My Six BEST Business Decisions

1) I determined VERY early on that teaching wasn’t for me and would not be part of my business model. Now to be clear… there’s nothing wrong with teaching. In fact, I so admire those who are good at it and make it an important part of their business. But here’s the deal. I firmly believe that teaching is a gift and its just NOT an area in which I am gifted. First of all, I really don’t enjoy it at all. I would far rather spend my time doing something I enjoy doing and actually am good at. I’ve bowed to the pressure at times and tried small settings like small quilt guilds as well as larger venues such as the Schoolhouse series at Quilt Market and the results are always predictable. It totally stresses me out and I’m never happy with my performance. So… now whenever I get invitations to speak or teach I politely decline.

2) We took a calculated risk and added a studio onto our house in 2009. It was a BIG expense and a leap of faith because let’s face it… 10 years ago we were still a relatively new business AND we were in the midst of that economic downturn so it didn’t really SEEM like a good time to take on this kind of a project, but we were in the midst of expanding our line (see item #3) and were strapped for space and quite honestly, we felt we were in the right place at the right time and it worked out beautifully!

3) We added zippers and hardware to our product line. I’ve always been a student of analytic metrics and the aforementioned economic downturn in 2008 REALLY affected our metrics, and not particularly in a good way. It totally changed our income streams. Prior to 2008, our primary income source was thru our distribution channels, to the tune of 60-65%! But when SO many quilt stores started failing in the recession it had a very negative impact on our business and we knew we had to make some BIG changes. We decided to add zippers and hardware to our product offerings in order to more aggressively pursue our retail customers thru an increased social media presence. And you know what? After this change, I began to notice our metrics were slowly changing as a greater and greater portion of our income was direct-to-consumer, so during those lean years, when many designers were struggling to break even, we did quite well as a direct result of being willing to diversify and to change our marketing strategy!

4) We began vending at retail shows. Piggy-backing on #3 and our changing demographic, we started small and close to home by testing the waters at a little 3-day summer show in Raleigh, NC, mainly because we wanted to get our feet wet and work out the bugs BEFORE going to Houston in November for the International Quilt Festival.

6) We upgraded our website to a WordPress site. Believe it or not, way back in the beginning (circa 2004) I taught myself HTML and built our first website from scratch (my son-in-law still thinks this is hysterical). It certainly wasn’t cutting edge and it would never have won a design contest but it served me well for 7 years or so until we had our website redesigned to a WordPress site. And here’s the deal … it was amazing how much the technology had changed since 2004 because the new site was SO much easier to manage besides being easier on the eyes! I didn’t realize how much time I was wasting making redundant changes!