Welcome to the Girl Gang Craft podcast, where we dive in deep to all things business, wellness, creativity and activism for artists and entrepreneurs. We talk with impactful, female driven companies and founders for an inside look at the entrepreneurial experience, where you'll come away with tangible steps to elevate your business. Are you ready? I'm your host, Phoebe Sherman, founder of Girl Gang Craft, artist and designer, and marketing obsessed. We're here to learn together how to expand our revenue, implement new organizational techniques, and cultivate about business practices as we work towards creating a life doing what we love. Let's get started.

Hello. Hello. Hey, creatives. Phoebe here. Welcome back to the Girl Gang Craft podcast, your host today. It's just me, Phoebe Sherman, and it's been a while since I've hopped on here solo. I want to talk today about what to take on and what to let go of. This is a tricky one for probably a lot of you listening. And for myself, I want to do everything all the time. I want to increase our revenue, increase our programing, increase our wage increase, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And that mentality is actually toxic and it is erratic and it's a little while. So I am trying my best to rein it back in. A lot of this has to do with my own inner work, learning that multitasking does not exist for me, and probably not many of us. I have really learned that I need to do one thing at a time, focus on that task, and then move on to the other task. What has been a bottleneck for me, as I've sort of embraced this way of thinking, deep work, of deep focus is the tasks. Switching is what is really challenging for me. The time that it takes for me to go to one task to another, that's like very different, that's challenging. I get a little lost, a little loosey goosey, a little distracted. We go to the phone, blah, blah, blah. We go outside, we eat our food, and it's really hard for me to start a new task that's in a different genre, if you will, of the previous task. So what I do to combat that is time blocking as much as possible. That means pairing tasks that are similar to each other back to back. On my core, I also really know my limits. Some people are like, okay, I'm into batching content, batching podcasts, and they'll do five podcasts in a row. And that is not for me. I can do two podcasts a day, maybe two interviews in one solo if I'm really, really feeling it. But same with meetings. A lot of people really take their meetings back to back, and I also can't do that like two three meetings tops is what I prefer and what works for me. I try my best to be really precious with my time and sometimes that works for me. Sometimes I'm not so precious with my time. This is a little bit more of a different direction than what I was planning on talking about, but I do think it's important. I talked about on the podcast tons of times about how time management is really important as an entrepreneur, and it's something I'm interested in as a Virgo, as someone with ADHD, as someone who has been interested in multitasking my entire life, as someone who has been interested in a lot of things all at once and also gets a lot of ideas, and I want to act on those ideas and make them happen immediately, with no patience and no realization that I can't do all the things I want to do all the time. If this sounds familiar for you, welcome, I love you. I feel for you. We're all in it together. And if you have any quote unquote hacks or ways that you manage your time, I'm always interested in that. So please feel free to share. You can DM me and our voicemail inbox still exists. I always forget the phone number though, so we'll put that in. Okay? Our phone number or voicemail is (413) 961-0855. Remember the days when you used to memorize all of the phone numbers? I still know some phone numbers, but me learning a new one is not going to happen. Me and Matt really tried to memorize each other's phone numbers because that is important to know. Your partners phone numbers in case of emergency. In case of so many things you don't know your partner's cell phone number, I encourage you to learn it. Anyways, that took a lot out of me and sometimes I still get it wrong. This is a different tangent. Okay, so I think it's really important to figure out what to focus on in terms of what you can handle, what season of your life, what else you have to do, and also what your audience is going through at that time.
When you're knee deep in quarter three, heading into quarter four, you have a limited amount of time this year, period. That's a fact. And you're not alone in that. So it is sometimes easier to tailor the rest of the year because there's all of these factors that are semi universal holidays seasons. What people in your niche are paying attention to. So I'll just talk about my real world experience and why I want to talk about this is because this whole year I have been planning on redoing some of my classes, redoing and expanding on them. Right now they exist as hour, an hour and a half workshops, and I really wanted to turn one or more of them into a full, sort of extensive course that you could take at your own pace A month or two ago, I had decided, okay, I'm going to actually not do both our email class and brand partnership class. I'm just going to do our brand partnership class, and that feels like that's aligned with my goals, aligned with our audience. It's pretty unique. There's not a lot of brand partnership info that is geared towards creatives, less typical influencers, and our growing craft niche is very specific. Anyway, so I was going to double down on this brand partnership class and get it out for you. Now it mid October, late October because I started this deadline. When we're moving into November, no one wants to buy a class. Our community is in craft fairs, is doubling down on their holiday sales. I'm starting to gear up for rest at the end of it. No one is buying in a course past October, even October as per half pushing it for a core sale. But I was still determined to get this brand partnership class going. I had really started a couple of the. I curated our new look. We have some slides down for several modules. The whole thing is outlined and it was just a matter of making the slides and recording and putting them up in our hub, with the goal of getting that out last two weeks of October.


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As a business owner, you know, it is super important not only to keep track of your revenue, but also your expenses. So you can get that write off so you can get that tax deduction. And maybe you know this in theory, but you're not really keeping track of things. Or maybe you're working with a DIY spreadsheet situation. In either case, it's time to get serious with your bookkeeping so you can save money on your taxes and also Know what's happening with your business so you can make informed choices. In comes QuickBooks. With QuickBooks Self-employed or QuickBooks online, you can find the program that works for you to keep track of the money coming in and out of your business, and we're here to help. We've got you with 30% off the first six months, six months of your QuickBooks subscription, so you can save a little money while you save a little money. Go to bit.ly/GGCxQuickbooks to get started today.

If you're looking for a new email provider or if you haven't started sending out newsletters yet, may we suggest Flodesk. Women owned and originally created in San Francisco. We love Flodesk and been using it for, I don't know, like five years so far. We love it. It's affordable, easy to use and a beautiful to design. Gorgeous emails and really easy to do workflows as well. And they just announced that you can share templates. So this is really cool If you're a designer and you want to share templates with your customers, this could be even a new revenue stream. We're planning on sharing some of our best templates as well down the road. Check out Flodesk. You can get 20 or 50, you can get 50% off the first year. So that brings your monthly total down to $19 the first year to use Flodesk and it doesn't go up depending on like how many contacts you have like some other programs. So you can get 50% off the first year with the link bit.ly/GGCFlodesk GGC is all caps and so is the F in Flodesk or you can go to flodesk.com/C/ GGC2020 gets you 50% off your first year. Also if you need help with email we've got a class for that go to girlgangcraft.com/classes and as always, feel free to ask us any questions about the brands that we love or our classes and what they're doing to help you do.

Now, to further complicate things, I had a honeymoon last month in September. September was a wild month for me. It's our anniversary, my birthday. We had our honeymoon anyways as we gone for 12 days, and then at the time of this recording, I supposed to go to Miami next week for Adobe Max. There was literal holes of me being gone to not work on this project.
Anyways, moral of the story is that this was an impossible task. This wasn't going to happen. Phoebe, you're delusional. Not to mention all the other things I have to do right about now besides these tracks. Besides my brand partnership stuff to turbines, we have five holiday crafters to throw, and I do have a really supportive team, but I'm involved with a lot of those decisions and organizations. And of course, having the professors over here on the East Coast. Plus I decided to redo our website anyway so we can talk about that in a moment. Basically, it was an impossible task and I was like, this isn't going to happen. And it didn't happen. I decided I was going to think about it over the honeymoon. And I think even just the allowing space of time to think about it, the answer was immediately, no, this is not going to happen. And we're going to redo that brand partnership class early in the next year. That makes so much more sense in terms of other people's timelines as well. Thinking about your customers timeline and when they're wanting to buy things like quarter one is generally slower for small business owners, so that's a great time to invest in your education. That matched up really well. And sometimes I know I made the right decision because my body immediately relaxes a few times. It takes a couple days for my body to relax and be like, oh yes, but often dropping things is really beneficial. And this is scary and hard. When you are relying on these things to bring in money. Money is challenging. I mean, it's just really challenging to decide what to move forward with in terms of funding your business and funding your lifestyle and funding your rent and paying your bills, blah, blah. But often I find, and I'm saying this because I always forget that often I find when I let things go other things come into fruition. And this includes things that are connected with money. I mean, there's so many other things that I can be focusing on quarter for that I am focusing on right are events, brand partnerships, and our apparel, especially this close to an election cycle or election day, which I really don't want to get into right now, in this moment. I do want to back up on some of those things and just share some facts and some statistics, our brand partnerships. But we made about 30,000 in brand partnerships last year. This year up to now, we're about to hit maybe 50. Okay. So we've and maybe on track to double it. We'll see how this holiday season lines up. And so that's a huge gain from last year, 30,000 or 50 or maybe 60,000. And brand partnerships. We're hoping we have two x our apparel sales on our website. And I've talked about before that our apparel sales were fine and not great. And the reason I put more attention and care into our apparel this year, we had some new items and some new items that have been really successful. So we've two x our website sales, which is amazing and awesome. Yeah. And then I want to talk about the website too. I got my website done by Meredith from Quixotic Design Co 2020 right before the pandemic. Maybe I signed with her 2019 and that was amazing investment. And at this point we've sort of grown out of that branding. And there's been sort of a lot of changes. And I still love that initial brand, but we have sort of ebbed and flowed and changed, and I wanted something different. And I have looked into working with other designers or re working with her, just what I wanted to invest in the website. And ultimately I decided that I didn't have money for that. I really didn't have an extra 1015 K sitting around, and that's really what it cost to make a good website these days. 10 or 15 K I had wanted to switch to Shopify. Right now we're on Wix and basically all of these things were big hurdles. Switch I was looking for a new designer, was challenging. Looking for a new designer that wanted to switch it over to Shopify was challenging. And then I was looking into, okay, what would it look like for me to design our website? What would it look like for me to switch over to Shopify? And ultimately, that learning curve to switch to Shopify was a big hurdle to get over, and I didn't have the time and space to do that. Additionally, Shopify, maybe it'll be a good fit for at some point, but we do so much service based stuff and have our podcast and blog and all of these different pages that didn't necessarily feel conducive to Shopify or Shopify wasn't even able to do some of these things that means like maybe down the line or whatever. Ultimately, we stuck with Wix, and I designed our new logo suite, our new branding. We've sort of switched colors ramp. It actually feels really sad and weird and intense. To move away from this pink and orange kind of have a different shade of pink and red ish. I mean, I literally painted my walls pink and orange. If you've seen pictures or video from my dining room for a different vibe, we're in a electric blue electric green vibe. We have some purple. Anyways, I'm really proud of my design. I do have the ability to design things. I have experience as a brand designer, but sometimes it can feel so scary and doing your own stuff. There's obviously more room for critique. Anyways, we decided to move forward with my own design, essentially because I couldn't afford a designer or a website rebuild at this time. We're kind of in the middle of our website rebuild. The homepage is on there, things have been changed, and we're really embracing imperfection because we can make it happen. For a full rebrand and switch over, there are some pages that haven't been switched over, and that's just what's happening right now. I think it's really important to embrace imperfection. Maybe you're horrified at the same time. Maybe you're like, oh my God, why would you do that? Make sure you have a website design first. And there are moments where it horrifies me, but there is literally only so much time in the day and so much capability that I can move forward with and my team can do. And we really have to embrace where we are right now. Instead of where we think we could be or what other brands are doing. Sometimes the way that you can do something, it's okay. It's the right way for you. At that time. We have a mostly new website up if you want to go check it out. But also I want to say about this, I guess, circling back to this idea of doing what you can and deciding what to let go of and deciding what to focus on, I think your whole business can maybe be summed up in that challenging world of deciding where to spend your time, deciding what to focus on, what's going to resonate with your audience, what's going to resonate with you, what you have time for, what you can fit in your day and it's all challenging. I will say that you probably can do less than you think you can. I will say that there are seasons of working really, really hard and then hopefully there are seasons of you not working really, really hard because that's going to lead to burnout. I think entrepreneur is like a crash course in our work, and if you're not healthy, the business isn't healthy. I think it's really important to take it seriously with what you can do, what you can move forward with, how you're spending your time, how you're taking care of yourself. How is your world around you as best you can? And of course, it's challenging and scary and terrifying when we're working with Scarcity Mindset or just living in late stage capitalism, how are we going to pay our bills? How are we going to make these things work? And I don't have the answers with that. I'm still working on it every single day. I am trying my best to trust the process and trust our community and trust that we've built to bring in money. And also it is scary. This is not a very uplifting note to end on, but yeah, I think it is a balance of inner work and then also learning new marketing, learning new tactics for growth, making sure that you're on top of your accounting, and then taking care of your community and your community is feeling taken care of. You're going to feel taken care of as well. Okay, I think that's all I want to say for now. Thank you for tuning in and I hope you review key to our events. Our first one is Sacramento, November 16th, Salem is November 23rd, and Providence and Oakland are both on December 7th on opposite coasts. And then our new event, Malden, is December 14th and our holiday gift guide should be up shortly. So stay tuned for that so you can shop from some forward businesses and get some fun gifts. And I hope you follow me at Phoebe Sherman and Grogan Craft at Going Craft, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and this podcast. And thank you for tuning in.

Thank you so much for listening to the Girl Gang Craft podcast. Head to GirlGangCraft.com/podcast for Shownotes and more. See you next time.