It’s just one dollar at a time to build your business, right?

You may have noticed that I’m not a jewelry business coach who promises you a million dollars, or fame and fortune.

It is both the benefit and the curse of experience on my part – I’ve simply seen too much. We all want that instant money, but the truth of building a business is that it happens one dollar at a time – it takes time.

And of course, if you know me by now, then you know that the way to building those dollars is to have a plan and a strategy to get to your goals. I can promise that this is much better than flailing your way to that pile of money.

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What many business owners have in common, and where they differ

After years of both coaching and teaching business owners, there are some commonalities that jump out at me, and one project I’m working on over the next year will be to create composite stories (like case studies, but without revealing identifying details) of businesses that share traits. Those traits could be the stage they are at, the goals they have, the genre they work in, or their baseline financial needs.

Case Studies of Two Jewelry Business Owners

Let’s look at a couple of business studies that I’ve started on – compiled from a variety of experiences (some might even be my own!).

Case study one – A jewelry business is currently at $450,000 annual revenue.

This business owner:

• Feels like they are barely scraping by, each month money is going out and hardly any is sticking around.

• Wants to scale to 7 figures, but isn’t sure how they’ll get there.

• Is following a plan they put in place 3 years ago, but hasn’t reassessed since then.

Case study two – A jewelry business currently at $90K annual revenue.

This business owner:

• Is so close to crossing that threshold from five figures to six.

• Feels like they are trying everything, but are also drowning in tasks.

• Doesn’t feel like they understand what it takes to cross that threshold.

With jewelry business owner number one – what do they need?

An assessment. A ruthless assessment of their expenses, and a review of which expenses are actually creating an ROI. Lots of businesses start to scale and spend money because they are too busy to think and gain perspective, but that’s exactly what this owner needs to do before making any other decisions.

Businesses that scale to this level are what many of us want, but it also comes with more costs. Getting to this kind of revenue almost always means a need to hire – production help, sales help, accounting help. You just need more bodies to make the jewelry and to make the jewelry sell at this kind of volume.

Case study two – what does this jewelry business owner need?

There are a lot of possibilities at this stage, but something that I have seen is a need for new skills. That skill could be a deeper understanding of their eCommerce sales. It could mean a new jewelry skill to be able to offer more to their consumers – to continue to surprise and delight their base. It could also mean that it’s time (in spite of high gold prices) to introduce a wedding and engagement collection, or add some gold into their collection to increase revenue.

At this stage, a stage I have been at, a stage that many of you have likely been at, you’ll need a growth spurt, but one that you create for yourself. This means taking on more business skills and more jewelry skills.

In both cases, the answers to what these business owners need are different because these are businesses at different stages.

How to add one more dollar at a time to your jewelry business

The good news is that for both of these business owners, the work required to move up in revenue and profit is not as much as you would think. Both could make small changes, move the needle just a little and still see big gains.

In case study one, a small shift in their sales strategy with a modest goal – in this case increasing eCommerce by 5% – would add more profit, and increase cash flow enough to help them feel caught up.

This can be done by making lots of consumer experience changes – more model shot photos, better language, doing tests and web audits, and ensuring that the web experience matches customer expectations. A 5% increase in eCommerce can be done for very little spend except  time.

In case study two, the designer could introduce five more gold pieces to their collection, and up their skills by learning a new-to-them stone setting technique. More gold pieces will increase both revenue and profit, open up their customer base to a new audience, and more stone setting could open them up to custom projects. This plan has the potential to add 5% more revenue for very little investment of either time or money. The potential here is to get them a step closer to their goal of making more than $100K a year in revenue.

Both designers need perspective, and both need different guidance based on where they were in their businesses at that point in time.

Different businesses are different, ya know.

This is when I should drop in that old saw about “not comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle” but it is true! If you aren’t at your goals yet, if your business isn’t moving in the direction that you think it SHOULD move in, and if you are looking at other more “successful” businesses, just know that each one of you has a goal you want to attain and haven’t yet, a plan you need to revisit, or changes you can make to move yourself one step closer.

You’ve got this.