When you start building your dream, in my case, my handmade business, you’ll have to put a lot of time and money into it. The less money you have available, the more time you need to spend on all aspects of it.

Financial investment vs. Sweat Equity.

Starting a new business, even a handmade products business like my own, isn’t cheap. You are looking at startup costs, which add up really quickly.

For me personally, that looked like:

• Materials to create with. You need the right type of canvas or artist-quality stock alongside paints, markers, graphic pens etc. Beads of different types, quality, and the right types of thread, findings, etc. For crochet, it’s hooks, different yarns, and needles.
• A place to sell your products. In my case, I sell my products through a creative hub in the form of a Shopify Store created and managed by Noctedea at http://owlhourcreativestudio.com in the Market section. Noctedea handles my billing and taxes through her business license and receives a commission from each of my sales. Once I add my books to the mix, it will go through Lulu and/or Amazon.
• No matter how great your products or services are, they have to be found. So now you are looking at URL’s, hosting (I found a great price here).
• Next comes marketing. Business Cards. Ads if you can afford it, and more…

The more money you have accessible to pay for different things that will automate some of the business and marketing ends of things for you, the more you can focus purely on production. What do you do when money is not available? That is when you have to put sweat equity into it.

Sweat equity essentially means time and work. You have to get your hands dirty doing all of the jobs that are time-consuming, often tedious, and take away from your production time.

The equation is that the less budget you have, the more sweat equity you have to put in.

I am building my handmade and art business on 98% sweat equity.

Have you ever heard the term “shoestring budget”? In my case, I don’t even have that available. There is no funding for things like marketing services, Seo experts, paid advertisement, and the like.

Over a few years, I have built up my material stashes. I bought yarn, beads, thread, paints, etc. whenever I could afford to, and put it away for when the time came for me to stepup and build my dream. Sometimes I was given broken jewelry, so I could repurpose the beads from it. I traded some creative work for beads, findings, and buttons. I literally became a dragon, building her hoard of pretty things to work with.

As you can see, I planned. This dream of mine has been with me for a long time, as you may have read in my last post. Putting sweat equity and planning into this endeavor started long before I made my first Facebook post on my Facebook Page.

I work roughly 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, between focused production, social media posts, and adding products to my section “Regina Creates” at the creative hub. Researching marketing that I can do without financial output. Oh, and let’s not forget my new favorite pastime of frustrating scam artists who love to target new or small businesses. (Sorry, dears, I don’t have time to waste on being bamboozled.)

“Regina, have you ever heard about AI?”

The great AI debacle.

AI can be a useful tool in some aspects. Proofreading, for example. Tracking productivity. Some use it for digital creations. There are thousands of ways you can use one of the many AI programs that constantly spring up. I think that AI has its uses, and it has been part of technology a lot longer than most realize. Here is the rub so…

I have tried to use AI editing for product photography to clean it up. I hated it because it changed the image into something other than what it was. To me, that was false advertising, and I won’t stand for it.

Part of the charm of art, and handmade items are those small irregularities that sneak in. That minor imperfection, which often is an artisan’s signature. If you want 100% uniformity – 100% of the time, you are looking for soulless machine-produced items.

AI marketing, AI influencers, I looked into that too. Considered it to ease my behind-the-scenes workload. Opening up my time for what fuels my passion. The production end of things. I couldn’t do it. Not only was it fake, and people already have a hard time distinguishing real from fake, but it lost my spark.

Which do you operate on?

If you are a fellow small business owner, creating your living via your art or handmade items, what do you operate on? Is it sweat equity and pure tenaciousness? Do you have the financial backup to invest?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Feeling supportive?

Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list. Check out my handmade treasures at “Regina Creates” inside the Owl Hour Creative Studio Marketplace. Click here to check it out.

Thanks for stopping by! Until next time…

Regina