So you're probably thinking to yourself...."Wow, since they've already had to start their business once when they lived in North Dakota, they should be experts at it now in Houston!"
HA! hahahaha
Not quite...I mean, yes, some things are easier and we're a little bit better at predicting problems, but starting a business is just a difficult thing to do all around. Basically, we want to make sure we do everything right this time around and really get organized and create solid processes for ourselves. We just wrapped up our first week of officially launching the furniture business and while it actually ended up going VERY smoothly, it didn't start out that way. So here's the rundown of how our very FIRST WEEK went!!
Like we stated in our last video, we want to get ourselves off the ground by selling cutting and charcuterie boards to people in town who have a large influence over our target demographic...which for now is mainly realtors. We sell the boards to the realtors, they give them away as closing gifts, we build the new homeowners furniture. Cue Lion King reference: "The ciircleeee of liiiifeee!"
But we can't just build these boards and expect them to sell themselves. When you start to think about the entire process, there's a lot to get done: product photos, staging, marketing, selling, taking payment, processing orders, shipping, repairs, website upkeep, social media...just to name a few.
So we sat down to tackle all of the above. We were going to come up with our MASTER PLAN to figure out how we were going to market, sell, process orders, ship, manage our sites, etc. all before we set foot in the shop to start building.
Because why not?! Seems legit. Knock out the difficult stuff first and do the easy stuff last!
Nope. Not at all. That is not how our week ended up going!
We ended up getting very overwhelmed because we were trying to do everything at once! And there were some things we just didn't have answers to!!
We had no idea what the website would look like because we didn't have product pictures. We couldn't figure out shipping costs because we didn't have any finished boards to package and weigh to fill out a sample shipping label!! And we couldn't update social media without pictures....
We felt a bit defeated because we couldn't get everything planned before we started....
so we just decided to GET STARTED!!
We went out and built a few boards. After that we laser engraved a few boards and solidified our laser engraving designs. We now had something for product pictures! AND social media! After that, we could box them up and print shipping labels....so then we knew how much packaging and shipping cost!
Before we knew it, we had completed boards, a finished website, rounded out social media, and were ready to start taking orders!! As frustrating as it was to us....we couldn't have figured any of that out if we hadn't just decided to GET STARTED. We weren't going to be able to eat the whole elephant at once. We had to take each little process step by step.
Planning is great. There will always be a time and place for prior planning and organization. But some lessons you will never learn until you just go out and START!!
#woodworking #woodworkingbusiness #business #entrepreneur #cuttingboard #charcuterie #motivation #mindset #positivity
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!