Chapin - Grow your handmade business: how to envision, develop, and sustain a successful creative business

To my community. Were all in this together. Thank goodness.

The first time I wrote up a business plan was in 2005. My husband, Eric, and I were living in Alabama, and we desperately wanted to get back to our native New England. Problem was, we had no money to make the move. Erics job had transferred us to Alabama, and we were stuck there, largely dependent on his salary and under contract to stay there for at least one year.

The fall of that Alabama year, I took a trip to Chicago to attend a conference for people passionate about public radio. At the time, I was following my dream of working somewhere in the field of public radio by doing low-paying (or no-paying!) freelance gigs, and while I was in Chicago, I interviewed a couple who owned one of the first cupcake-only bakeries in the United States. Even way back then, I enjoyed combining my love of fresh, new, creative businesses with my love of telling stories and helping people. My best friend, Karie, had tipped me off to this at-the-time-unusual business near her Chicago neighborhood. I was immediately smitten by the idea of a cupcakery and jumped at the chance to learn all I could about a bakery that sold only cupcakes.

I fell in love with the idea of owning my own cupcakery. When I got home, I excitedly told Eric all about my idea for a new kind of business. Then I got to work.

I devoted all of my time to researching and working on my baking skills and scheming. Oh, how I schemed! During the middle of all of this pre-enterprise enterprise, the owners of that Chicago bakery called me and asked if I might be interested in buying their business. Turns out they had received prestigious Fulbright scholarships and were headed off to Turkey, and as a result, they needed to sell their cupcake bakery quickly.

It seemed like a heaven-sent opportunity! Here I was, baking up a storm, taking classes in baking science, researching bakeries basically going whole hog in learning the ins and outs of my projected new profession. I had even taken a holiday job working in a local bakery, where I frosted over five hundred cookies a day. And now the very same people who had inspired my new passion were offering me the bakery that had started it all and at a very fair price, I might add. I was over the moon!

I wanted us to buy that cupcakery so badly that I could taste it as if it were an actual cupcake. In fact, I could think of nothing else but taking over that bakery. There were a couple of problems, though, that my brain seemed to be unable or unwilling to register. Number one: My husband didnt want to move to Chicago, even though he was on board with the overall cupcakery idea. Number two: Although the asking price was eminently fair, buying any established business costs money and I didnt have any.

After awhile I had to give up on the dream of owning the Chicago bakery, but I didnt give up on the overall dream. I decided that I would take my passion for a cupcakery and figure out how to make it work back home in New England. I knew that I needed to keep learning about baking, but I also needed to learn how to buy a business or start one with no money and that meant figuring out a key component: business planning.

Now, Im a planner by nature, anyway. Always have been, always will be. I enjoy dreaming up concepts and filling in all the details to make them work. I love developing ideas and going over and over them, watching them grow and expand into something real. Not surprisingly, I dove into the world of business planning like everything else I do: feetfirst for all Im worth. I signed up for classes at my local Small Business Administration office, I applied for a SCORE mentor (more on SCORE mentors later), and I bought every book on starting a business that our local bookstore had in stock, plus all the ones I could find online. Eric was equally invested. Together, we traveled to our chosen area of Massachusetts and looked at rental spaces. We studied up on health codes and requirements and met with a counselor to work on our small-business plan. We had appointments with credit experts and banks. We even chose a name for the cupcakery. Eric and I were beyond excited even though something didnt feel right. Nonetheless, we forged ahead....

Ill be honest with you about my first attempt at writing a business plan: it was easier to make a perfect batch of cupcakes with professional-looking frosting than it was to write that first draft of a professional-looking business plan. I found myself more interested in designing my very own cupcakery space and thinking about the perfect logo for my business than I was about projected revenues and figuring out the interest on a bank loan.

Truthfully, I was having a hard time understanding what I was trying so hard to learn. Most of the resources I had access to seemed like they were written in a foreign language. I found it tough to understand a lot of the words, let alone the meanings behind them.

I wasnt sure what I was reading, let alone what I was writing, but eventually I got it done. But even though I found it hard to digest all the reading I was doing, I managed to complete a business plan that we could literally take to the bank.

These days, I wouldnt use a lot of those same resources I used back then to write a business plan. Not only has the kind of business I own changed, but also and luckily the landscape of owning a business has changed from just a decade or so ago. But even though those old resources I used way back when wouldnt be useful to the business I have now, I did take something wonderful (and perhaps rather ironic) away from that first business-plan experience: I did not want to open my own cupcakery.

Thats right. Putting together a business plan showed me that owning a bakery, of any kind, wasnt the right business for me to be in. I learned that I didnt want to work seven days a week. Plus, Eric and I were not comfortable taking out the sizable loan we would need to open a bakery from scratch and all that it would entail. We decided that the amount of work the business would involve would just be too much. We suddenly realized that while we may be entrepreneurs at heart, owning a cupcakery was not the right fit for us. And that realization might not have come or might have come at a hefty price tag had I not developed a business plan.

My business plan helped me to learn not only what kind of business I didnt want to have but also a lot about what my personal values are. Turns out I value freedom a lot, and I wouldnt have that freedom if I was beholden to a schedule of store hours. The bottom line is that I learned what I did and did not want from a business where I was going to be the boss. And until I had that long, detailed bundle of facts and figures outlining in great, great detail what could be my future life, I had no idea that this seemingly perfect dream that I had been focused on for almost a year wasnt perfect at all.

Thank goodness for business plans.

When I traveled the United States promoting my first book, The Handmade Marketplace: How to Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and Online, I had the pleasure and the privilege to meet a whole lot of people. People like me and probably people like you, too. Which is to say, creative people who love what theyre doing but who need some extra help when it comes to running their businesses.