Module 1: Ideas worth doing

I'll help you answer the question, "is this business idea even worth doing?" We've got exercises to help you stand out, narrow down your niche, and quantify the handmade product you want to sell.

A lot of businesses that never made it to year two, never did this one simple step.

We'll walk through every single step of becoming a legal business together. Once you're legit, I teach you every element of building your business processes. From efficient project management to implementing billing systems, I'm giving you my hacks for so you can hit the ground running.

Properly estimating work is the single biggest factor in running a profitable craft business. Using the business processes we just built, I teach you my foolproof framework for estimating every product or project that comes your way.

Accurate estimates start by turning your process into a checklist, and if you can't trust your own quote, you're in for a rough time. Say goodbye to accidental non-profit projects!

Building a business process for how you do things is the most powerful thing a business owner can do. If you've ever had a deadline, you probably worked down to the wire. This isn't an estimating issue... this is a process issue. When you make things for money, you’re promising to do the job in the time you estimated. But you can’t be productive if you’re blindsided by surprises you could’ve foreseen along the way. I teach you how to find a repeatable pattern in your work, and take control of your projects from the start.

There are plenty of coaches and educators out there pushing people to simply charge more.

Instead of a rah-rah money session, you'll walk away from this module with the knowledge of what different skill levels can earn, and most importantly, my formula for how to find out what YOU YOURSELF should be charging for your products & services. We're cutting through the noise and coming up with a pricing list for everything you sell. 

I got tired of hearing horror stories from other seamstresses just because they didn't know what was in their own contracts. I'm serving up tried-and-true clauses for you to use, so you won't end up like those poor souls (in bed, eating Jeni's ice cream, crying).

It's not enough to simply have a contract in place. When I say I've seen it all... just trust me friend. I've got stories for every clause to help you understand just why each one is necessary. Once you become a business, you're responsible for understanding what's in your contract, and more importantly, how it protects both you and your clients.  I'll walk you through policies, retainers, and the nine critical elements every contract you ever sign should have.

Almost every time a sewing business comes to me struggling to find more customers, the real issue is that they didn't brand their company well.

Branding all comes down to how we want our customers to think about our product or service, how we want that to make them feel, and finally, what we want them to do about it (in our case, hire us, or buy from us.)

It's the secret sauce when you want to find more dream clients for your sewing business or etsy store. You'll turn your business into a brand here, develop clear-cut style templates for how the world sees you, and open it up to even larger opportunities in doing so.
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Marketing is simply attracting those you want and repelling those you don’t. Makers tend to get overwhelmed by all the fancy marketing tricks and strategy - so much so that they freeze instead of take action. Good marketing is actually good storytelling - and I'm about to teach you how to tell irresistible stories that will do the selling for you. The best part?

I'll take you through how to create contextual content, and how to repurpose the same content into numerous pieces that will get you results, no matter what platform you plan to use. From social media to SEO to email marketing, you'll know just enough about each marketing topic to be dangerous enough to take action, without getting bogged down in the details & the tech. Whether you currently know nothing about marketing, or you already know the basics, you'll complete this module with your marketing plan, and know exactly what to do from week to week.