The decisions I made during years 5-10 are ultimately what led me to where I am presently. I'd say the first 5 years were all about learning, making plenty of mistakes and picking myself back up after each one. Then the 2nd half of the last decade was taking all those hard won lessons and compiling them into growth and successes.
By the time I was celebrating year 7 I had finally started to see some real change in things. That's about when I noticed that not only was I hitting major milestones but that I, myself, was growing right along with the business! And quite honestly, that's supposed to happen! We small business owners are close to what we started and the relationships we have with our businesses should continue to grow and be objective yet close. One major choice I made in those next 5 years had the biggest impact on things and that was giving myself regular work weeks along with regular time off. When I first started my business I was working 7 days a week for several years and couldn't seem to understand that I was the cause of my own burn outs. I was constantly tired, frequently frustrated and always seemed to be spinning my wheels and gaining no traction. And really, how could I? Not many people want to work with someone who's always walking around tired and wearing their frustrations on their face. So, I started doing a normal 5 day work week and in year 5 gave myself my first week off. Of course I felt really guilty at first but I still worked my way up to giving myself then 2 weeks off the following year and after that 3 weeks and last year I took 5 weeks off to take care of myself. It was the best thing I could have done! And I no longer feel even a smidgeon of guilt! I'm now at a place where I work 4 days a week, which is something I wanted to do for a while, and this year I'll be taking 7 weeks off as my gift to myself for making it through 11 years of business! We survived Covid, the first 5 years of serious mess ups, some pretty uncool meetings and lots of blood,sweat and tears; and in celebration of that I'm taking a full 7 weeks off this year. If you're a business owner and struggling with some of those same issues I mentioned- exhaustion, burn out, frustration and feeling like you're not getting anywhere no matter how many hours you put in- I encourage you to take some down time and breathe. Just offer yourself the same grace periods you'd want a loved one to have when they're tired and worn out. Because we may be amazing business owners trying to conquer the world but we're also human with bodies and minds that occasionally need a break. They say the first few years determine whether a small business will last or not. Quite a few don't make it past year 3 and for those that do it seems year 5 is the definite make or break moment.
That was pretty true for me as well. After I started my small business in August of 2012 I made a LOT of mistakes. I was passionate about my new "baby" but didn't know exactly how to take care of it once I'd given "birth" to it. I just tried things. For 4 years I experimented with everything from producing shows to participating in craft events to selling within other businesses to framing for my artist clients. I used what I knew from the events I'd visited in the past along with the skills and experience I'd gained from managing teams and spaces for corporations when I was employed by them. And even with all that knowledge and experience I still f*cked up. A lot. And in numerous ways. The thing that most people won't tell a new business owner is that this is normal! That's why so many of us fail at the start. We're supposed to mess up, fall down, flounder...but THEN once we do we're also supposed to get back up and try again. It's how we learn to even be successful to begin with. Through failure. I could write a book on what not to do in business now. I won't, but I could. And I learned just as much through all those mistakes I made as I did from past work experiences. In year 5 though I got tired of messing up. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired within my small business and there wasn't a week that went by during those first 5 years that I didn't think about giving up. Some years I thought about it daily. But then something happened in the 5th year that caused me to "woman up" and manage to begin to turn my sinking ship around and start to steer it towards my definition of success. I finally sat down with a pen and paper and asked myself some deep questions about what I was doing. Then I answered in complete honesty with no emotion allowed. I tuned out all the noise of what others had told me and tuned into what I truly needed to do to make things work. That's when I began to stop making mistake after mistake and my small business started to grow. And after 11 1/2 years now I'm so glad I did that in year 5 AND I'm also grateful for those first 4 years of screw ups a.k.a. lessons. When I was a kid I was forever selling things. At first it was food that I'd walk door to door asking neighbors to buy (I'd go home and have my mom make whatever the item was AFTER making the sales and not telling her beforehand), then it was Avon in my preteen to early teen years and of course school fundraisers. And each and every time I loved it! I enjoyed the process of selling so much that I would have sold anything, even now- sales are one of my favorite parts of running my business.
When I was in my late teens I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just FELT that was where all directions were pointing me and the idea of operating my very own small business just thrilled me to death! At the time I had no clue what kind of business I wanted to have, just that I needed to be my own boss and have one. Life didn't lead me into owning my own business right away, instead it took me on a very long and circuitous course through the land of retail, hospitality and management. Which is exactly what I needed it to do. Having those other jobs allowed me to gain the experience I needed to then step out on the shaky limb of entrepreneurship with some knowledge and understanding not only of what I needed to do to be successful but what my clients needed to do as well. It wasn't until 2010 though that I got the idea for what would later become Baldwin's Gallery. At the time I was a supervisor for a local branch of a corporation in Lancaster, PA. One day during work I happened to walk into the employee break room in time to catch a coworker creating mini works of art on paper cups- doodling. As soon as I saw the details, the intricate style and breath taking process of what he was doing I immediately told him he had to do something with this amazing talent! I was on fire to see him do something with it beyond doodling on paper cups that would be thrown away! So we put our heads together and I coordinated his very first art exhibition, which wound up being a screaming success!!! I was so high on the feeling after the opening show ended that I just knew that was the kind of business I wanted to start. In August of 2012 I finally started Baldwin's Gallery (back then it was called Baldwin's Dirty Little People Art Gallery) with the goals of helping people and working with art. I had no clue it would become what it now is nearly a dozen years later. Baldwin's Gallery has gone through a number of changes since the start, as do most businesses, but the one thing we've stuck with since the beginning is our 2 main goals- helping others and working with art; that has not changed at all and continues to shape the way we do business even after over a decade of doing this. I'm so very thankful for all those work and life experiences that helped prepare me to be more than just a salesman, because even though that's still one of my fave parts of what I do the business is so much more than that and I'm so glad it is. So I've been asked for several years now to create a blog on "what I know to be true" and I FINALLY decided to integrate one into my website in order to utilize this platform more AND to share more information about myself, the business and what I do with my audience. So welcome to my blog!
This first post will be fairly short in comparison to what's to come as I want to really give an overall summary of my intentions with future posts and what you can come to expect. As I move along with this blog you can expect to see posts about:
As an artist representative that's what I do for my clients but obviously in a much more hands on manner. For those out there who could use just a tip or 2 though to really get going to the next level then my hope is that this helps you in whatever manner you need it to. Thanks for reading this as well as any future posts and don't hesitate to reach out with any questions you may have. |
AuthorViolet Baldwin is the founder and owner of Baldwin's Gallery which has been operating since 2012. Archives
April 2024
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