Tuesday Marches On

It's a beautiful, chilly fall morning, I need to focus on the beauty and be reminded of life by the chill. Building a retail business is a series of waves. First you get it open, then you promote it to get people in to it. When the people come, you make sure you have everything in place for them to have a positive experience that makes them want to come back. Then you need more people so you expand your promotion mechanisms. A resource center offering supplies and classes is a vastly different beast than a production studio. If what you're selling is your work, there are retail and wholesale shows, ready-made on-line venues (like WholesaleCrafts.com and Etsy), and there are trade magazines in which to advertise for the wholesale market. If what you're selling is classes and supplies, how do you build that business? Retail of this sort is completely new to me.

The resource center is open, we've had our grand opening weekend that Bullseye kindly promoted through their vast mailing list, and we've begun a modest mailing list of our own. Now what? We have a great class line-up, how do we get the word out more? It's a whole new set of things to think about and I have got to get comfortable with the idea that I don't need to do them all *today*. It will be enough for this week to get the class descriptions up on our website in their own page, to have postcards made of our class offerings and drop them around coffee shops, restaurants, bars, etc. in the little neighborhoods surrounding East Lake, and to get a form created for people to sign up for them on the web.

This is why I blog. I sat down this morning in a vast funk of what to do, what to do, and worked through the broad brushstrokes of it here before. Now I'm ready to get dressed and on with the day!