When you think of entrepreneurship or starting your own business....typically happy thoughts come to mind!
"I can do what I want!"
"I'll do everything MY way!"
"This is going to be so fun!"
"I will love every second of quitting my job and starting my business!"
And don't get me wrong.....it IS great! Not having anybody to answer to but yourself and being able to do things exactly how you want is a wonderful feeling!
But the only way a successful business is sustainable is if you also do the things you HATE doing. Success doesn't come from only doing what you want. It comes from taking ownership and doing the things you KNOW need to get done...even if you don't like doing them.
That was the big takeaway from this past week for us! So you may be wondering....what is it that you HATE doing that you HAD to do this week??
Well, it all started as we were about to contact some of our first realtors to sell some boards! We were all ready to reach out to the people on our list...and then we realized...
What are we going to sell to people AFTER they get their cutting boards? We know what we WANT to sell them (kitchen tables, coffee tables, desks, etc.), but are we in a position to be able to sell them those items? And the answer to that was no. We don't have any prototypes built yet to even show them. How are we going to sell people something that we don't have yet?
We've known for a while that we want to insert flyers into the cutting and charcuterie board boxes advertising our other products, but we've only been able to do that for the boards so far since we don't have table prototypes yet. However, tables are our main products that we want to sell! The boards are great. They'll make us a bit of money - but they're just a means to advertise our main product line to the right people. So we knew it was time to start down the road of building our main product line.
So we decided to create the flyers for our tables. However, that seemingly small task entails:
- Deciding on what options we want to offer for each table type
- Creating the designs for each product
- Building a prototype for every product (kitchen table, desk, coffee table, entertainment center, etc.)
- Taking quality product photos
- Putting those pictures onto a flyer
- Designing the flyer
- Ordering the flyers
- Updating our website with alllllll that same information that goes on the flyers
That sounds like an awful lot of computer and office work.
WE HATE DETAIL ORIENTED OFFICE WORK!!!!! Photoshop gives me grief. Keeping a website updated is taxing. File management drives me insane.
We just want to build and sell. We don't want to spend 20 hours of our week in our office. That's why we left our last jobs.....
But if we didn't slow down this week and tackle the small jobs that we really don't enjoy, we would have been caught in the future doing these tasks while we're swamped with cutting board orders. We would have been too busy with one small avenue of the business and left with zero time to actually develop the main part of Samara Table Co.
We know future Jennie and Davis will thank us for buckling down and doing our demons so that we can accomplish the things we DO want to do. We're essentially doing the dirty work so that it doesn't come bother us when we realllyyyy don't have time for it.
Starting a business that you're passionate about is a wonderful thing! And you should be super excited to work at it and accomplish your goals. But with ownership comes full responsibility. For everything. Even the things you may hate doing.
This post may contain affiliate links for products we used to create this project! If you’d like to check them out, we do get a small percentage of the sale and they are of no extra cost to you! It all goes towards supporting the content creation of Jennie and Davis. BUT – we do not take tool sponsorships and there were no tool endorsements. Just our honest opinions!