For many of us in the saddle making or leatherworking industry, we are a shop of one or maybe two people. This business model has both its advantages and difficulties. Finding time to design the products, build the products and market the products all while keeping a handle on the administrative aspects of our business make for a challenging day to day.
While most of us can not afford to hire a full time office manager or marketing manager, we can use the wonderful technology that is right at our fingertips and virtually free when compared to adding staff.
In this article, I will show you the 7 essentials for a one man workshop in my opinion. There are definitely more apps, tools, and systems that can be put into place to help you accomplish your business goals, but this short list is what I would call the minimum to help you minimize the work involved in running a one man show.
1. Smart Phone
The first in our list is the smart phone. Whether you carry an iphone or Android, the majority of the population to date is carrying some sort of phone with internet capabilities. This little device, although sometimes very intrusive and time consuming, can be your best asset to help you run your small business.
At first glance, the infinite availability of apps for these phones is astonishing to say the least. You can download apps to give you access to all your marketing and social media channels so that you can monitor and update on the go. You can get apps to edit photos and even your website straight from your phone without having to sit down at a computer. You can access all your email addresses and contacts from this device.
Outside of being completely available and connected to your customers all day everyday (which can be hard on productivity at time), the camera available on these devices has brought a quality to our workshop photos that before was limited to only those who dabbled in photography along with their craft.
The ability to capture quality photos of your works in progress, completed works, and videos of work being done has opened our shops up to both interested consumers as well as fellow craftsmen through social media and these devices.
In my opinion the smartphone is one of the most essential tools for any one man craftsman looking to grow his/her business. Never before have we had so much marketing power and access to our customers wrapped up in a device small enough to fit in your pocket.
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This video shows how to dye the background of a leather floral pattern. We are dyeing the horse head floral piece from our July Tooling series for this tutorial. Yes, I am aware that it is September… I like to think this one is fashionably late.
I have had a ton of requests to do a video on how I put on a one piece saddle swell cover. This video is a quick rundown on how I put mine on. I am working on another video that will show the amount of prep work that goes into getting one of these put on successfully. I wanted to break it into two separate videos and this one is just putting it on and hopefully it will help to show how these are put on.