On Wearing Many Hats, Money & Working Solo

As a artist/crafter/small business owner/blogger, I work alone. It sounds kinds of nice, not answering to anyone, but overall, being an island is extremely exhausting.

Everything I need, from product concept, to design, to production/printing, to finishing, to packaging, to marketing...it's all just me. I'm lucky because internet access makes all of that a LOT easier than it was 20 some-odd years ago, but it's still a lot for one person to handle.

Social media is a wonderful tool. We can save money on advertising by being our own advertising! Saving money sounds great and all, but what you don't realize is how much harder your have to work to get people to notice you while keeping your own production up and costs low. Free time is pretty much non-exsistant when you're a one-person production and yet, I always feel like I should be doing more!

When someone does a lot of things the old saying is they "wear a lot of hats." I have a face for sunglasses, but hats? They never look right on me.

Silliness aside, I wear a LOT of hats. This is a little sample of my weekday schedule, it's been intense, but it's been paying off. I'm seeing a lot more page views and sales!

Current Big Project At Work

1. First there is my main job, which is an hour away from home, where I am the only employee, and I work 9-5 Mon-Fri (9-4 on Fridays right now in the summer with our new summer hours. Thank goodness.) I am a graphic designer and digital printing consultant, but being the only employee in the facility, I do everything from filing, to answering phones, to production, to being tech support and personal assistant handling their messages and stuff not pertaining to business. When we're slow it's manageable, but when we're busy it's exhausting in and of itself.
   
   
   Then I have...
   

Story Time: Don't Feel Obligated to Accept EVERY JOB

This one is a bit of a downer and mostly me venting about a nightmare job of mine I should have walked away from a long time ago. Let this be a precautionary tale to those of you starting freelance.

A group of dentists are making a directory for their 500+ member organization. The job comes to my print-shop-day-job, but we can't do the file creation part of it (they have ancient computers and no InDesign) so my boss sends them my way and suggests I freelance it to keep the job close as well as "help me out" with extra income. I'm saving for my own house so I do need the money so I talk to the clients. 

The client said they will provide an excel sheet with data about the members. I need to use that 500+ directory of data to make a book divided into three sections. 

1. Directory organized alphabetically by members' LAST NAMES
2. Directory of members organized by the COUNTY their practice is in
3. Directory of members organized by their SPECIALIZATION in the field 

I give them my hourly rate and let them know what I need to complete the job. They assure me they've done this before and that it'll be sent over very soon. 

I have better computers than my day job, and I’ve done data merging like this in InDesign before, it’s 500+ members, but it should be a simple data merge and a little tweaking here and there to get the layout to flow correctly. Should be easy enough, right?