Facebook and Myspace. There are all these sites where people can go on there, they can tell their friends and then they can go on to Facebook these days and put a little picture of them wearing their new necklace and earrings and show it off.

But also a referral from a friend is always so much more powerful than any other type of marketing because there’s already trust built into that relationship. So I’ll tell you try showing off some of your jewelry pieces to friends, you can be pretty sure that someone will want something made for them as well. And if you’re creating unusual pieces or just exceptionally good quality pieces if that’s your USP then they’ll show that to their friends and so on and so on and so on. Maybe even start out if you want to get your work out there to start getting a bit of word of mouth marketing through your friends then maybe start by giving some of your friends pieces that you’ve made for birthday or Christmas gifts something like that. So just get some of your stuff out there to begin with.

Dionne: That’s also very good advice. And that the word of mouth thing is so powerful it’s quite surprising isn’t it?

Gary: Oh it’s huge. I mean it’s just massive. It’s because there’s such an inbuilt trust in that because if a friend of yours tells you that they bought something from somewhere and they liked it then quite likely that if you need whatever that thing is next time you’re very likely to go there and get that yourself. It is the best marketing tool there is if you can get enough word of mouth going on.

Dionne: Now I was reading the e-book you have the other day that is advertised on your site and there was something that caught my eye and I thought oh this is really interesting. You talk about jewelry parties. So for anybody that hasn’t heard of that before what is it and what’s the best way to get started?

Gary: So what is it? I guess you never heard of a jewelry party but you’ve probably heard of Tupperware parties or Avon or those makeup parties or even Ann Summers parties dare I say that? Where you get all the girls round and look at different stuff.

Basically its just hosting some kind of party where you’ll get people round, you’ll put on an event and it can either be at your house or a friends and you can showcase your jewelry. The best way generally to get started with that is with your friends, so you might want to start with running your jewelry party at your home so you can invite people round maybe put on a bit of finger food, a couple of drinks or something like that to make a good evening out of it as well. And then what you want to do if you want to expand those, you need to reach out to other people. So if you start with your first one and just invite your friends what you really want to be doing is getting your friend’s friends.

So what you can do is offer some incentive, so if you run your first party then you might say to your friends there, ‘look if any of you guys if you want to run a jewelry party then what I’ll do I’ll give you a percentage of the profits from that party maybe or you might give them some jewelry in gifts or a present or whatever it might be something to incentivise them to host the party. So then when they host the next party for you, you give them their gifts whatever it is and ask at the next party, ‘so look if anyone here would like to host the party then I will give you the same thing’, whatever that might be again.

So try to make sure that you actually have a good party that everyone has a good time at them by creating that successfully then everyone will be happy they’ll be relaxed and not too pressured into buying and as we were saying earlier word of mouth relationship marketing is very important so people always buy from friends.

Metaphorically speaking that means that people don’t buy from someone they don’t like so even if you don’t know all the people at the party then its important that they like you and consider you a friend even if only for the evening and then you can grow basically your networking from there.

And also when you’re at these parties try and build your own database so if you can get names and phone numbers and emails and so on from guests you can build your own little database. There’s a whole host of other things that you can do which as you mentioned in our e-book which you get from the website Beading-Software.com. Then just making sure that you really run a good fun party environment and having those incentives for people to host it and to bring their friends along then that’s what’s going to help you to network really within your crowd of friends and then your friend’s friends and your friend’s friend’s friends and so on and so on and so on.

Dionne: Now that’s powerful stuff there Gary! So what you’re saying is that by organising your friends and their friends and getting referrals from that group as well you can actually build your business. It would be quite a quick and easy way because you’ll be having fun and the word of mouth thing is happening for you as well.

Gary: Yeah it’s really just looking at a way that you can socially interact and push that word of mouth marketing with some incentive as well for people to help you out and if they have a good time then they’re going to have no problem with doing that.

Dionne: Absolutely. So Gary we’ve gone through the call and it’s been a really great call, we’ve got a lot of things out of this, so thank you very much.

Gary: No problem.

Dionne: Now if one of our listeners wanted to find out a bit more about you and about the bead jewelry software that you have how could they get a hold of you?

Gary: Yep, so you can just visit our website which is www.beading-software.com. We’ve got our software on there, Bead Manager Pro and you can also go there and download the free e-book that we talked about as well which covers quite a lot of this stuff in depth there too.

Dionne: Fantastic. Now I’m going to have a link to that on my website as well so that will make it a lot easier for everybody that’s listening on the call.

Gary: Ok good.

Dionne: Wonderful. Well Gary thank you so much for your time and I’m sure that everybody who’s been listening to this interview is just going to be so inspired and they’ll run off and figure out how to market their businesses and their jewelry in such a good way. So thank you very much for your time.

Gary: No problem at all – thank you for having me.

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