The New Year is upon us, and sometimes we start to visualize, or dream, about how great this new year will be.  The facts are that we have to do more than just dream and wish – we must take ACTION!  Action requires us to think about things, write some things down and begin to work on the list we’ve written.

Here are a few ideas to help you get started on your list for the year and help to move your business at a pace that will definitely make it the “best year ever”!

** Update your planner for the entire year.  Put in all birthdays, anniversaries, craft show dates, conferences you want to attend, etc.  If you don’t have major items on your calendar, you’ll get so busy you’ll forget important items, or worse than that, you may be trying to schedule two craft shows for the same weekend, if you don’t already have something on your calendar.

** Set up 2-3 major goals that you’d like your business to accomplish this year, such as getting started in that new area of sewing for big and tall men, locating two additional craft shows that you can attend or setting up your customer area so you’ll be able to show off and sell some of the crafts that you make from those downloadable patterns. Write these goals into a book so you can cross them off when you’ve accomplished them.

** Plan your time off.  If there’s a reunion coming up over Memorial Day or you think you’d like to head into the mountains or to the beach over the 4th of July, mark it down in your planner, and add that to your list.  By doing this you know well in advance of the upcoming days that you won’t be in the office / workroom, so you can get your work done accordingly.

** Educate yourself.  In every business, there are new things coming along constantly, and you need to keep abreast of any changes.  You could even decide to educate yourself a little and learn how to do your own sewing machine repair, instead of having to take your machine to the shop for maintenance and repairs.  Figure out how many times you had your machines at the repair shop last year – add up the total spent, and this will probably be the savings you’ll have THIS year, once you learn how to take care of your own machines.

** Organize your office. The biggest problem in any office, at least in mine, are the mounds of paper!  Things I want to look at in a few days, magazines I want to browse through again, ideas for projects that get out of control – you name it and it’s all in my office.  I’ve decided that I WASTE entirely too much time shuffling these things around to make room for more papers.  Today, January 1st, I have made the decision to clear out the “junk”, get the office organized, get a filing system set up and categorized (project ideas in one file folder, future article ideas in another folder, patterns organized in my new clear view pattern holders,) and go through the huge stack of magazines to tear out and file what I want to keep and recycle the rest of the magazine.  I’ve made a big headway already today and feel so much better about the office – I know I won’t be wasting as much time this year as in past years shuffling and re-shuffling.  And guess what – time WASTED means less productive time, therefore dollars wasted!

** Last but not least, after making your list of goals and “to do’s”, plan how and when you will get them accomplished.  You don’t have to do everything in January!  Spread out the items according to what you’d really like to accomplish first, second and so on;  this way you can get a time-table set up that you can easily follow.  If you see that you’re nearly finished with your entire list by the middle of the year you can easily set up another set of goals for the last half of the year.

I’m planning on making 2019 the BEST YEAR EVER for my sewing and craft business.  How about you?  HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!