Kickstart a Kickass Creative Business

2018 is upon us, and ‘tis the season to either make or break your resolutions. Will this year finally be the time for you to push yourself, commit (or re-commit) to your goals, take charge of your creative business, and make 2018 your best year yet?

If all of these sound like music to your ears, then you’ll want to join the [MEGA Planning Day for Makers, an exciting workshop made specifically for creatives, where you can gain very valuable strategies and insights on how to launch or grow your creative handmade business. It’s going to be a day of passion and energy intertwined, and a great opportunity to meet new like-minded people (and look-out for the perfect accountability partner, too!)

In this post, we have a quick chat with the event organiser, and a successful creative entrepreneur herself, Kelli Vizzari, to talk about her own start, pieces of advice that she will always swear by, and why you shouldn’t miss February 17th.

What sparked the idea of starting The Make It Collective?

After many years working on my own as a felt maker, and meeting so many creative people at local craft markets, I wanted to somehow create a collective that brought us all together for support, collaboration and friendship.

To what do you attribute your success in the business?

There is no doubt that it takes a lot of hard work, but also there are two major things that I believe helped move my business forward:

1. Continually seeking new learning opportunities. There is always something you don’t know, so pushing myself to learn more even if it’s not my window of expertise is crucial.

2. Learning to pivot and move to where the opportunities are. My business looks very different now to the one I started in March 2015!

What made you decide to teach about running a creative handmade business?

Over the past two and half years, I have worked with HUNDREDS of makers - helping to create more exposure for them and to get their products in front of more customers. These are amazing creative women, but there is the business side of running a creative enterprise, and sometimes all makers want to do is ‘make’.

I want to create a space where they can learn about all the things that go with running a small business, and make a success out of it too!

If you had one piece of advice to give to yourself when you were just starting out, what would it be?

1. Don’t be so hard on yourself.
2. Things don’t need to be perfect
3. Failure is the best learning experience.

Oops, sorry that’s 3!

Finally, why is the MEGA Planning Day an event not to be missed?

We have created a day just for makers to focus on planning their goals for the year. This is a dedicated day for writing these goals down and making important decisions. Not only this, but you get to join our private Facebook community for some accountability throughout the year. Because really, who wants to do this alone?