New Year's resolutions

First of all: Happy New Year! I hope it'll be awesome for you! (And wouldn't mind if it would be awesome for me too ;) I also hope it started for you as well as it did for me: on the first of January I've got my second biggest order yet! Here's hoping the trend will continue for the rest of 2016 :)

Are you in the habit of making New Year's resolutions? I'm not. But I've decided to start this year with making a list of goals I want to achieve with my shop, and seeing how this will work out for me. Apparently, as just about everyone seems pointing out, having an actual plan makes it easier to get there (wherever this there is for you). I've never did that, so I'm hoping that having a clearer, better defined view of where I want to be in a year's time, and what I want to achieve during upcoming 12 months will act as a big motivator for me.

Right now, my list consist of 7 goals, but, knowing myself, I'll probably add to it later. Those 7 are pretty modest goals (I hope I'll finally figure out where my elusive target customers "hide", and next year's goals will be bigger ones!), but here we go:

• being active on social media/blog more often, and regularly! As you well know I'm guilty of abandoning them for long stretches of time, and I plan to fix that tendency this year!
• and while we're at it: making a weekly schedule telling me when to post on those media. That should help me with the regularity thing. If I even bother to look at it ;) I'm guilty of ignoring schedules, plans, lists, and anything that helps you stay organised. I'm too chaotic for my own good.
• making at least one new piece every week.
• I hope to be able to make at least three sales a month. I'll have to think about this one, and then make another list of things I'll do to try to achieve that! Three sales isn't much, but seeing as now I'm making one a month, or none, that seems like a reasonable improvement.
• introduce rings, probably made to order. This one shouldn't be difficult, as just today I ordered some supplies for ring-making:)
• find those elusive dream clients of mine. No idea whatsoever how I'm going to do that. That one also requires another sub-list, and ties in tightly with the 3 orders a month one.

• the last point on my list states (almost exactly): to treat this whole mess more seriously. The whole mess is, of course, my shop. This again comes back to being more organised, and keeping track of things.

I hope I won't ignore that list. But I'm not an organised person by nature, far from it. I'm that absent-minded stereotype people think about after hearing about someone creative. I mean, I once spent a whole day looking for new garbage disposal bags, only to find them in the oven the next afternoon! Not to mentions brand-new socks in the fridge. Or getting lost in subway with one entrance and one exit, and coming out the same way I got in. And it wasn't my first time crossing that particular one. Basically, I went into a tunnel and went out the way I went in. Let me tell you, I was really surprised. For my defence, I did drop my keys and had to pick them up.
So, as you can see, being organised, or even knowing which way I'm going, is not my strongest point.

However, I'm really determined to stick to that plan, and make it work. I hope I'll see some results in the next 12 month. And I really hope my recent stroke of luck will continue for a while longer: I've got my biggest order ever at the end of December, and, as I've already mentioned, second biggest one yesterday. That's what I call a very positive end to the old, and equally positive start to the new year!

I wish you all the best! I hope 2016 will be a very happy year for you!
Kasia