How long does it take to set up a crochet business? Not long at all, but there is a difference between setting up a crochet business and it making you money. Often we lump the two things in together and that’s not how things work. Let’s look at what you can achieve in 90 days when it comes to getting your crochet business up and running and actually start seeing the profits roll in.
If you prefer to listen, you can find the podcast here
Setting Up vs Building
Creating a crochet business that you can make a living from isn’t difficult to set up, nor does it take very long. What takes time is building your reputation, building an audience and then getting people to trust you enough that they’re happy to hand over their hard earned cash. Your crochet business can be fully set up, but not yet earning you any money because you’re stuck in this second phase. That reputation and audience building phase is not part of the setting up part.
The setting up is the machinery that allows you to make money and start building your audience. The building phase is all about communication and connection that you use the machinery to do.
How Long Does The Setup Actually Take?
Let’s focus on the actual set up of your crochet business first. How long does the machinery you need to get things running take to set up? You can actually get the majority of your crochet business set up in a single day. What makes it take longer is the self doubt, second guessing yourself, searching Google and social media to see if you’re missing a trick or if you should be using a different platform or what the trendiest thing to do right now is.
All of these things shift your focus so you stop doing the practical things and just overwhelm yourself with information and the huge amount of options available to you. You can make your crochet business setup as simple or as complicated as you want and there are enough options out there that you are able to make it so complicated and convoluted that you tie yourself up in knots and 6 months later you still don’t have a fully functioning business.
I will always advise you to start things simple. Get the basics in place, make them work and then you can add things in down the line if you want to. The basics can be set up in a single day.
A simple crochet business with recurring income needs 4 things
- a way to make a profit
- a way to communicate with your audience
- a way to get found in online searches
- a way to receive payments
A way to make a profit is a product you can sell or content that earns you money. A way to communicate is something that gets the word out quickly such as a newsletter or social media. A way to get found through online searches is anything that shows you or your crochet in the search results such as a YouTube video or a blog post. A way to receive payments is just how you receive the money you make which could be a PayPal account or through a site such as Shopify.
Some of these could be combined. So an Etsy shop gives you a way to get found in online searches and takes payments. A blog is a way to make a profit and is a way to get found in search results.
So if the machinery is in place in just one day, what could you achieve when it comes to building your audience and your profits in 90 days?
What 90 Days Of Focused Work Can Achieve
90 days is a long time. It’s 3 months, a quarter of a year. Even if you only have an hour a day to spend on your business, you can achieve a huge amount. That’s if you’re focused and have a plan. If there’s no plan and you just scatter gun approach it, the results will be far less impressive. This is why organisation and planning is so important in any business.
I have 3 business plans in my crochet business. A financial plan, a yearly plan and a content plan. These show me the big picture of what I need to achieve in terms of the money I need to make. The yearly plan is how I intend to make that money each month and the content plan is how I bring in that money each day.
Why are these plans so important to me? Because they break everything down into a simple weekly to do list that isn’t as overwhelming as “I need to make $60,000 a year from my crochet business.” That overwhelmed feeling from the big target makes your brain panic and make you think that you could never do that, it’s too big, you could never make it happen.
Those mind monkeys bouncing around your head are your biggest enemy in those 90 days because they’re the ones telling you you’re getting too big for your boots and people like you just can’t do this sort of thing.
We need to break the overwhelming down into manageable bite sized chunks. Once you’ve got your crochet business machinery in place, the rest is just content. In its simplest form, you build your crochet business and start making money by becoming visible. Can your audience find you? Do they know what you do? Do they believe you can be trusted with their cash? Do they believe what you say in your content?
This is what you need to do over the next 90 days. Visibility with consistency.
The Hardest Part = Trusting The Process
Trust the process. That’s the most difficult thing to do when you’re not seeing the money coming in yet. You have to believe in yourself, your crochet and your ability to make it work without seeing any validation yet. Your audience need time to get to know you. So the work you do today won’t start paying off for 3-6 months, and that’s if you stay visible and keep consistently showing up. The part in between is incredibly hard and takes self belief and staying focused on the plan. This is where so many people give up.
We live in a world where we expect instant results. We can order takeout online and have it delivered to our homes in less than an hour. We can search for a piece of information on Google and have the answer almost instantaneously. We want to be entertained and can find that on our TVs and on our devices within minutes. Going from a world of quick results to one that takes months is hard.
We have to shift our expectations and have patience — things that are becoming rarer in our fast paced world. But if you want your crochet business to be a success and give you the profits you need to make a living, then patience for the next several months is what is required along with unerring self belief.
Self Belief Is The Secret Weapon
Self belief is lacking amongst many of us. That’s why we have so many mind monkeys beating us down. It can be hard to ignore them, but that’s why we have our 3 plans. If you don’t believe in yourself then believe in the plan and then get stubborn. Stubbornly stick to the plan and ignore the mind monkeys. That’s what you need to do for the next few months. Sounds easy I know, but we all know that this is difficult to do in practice.
That’s why I created the Blueprint.
90 Days Of Support And Structure
The Blueprint supports you through the whole 90 days of getting your crochet business set up and then creating the plan for the next 90 days so that you have the support and accountability to see the plan through. Then when the 90 days are up you will have a fully functioning crochet business that is designed to make you a living along with a plan on what you need to do for the next 90 days to get you to that 6 month mark where you will be seeing the results of your efforts.
If you want your crochet business to become your career while living a flexible lifestyle that allows you to take time away, then the 90 Day Crochet Business Blueprint is for you. You can discover more about the Blueprint here and when our next start day is scheduled.
I’m Kelly Thomas, crochet business owner, pattern writer, blogger and coach. I started my crochet business selling what I make and made all the mistakes along the way. Let me show you what I learned so you don’t make the same errors.
You can listen to the podcast episode that goes with this article here. It is a bit different to what you’ve just read, but the message is the same.
You can check out the rest of my podcast here to discover more about how to turn your crochet into a successful business.
I also have this free workbook that you can download to Map Your Path and work out what your next step in your crochet business is.
