Crazy, right?

If you follow along on Instagram you have heard some of this but I think it lends itself better to a few paragraphs instead of a few story slides so here we go...

The way I travel through my work (and life) is I come up with an idea, make a quick decision and then stick with it until it stops working. Sometimes (usually when it's a craft project related idea) it stops working in like an hour and I move on to the next thing. Sometimes it stops working three years later when I am so deeply entrenched in the habit that I have forgotten I am even in control of the decision making process.

The latter situation was me, last week, when my shipping label provider started glitching and their support team stopped responding. I spent a few frantic days manually entering shipping addresses (extremely not fun) and then moved my business over to Pirate Ship which is an order organizer and shipping label provider in one. It's extremely user-friendly, faster than my old program and (drum roll please) free compared to the $70 I was paying per month.

Unbelievable! But even less believable is that if my first program hadn't failed I would have never stopped to look around. Never. It's not my style. It's not how I work. I have my routines and I like them and until they fail on my busiest shipping day of the year...they are mine.

But $70/month is a lot of money and this experience has encouraged me to look at the way I do everything in my business. 

I went through my extremely high-tech excel spreadsheet to take note of each dollar that has gone out the door so far this year (10 months). Because everyone likes a pie chart (no, just me?) I have created one for you to see. 

I run a business (Get To Work Book®!) where I create, sell and mail out physical product! That means I pay a lot for the product design (blue), creation (red) and then shipping (green) and packing (purple). I also have to store all that product and packaging (teal). Changing any of those pie pieces would be a huge deal and so the area I decided to look at first were those fees. Let's see another chart. Here is a breakdown of my "fees" so far this year.

There is not much I am going to do about that huge lime green chunk (it's the fees my payment processors charge every time I take a credit card transaction - I use stripe, square and paypal - am I missing something much better?)

But the next slice after that was this email newsletter! I was paying $147 a month for a service that I joined in 2012. It was good. It had many features. Most importantly I was so comfortable there. But (as I learned from my shipping fiasco) "comfort" is not a good enough reason to sit tight. I checked out flodesk ($28/mo regardless of subscriber count!) and so far am very pleased. (You can check it out here with my affiliate link and save 50%. I do not know if this is the right tool for you, but I do know it is pretty and it doesn't charge you more as you grow your list.)

Let's be clear: spending money is part of running a business. I know that so many of these expenses are necessary. But some? Some are not. 

Just because you have been doing things the same way for ten years, five years, three years or even two months doesn't mean you can't stop, look around and adjust.

So what am I doing next? Probably letting go of some of those random domain names. Probably (SPOILER ALERT) cutting that teal piece of the first pie. And after I get my business processes straightened out, I am going to take a closer look at the way we are running our house. (How many streaming services do we need?)

What does any of this mean for you? Right now, not much! Get To Work Book® is still going. I am still extremely chatty on Instagram. BUT ALSO: I am excited about working on this newsletter. You can now expect me to deliver more unique and fresh content to these emails (do not worry! This was pretty in the weeds and long but I promise it is not going to be all business!). I have so many fun things I want to write about here on a semi-weekly basis.

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Copyright © 2019 ELISE JOY INC, All rights reserved. please note, I often use affiliate links in these emails which means if you make a purchase through an affiliated link, I make a small commission.