If you’ve been following me on YouTube or on the blog for a while then you know that I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. To me they’re ridiculous. New Year’s resolutions are frequently broken leaving the resolver guilt ridden. We need less to make us feel guilty.
I am a big believer in setting goals though and a new year is always a good time to take stock of what’s happened in the past year and evaluate where I want to go.
My Goals for 2023
The past few months have found me angsting over my goals for the new year. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve felt completely unmoored.
Part of the reason for feeling a drift has been my change of attitude on events like Junk Bonanza (JB) which were always cornerstones of my selling year. 2022 wasn’t good for JB. That made me re-evaluate if I was going to attend JB in 2023. If not, was I going to do any pop-up sales?
The turn in the economy in 2022 forced me to get a “real job” which has cut into my ability to juggle all the aspects of my business. There’s a lot of moving parts to what I do between 2 brick and mortar shops, an online store, a blog, and a YouTube channel. So do I need to scale back on some of these?
So many questions and I’m the only person who can answer them. Unfortunately, as an entrepreneur you are wholly responsible for making all choices.
I’m restless. That’s always an interesting place to be. Restlessness opens doors for possibilities. At the same time, endless possibilities is an overwhelming and slightly scary place to be. There is no “right” way to go at this point. It’s about testing the waters and trying new things.
Yep, my anxiety just spiked.
Nevertheless, it’s time to set some goals!
More pop up sales
Just because JB was a bust doesn’t mean I’m off the hook as far as pop up sales go. I’m in the process of researching other sales for 2023. I’m looking at a few in different parts of the state including some closer to home. I don’t know yet how many sales I’ll do, hopefully at least two. It’s always nerve wracking going to a new sale. We all know how the sale in Saint Cloud went.
Scale back on booth spaces
At the moment, I have two booth spaces that I’m filling and maintaining. It’s been difficult but necessary before I moved to my new large booth space. Right now I have no guarantee that I’ll be able to keep my new booth (I’ve taken over for another vendor) but if I am able to keep it then I would like to only have the one space. It would make it easier to stay on top of everything.
Weekly blog posts
I need to be better at creating posts for this blog. For a large part of 2022 the blog went dormant. I suspect because I had been given advice that I HAD to create two posts per week which I did for a long time until I became burnt out. When I hit the wall I just stopped writing. That wasn’t fair to you dear reader. So now I’m committed to one post per week. That for me is manageable (I think).
Double down on video
Video is king all over the internet. Short form videos like those on TikTok are fast over taking long videos but I’m again behind on this trend. To be honest I couldn’t wrap my brain around what I could do for a video in one minute or less. It’s time to sort it out.
More quality videos
For my YouTube channel I would like to produce better quality videos. At least one quality video per week to go along with the daily vlogs.
Regular online etsy/ebay postings
I would like to sell more online. Again, I hit a wall with the amount of posting I was doing. I was listing daily for over a year. Then when Etsy started having issues in 2022 I stopped posting and tried moving to eBay which ended up being a bad decision. My sales went to nothing when I switched to eBay. When I went back to Etsy sales picked up again. As annoying as Etsy is, at the moment I don’t have an alternative that works for me.
My Latest Etsy Listings
Live sale online
Maybe this will be the alternative. I was approved to sell on online selling app Whatnot, but I didn’t do anything with it. I’ll be honest here; it intimidates me a little. It’s new and I had a lot going on at that time.
Planning
This is my #1 goal. To plan more and “seat of my pants” I’ve already started planning my December posts and videos for next year and I’m looking ahead to other months. I’m keeping a calendar and notebook to track all the moving parts of my business and personal life.
Those are my goals for now. I’ve been thinking about them for some time, but that doesn’t mean they won’t shift and change as the year progresses. As of now I look at them and feel overwhelmed. If I try to look at them all at once I know I’ll want to run and hide. But if I take each one day to day and chunk those goals into small steps then I start to believe I can accomplish them. Belief is the hardest part.
