Well, finally it’s all over and a fresh year is underway. Hooray!
My festive season was even more tiring than usual, having lost about two months worth of preparation time after a major project ran behind schedule a bit earlier in the year. So I felt like I was on the back foot throughout the season in terms of my handmade jewellery business. But I survived it, which is the main thing!
I also had my entire family come and stay for several days – they all live in another state. Given that I was hosting Christmas it meant a lot of preparation for the day itself, as well as for having numerous extra people in the house for some time, including two children. Exhausting!
But they have all gone now and things have slowed down, so it’s time for taking stock and spending some time getting myself sorted out for a new year – and my first full year of full self-employment.
I plan on spending much of the next few weeks doing some serious business planning and analysis. But also looking again at the fact that I continue to work far too many hours and don’t have enough of a life! It will be good to take a long hard look at all sorts of bits of my life to make them work a bit better.
So here’s to a happy and successful 2010 for all of us!
Hi Simone. I can fully relate to your feelings of the presure of the big season. Sometimes it seems to me that the expectations of Christmas sales puts crazy pressure on us in the jewellery business. After all we work at this all year round and steady sales throughout the year are much more satisfying than trying to live up to the expectations of the Christmas rush.
We too are analysing our work schedule and will definitely include a new year’s resolution to get our Christmas displays in place by August/September this year and not worry too much about the crazy competition in November and December.
We use Google Adwords to drive traffic to our site and were finding that a bid of 1$ US or more was needed for a page one display of our ad…crazy.
I wish you well in 2010.
Happy jewellery making.!!
by Tim on 6 January 2010 at 4:39 pm |