andrea

I like to cook a lot of foods from scratch, and back when we had 3 or 4 growing and constantly hungry children underfoot, I spent a lot of time at it. At one stretch, we even grew many of the ingredients ourselves. This meant I had acquired a lot of kitchen gadgets, many tools to do different things to make the process of getting the vegetables to the table easier.

Over the years, the kids have grown up, our needs have changed, and many of the neat kitchen gadgets and weird tools have been cleaned out. there are some, however, that I’ve kept – even though I use them once a year or less. I have a pasta maker I whip out for special occasions – and they have to be really special, because taking 3 hours to make homemade ravioli that disappears in less than 15 minutes can be a little daunting. I also have a tomato strainer. It’s large, has many pieces, and the box frequently gets in the way unless I keep it on top of the fridge.

But keep it I do. Why?

Well, once a year, maybe two, we either grow, buy, or get gifted with more tomatoes than we can handle or even eat in a week. And our family loves tomato sauce. Yes, you can buy tomato sauce cheap, and we go through a lot of it. But until you’ve tasted fresh homemade sauce, you have not truly tasted tomato sauce. The way this machine works, it gets the whole family involved. Someone clamps it to the table and put the thing together, someone starts quartering tomatoes, and one of the kids starts tossing the pieces in and turning the crank. Seeds and pulp come out one end, and beautiful crushed tomatoes come out the other, right into the pot. Then I give it a simmer, add spices and there we go.

So why go through all this effort, and maybe more to the point – why talk about tomatoes on my business blog? 😉

Underlying all this is a process that highlights where something comes from. It’s easy to buy a jar or can of tomato sauce. It’s harder still to grow the tomato, process it and make the sauce yourself. My tomato machine helps me in that. But mostly it helps me, and the children, understand how involved that final product came to be.

And today that got me thinking about WordPress. Sure, I could hand-code an entire website in HTML – and I’ve done so. It takes an enormous amount of time. WordPress, on the other hand, is like my tomato machine. I set it up and just.. crank.

There are other tools I’ve used in my work life that also make my job easier. Sometimes I go back and do things the hard way, just to keep my skills sharp. Yesterday, I coded. I could have asked Ron to do it for me. And he could have done it in 20% of the time it took me to do it. But I wrote that function so I could still remember how to write a function, and thus get better at explaining it to others. Even if it was a really simple 3 line function. (Two of them, in fact. Go me!) I had tools at my disposal like the codex and forums to help me.

What kind of rarely-used tools do you have that can make your work easier? Even on tasks you don’t do that often? What tasks do you do occasionally to keep your work brain sharp?

Finally! The WordPress All-In-One reference for Dummies has hit the shelves. 🙂 There’s six whole chapters on how to create a network and use multisite features. I pretty much cover all the basics.

Oh right. There’s 5 more big sections too, also incredibly useful. 😉

Before I did this here WordPress thing, I did other things. I tend to forget a lot of them, mostly because the biggest job I did over the past twenty years was raise my children. Everything else was squeezed in around that, and that particular job still isn’t finished. There’s a common thread around the things Ron and I did, both for work and for living, and that was if it didn’t quite work out the way we planned, we’d just try something different.

Oddly enough, that works for parenting too. It’s also a core philosophy behind WordPress development, so maybe that’s why we like. Just wait, things will change. 😉

Back in the beginning, at the start of my adult life – or at least only a few pages into that chapter – I was a *lot* more impulsive, and my husband maybe a bit more indulgent. This is the story of when I owned a craft store – why I started it, how I ran it, and why I stopped.

We lived out in the country, off a secondary highway. It was a road people did not use to get somewhere else, just whatever was out that way. Not quite the middle of nowhere, but you could get there from here. And as these places normally, go there was a whole passel of women looking for things to do, so there was a healthy craft community. One day, a few of us were talking and I had received a mail order catalog from a supplier out in Alberta. Alberta doesn’t have sales tax, so the prices were basically wholesale. Most of the other women were not interested in ordering anything, even though the prices were really good, becasue the shipping would be high for each order. “Well, let’s go in on an order together,” I said. They were all fine with that as long as I was the one who handled it.

Of course, after that I got the idea to put in an order for more that what people asked for and thing I thought they might need. When I sold off some of those items, I used the money to pick out more items. This worked really well at the time because many of my neighbors were familiar with home parties (like for Tupperware), knew how it worked, and liked buying stuff they needed – especially if they could just pop down to my place and get it.

Eventually, the corner of the room got bigger, I found more suppliers, and since my house was also not finished, I got Ron to build me a room on the lower level, with a door to the outside. When that got bigger – it didn’t take long – we decided to use half of the lower level for a proper “shop”. We had also formed a company for the consultation Ron was doing, so we made Rennick Craft Supplies a subsidiary of it. Funds to do major things like building a room were company paid for. We hired Ron’s brother to do the actual build because Ron was often away working. The old one-room shop then became Ron’s office.

All of this without a business plan and without a bank loan. I either used money from sales to buy new inventory (my main cost) or got some from The Bank of Ron – I mean, an investment from the parent company.For example, we went to a craft trade show in Calgary, but Ron’s company foot the bill for the entire trip.

At some point I got the bright idea to have a site on the internet. See the wayback machine archive for it here, as it is no longer online. I never did quite get to the point of using e-commerce software, as literally the only free software available for it was Mal’s E-commerce. I didn’t even have my own domain name as this was the mid-nineties and they were still around $70. I had to figure out how to navigate the newly birthed web, and how to build a site – all in HTML!

Also, I had no idea what I was doing.

No, really. I just jumped in then figured out what to do as best I could, or even as good enough as possible. I wrote a catalog and made copies at Staples, mailing them out myself.

I stumbled along, trying to broaden the business while dealing with flaky customers, a sagging craft industry (it goes in cycles) and my money tied up in inventory. I often had to order 12 of an item, even if the customer only wanted 2.

During this time, we also started homeschooling. So in between listening for a car in the driveway, making supper, doing laundry, and doing spelling drills, I often had the kids help me with packing up orders, greeting customers, and drilling them on times tables as we repackaged beads. I planned & taught classes to bring in people on a regular basis, but as the decade neared to a close, the downturn in crafting (scrapbooking was just becoming huge), the lack of funds and an unfinished house, plus a new Wal-Mart in town made it really easy to stop when we had our fourth (and last) child. Her arriving on the scene, as well as my grandmother passing, made things painfully obvious.

I sat down, ran over my finances for a full five years and determined this: for all my efforts, I had grossed an average of $400 a month. Not counting each July & August, when we closed for the summer and there was very little business anyway. That’s gross, not net. Any net was more inventory. Certainly not a good return for the amount of time I put into it.

When we decided to close, it was as if a huge weight had lifted. This was a big hint. I sold off what I could, and the rest I took with me when we all moved to a new city, selling our old house to the brother that had worked on it. I held a massive yard sale there, selling off most of the remaining supplies I didn’t want to keep for the kids or myself. I still have some of the supplies kicking around – a ten pound bag of hot glue sticks lasts a long long time. 😉

So what did I learn with the thousands invested in mostly inventory? Oh, a LOT. While more expensive than the community college course in computer programming I took for a year, it was less than a business degree from a university and probably more useful.

• While I did take an accounting course, I learned a I really *really* hate accounting. And one needs to stay on top of the paperwork and have a proper filing system, that one actually uses.
• Sometimes you have to round up.
• You really do have to spend money to make money. The trick is what to spend it on.
• You really need to know your industry inside out.
• Networking is more handy than you think
• Your instincts are probably right. If it looks like things are taking a downturn or something isn’t working: change. Don’t wait and see.
• Throwing more money at some things is not worth it.
• Treating customers as people, paying attention to them, and remembering them goes further than advertising.
• Doing too many things at once dilutes your message.
• Automate whatever you can, ask questions when you don’t know.
• “I don’t know, let me check,” is an acceptable answer.
• Some people will not do business with you for reasons that will never make sense. Don’t waste time chasing after them.
• If your heart’s not in it, it’s time to pack up.

I’ve seen people older than I am who have not learned some of these lessons, so overall I feel grateful that they took only ten years or less to learn. Many of the lessons listed above I use in the work I do now. Sometimes when I am sorting through a box of old papers, I find some receipts or flyers relating to the craft store and I feel a little sad it didn’t work out. Then I realize that while it may not have worked out the way I expected, it gave me experience and confidence to move on to something bigger and better.

Right there is one of the biggest lessons we passed on to our kids – you can pick a job or career, but you don’t have to be “stuck” with it when it’s just not for you any more.