The Signs It's Time To Change Direction

Hello, and welcome to the Crochet Business School podcast. I'm Kelly Thomas, and this week I'm going to talk about how you know when it's time to change direction in your crochet business and how all the signs are already there, but you're just breezing past them So last week I was talking about my own journey, about how I came to stop selling what I made, and all the signs that I'd seen along the way, several which I ignored or just didn't know what to do with. It took time for me to get to the place where I'd really seen signs that I...

It was time to change direction. In the end, I was forced to stop, but I was already well on my way, and really that forcing to stop just brought the decision about sooner about what came next. And if you're finding yourself in the same place I was before I got to that full stop, it's... It can be very disorientating, very overwhelming, very frustrating.

You don't know what to do. You feel completely stuck. But at the same time, the signs were already there. You've been having off days where you know what you need to do, but things are just not getting done.

Things that you did day in, day out for so long are suddenly feeling like something that's really hard to get done, like posting on your social media every day, sending out that newsletter every week, researching new products to make for your next craft fair, or finding new events even to attend. You're not doing these things, but you're making the excuses. You're... You've been tired, not feeling well.

You just need more motivation. Need to improve your mindset a bit more. All these things, they're excuses. They're the stories we tell ourselves s- so that we don't confront that nagging doubt in the back of our heads.

We're very good at it. The determination to make the dream come true is there, and that determination just rolls over any other doubts that are in the back of your mind This can often feel like self-sabotage. You know you, what you need to do, but it's not getting done. The excuses cover what you feel is just some self-sabotage going on.

But really it's not. It's not sabotage at all, because our subconscious, that voice in the back of our heads, it's very powerful, more powerful than you realize, and it can dictate our behavior before we even become conscious of what we're actually doing and why. And so your subconscious realizes long before you do that this isn't right. This isn't working.

This is not the path for us. It knows. But it takes our conscious mind a bit longer to catch up, and in the meantime, the subconscious is causing all this self-sabotaging behavior because it knows. Your subconscious has already checked out.

It has mentally done the calculations and gone, "Nah, I don't want to do this anymore," and this is why you're not getting things done. Things that seemed so easy and were just part of your routine before suddenly become really difficult. Just opening that app on your phone to put a post up on social media, and instead you find yourself scrolling for ages and procrastinating and getting nothing done. It's all part of this subconscious realization.

You know, you want to make things work out, but really the, the final big sign is that the question changes from how do you make your crochet business work, and it slowly starts changing, maybe very quietly, but it changes to do I actually really want to make this work? And it's a very slow, subtle shift. And if you think you're not doing any of this self-sabotage behavior, have you got the list that you made from previous episodes that we talked about? Because one of them was listing the self-sabotaging things that you've been doing, and the signs are all on there I ask you to write these lists because they are the signs.

If you're having them, and if those doubts are there, you'll list have them. The hours you've been working, the real numbers from the profits that you're actually making from those sales, the self-sabotaging, the... all the different things that you've been trying to fix your crochet business to make them work. These lists are all the signs that you've been blowing past because we don't want to believe it.

We put in all this time and effort into our crochet business, and the last thing that we want to do is give up. We don't want to throw all that work away. We don't want to walk away from all of this work from this business that has become part of our identity. It's become part of who you are.

It's just a fixture of your life now. To walk away from that not only feels like failure, not only feels like quitting, it feels like you're gonna destroy part of yourself as well, and that is so hard to walk away from. You know, there's this meme that's going around saying, "I have a sign, but I, I'm waiting for a much more sign-ier sign," and this is that. If you take all these little doubts from those lists, the self-sabotage, the lack of profits, um, the hours you're working for such little return, all of these little pieces, when you put them together, they're your big neon sign that's waiting for you to realize that something much bigger is wrong, that it's not because of you, it's not because you're not working hard enough, it's not because that you haven't learned enough, it's not because you're not capable.

It's something much more fundamental, that this idea that selling your crochet can make you a living, and you can do it easily. It's not easy. It is extremely difficult, and very few people manage it. Not because you're not capable of running a business.

That's not true. You absolutely are. It's that there is something fundamentally wrong with this model. You have to be able to sell your crochet at a price high enough that it p- covers your time but also pays for the time when you're not crocheting, and for that you need to be able to sell at the high-end luxury level.

And that means being able to sell a crochet hat for over $100 And that's probably a rather horrifying thought because it's... You know, don't just need to cover the cost of your time that when you're making it, you need to cover the cost of your time when you're promoting it, when you're doing all the admin work. You need to put money aside for when you want to take time off. That's the only way to make it sustainable over the long term, and creating a luxury brand takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work, and there is some upfront cost to this because you've got to provide the entire experience and get yourself established.

It takes a really, really long time, and often we just don't have that time. We don't have the money behind us to afford us the ability to make that happen. You know, there are other ways, like collector's items, art installations, but again, they take time, and you've got to have all the pieces in place. Being able to run your crochet business like a regular shop If you want to do it full-time and you want to make a living from it, incredibly hard Your crochet business can work, just not in the way that you hoped.

A change of direction is what changes this. Not give up and walk away, just a change in direction. And that's the question I had to ask myself. When I stopped selling what I made because I was forced to because of all the dog fur, which I, I told you about last week, but when I stopped, I didn't s- just pack up and quit.

I started asking myself, "What next?" I wasn't ready to give up. I still wanted my dream, but I had to ask myself, "What comes next? What do I do instead?"

And when you're trying to figure that out, it's a good idea to look at what you're doing when you're not promoting a crochet business right now. When you're avoiding doing that work, what is it that you're doing instead? Because what you're doing instead tends to be the parts that you like doing. Are you jotting down notes in a notebook of things that you could make?

It might not be something that's in your niche from what you're selling right now, but maybe you're jotting down design ideas. Maybe you're enjoying just teaching others about how to crochet and chatting away in groups and giving them advice on ways to improve their crochet. Maybe you like making videos, showing off your crochet. Maybe you're not posting them right now, but do you enjoy the picture setup?

Do you enjoy showing off what you're making? Do you like writing about crochet, researching where the history of crochet, all the different, um, events that happen that are crochet related, writing about them All these different things feed into what could be your future. Because everything that you've built so far, building that business, building the following on social media, learning how to take pictures, learning how to write descriptions, uh, discovering your niche, building a newsletter list, all of this is not wasted.

All of this you still need. All of this will still play a part in what comes next. Nothing you've done so far is wasted. It's just been building the foundations of your future.

You're going to need all of these skills for your next direction, so you don't need to be worried that all that time has been wasted. It absolutely hasn't. It's just that you've been learning what you need, need to learn, and it will all be used later. You're not wasting all that effort.

It is not something that you shouldn't have bothered doing. It's all just laying the foundations for what comes next. You will use it all again. I still use all of that knowledge that I learned from selling what I make now.

It's come in useful for everything from taking the photos, to social media, to newsletters. I've used everything that I learned then and moved it to my next direction. So that is not something you need to worry about This is not the end. Realizing that something needs to change and a new direction is calling is not a failure.

It's not quitting. It's just a new direction. It's just the start of something new, something exciting, and something that is going to actually let your dreams come true and give you that financial freedom. Because it's not just about the money, it's about the time as well.

You want to be able to take time off. You want to be able to have that true flexibility of being able to walk away from your business to enjoy family life, to enjoy your own life, to enjoy some downtime just so you can take care of yourself. You want a business with all of this built in. It needs to be sustainable for the long term, not something that feels like a lead weight 'round your shoulders, and that's what we're going to talk about next week, about how all this comes together and takes us to the next step.

Take a, make that list about the different tasks that you've not been avoiding and that you have been doing, because those are going to help us decide what the next stage is. Because if you're still doing those things, it means that you enjoy doing them. You're not avoiding them, and that's going to help show you what your next path is because there are several available, it is not one size fits all, and it's all down to your personal preferences. So make that list, and then next week I'll tell you all about how we're gonna set these foundations.

So thank you for listening, and I shall see you next time for the next episode.