When is it Time to Expand Your Craft Business?

Once your craft business is up and running, you may start to wonder if it’s time to expand and grown your craft business. It can be tempting to start selling more products and even diversifying into other crafts right away, but you’ll want to be sure that your business is ready to expand first. 

Expanding your business can mean adding new products, upgrading your work space or even hiring help. It’s important to realize when its time for your business to grow because this will help you stay competitive especially in a crowded niche and it will keep your business from taking on more than it can handle. 

Look At Your Customers

The first way to determine if your crafting business is ready to grow is to look at your customers. Do you have regular customers shopping for your products? A steady and growing customer base shows that there is demand for the product or service you’re offering. Having repeat customers is even better as it proves that your business is successful. 

Customers also may start to ask you to grow. They might inquire if there are different products available or even ask you to create new products. If you notice customers asking for something that you don’t have, it’s time to consider expanding your crafting business. 

Business is Booming and Profitable

With regular and new customers, you’ll notice that you have regular and new profits as well as an increase is business. If you aren’t sure if your business is successful, check out this article on Quickbook’s website to help you measure your profitability and grow your business. If your crafting business is increasing its profits, it’s definitely time to consider growing. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll need to expand the type of products you sell, but you may need to upgrade your work space, equipment or even hire employees to help you move product. 

When your business is profitable, you’ll notice that you have a positive cash flow and a steady rise in profits. This means you are financially ready to move forward in expanding your business. If profits aren’t that great, you may want to wait until you are more financially stable to expand. Accounting software is a great way to help you keep up with numbers, and an investment you should consider for your business.

Feeling Overworked and Crowded

It may have been fine only having yourself as an employee, but when you notice that it is just way to exhausting to run things then it may be time to grow your space and add employees to the business. Running on fumes means you’re doing too much.

Not having enough help can negatively affect your crafting business. You may lose out on opportunities and your customer service and product quality can also suffer when you’re not at your best state of mind. It can be scary to grow your business, but just remember that growth means new opportunities that equate to more business and more profits. 

You’re Complacent 

When things start to seem mundane and you’re just getting by doing the daily grind, you should take a step back and look at your business. If you aren’t pushing yourself to grow, then your business may suffer. No one likes to be uncomfortable, but that’s the truth about growth. It doesn’t feel comfortable. 

Instead of scraping by and surviving, start pushing yourself to do more. Take a look at why things feel run-of-the-mill, and figure out how you can push past that to get rid of complacency and move toward growth. You may need to find a new product that excites you, you might need new inspiration or maybe you need to take a step back and take a break to really thing about the next direction for your business.

Once you’ve determined that it’s time to expand your craft business, there are many different approaches that you can take to make it happen that include networking events, doing research, building email lists and more. We’ll discuss these in a future blog post!