Trying to start a business is difficult. Trying to start a business while working full time is mind-blowing. Trying to start a business while working full time and having just adopted two puppies is ludicrous. Guess which route we took?
Actually, we started Fragile Earth Stuffed Animals a little over a year ago and we've been working on Hey Teach for a few years. But recently, due to frustration at our jobs and just overall needing to work for ourselves, Helen and I have been talking seriously about how to get Fragile Earth Stuffed Animals to the point where it will sustain our household and keep us in the style to which our 6 pampered pets have become accustomed.
While Amazon Marketplace and Ebay have been good to us, ideally we'd like the majority of our purchases to be on a site that doesn't require paying an arm & a leg fees to third parties so we created a store website. Realizing that we don't have the knowledge to do it properly ourselves, we hired someone to build us a kick-ass online store, found at feplush.com. So now, all we have to do is sit back and wait for the money to start rolling in, right?
Not quite. No one knows we're out there and why buy from us when there are tons of other stuffed animal stores on the web. We have to get our name and our wares in front of people, and be creative so they remember us instead of the others. But how?
We started a facebook page (facebook.com/feplush) and our store mascot, Rupert, has his own twitter account for store missives (twitter.com/ruperthedgehog). And we have this blog. Which all takes time and the companies we work for tend to frown on paying us for doing something that has NOTHING to do with our actual jobs. So we steal minutes after work, while carpooling (a good chance to hash out ideas), and on weekends.
Weekends can be difficult when you have a family that finds you interesting and wants to spend time with you, not your computer. After the 4th weekend in a row where we didn't get anything as much as we wanted done, we're trying to come up with solutions. Right now, we're playing around with the idea of setting up a workspace where we will not be distracted by everything going on around us.
I know we're not the only ones out there that are dividing our time seven different ways. So, what do you do to stay focused?
Oh, and if the lottery gods are reading this, you could save me a lot of heartache and let me win. I'm not being greedy - I'll split the pot. Just let me win enough to quit my day job, please!
How is your business going? Reading about starting-up businesses can be a real motivation for you to start your own. But it's a whole different world when you get there. It takes a lot of time and a whole lot of effort, but journeys to success are always full of challenges.
Posted by: Matthew Engquist | 08/02/2011 at 03:44 PM