The party plan business that I bought into advertised that it had three income streams: demonstrations, classes and recruitment.
It was the classes idea that interested me most. I am a teacher, I love to teach and I love craft so what better way to combine the two loves?
I worked on some card/craft ideas and then advertised extensively in the local area and at the kids' playschool. One person expressed an interest.
One. Ok...one is better then none, so let's press onwards.
My first class was booked and the lady who came brought a friend and we had a lovely evening. I came out with $20 in my pocket and the ladies went home with three cards. The lady also booked a demonstration, so I felt that it had been a moderate success.
I signed up to do the training courses for the scrapbooking classes as in order to hold classes, you had to be "qualified" and have the party plan's certification.
The two days of classes were a total disaster on several levels. The woman who held the class made fun of my scrpabooking album, the layouts that I had already done and treated me as really weird as I had a number of single page LOs. Apparently all legitimate layouts are double page spreads. Who knew?
The papers that we had to use were horrific...the colour schemes very unattractive and uninspiring. I hated the LOs that I made at those classes and to this day cannot bear to look at them. The common cry of all these craft based things is that "anyone can do it". I discovered at those training days that, no, actually, everyone cannot do it and I am one of the everyones.
The second day was worse than the first and I ended up crying all the way home as my LOs were awful and I'd had two days of being laughed at and picked on. To make matters worse, spending two days hunched over a craft table had aggravated an old back injury and 24 hours after the last class ended I was flat on my back and unable to move without agony.
When I advertised my new scrapbooking classes, one person came. She signed up for Scrapbooking 1 which lasted 6 weeks, and then signed up for Scrapbooking 2...another 6 weeks. It was not an unenjoyable experience, but I felt acutely embarrassed at the end of each lesson as the whole idea behind having the classes is to encourage people to buy more product. This lady worked at a low paying job and I really felt bad encouraging her to spend money that she really didn't have on products that she didn't really need.
Despite trying hard at advertising, no-one seemed to want to do craft classes. I held a Hostess Night and invited everyone from my contact list. About eight people came and we had a pretty good night, but there were no bookings for demonstrations or craft classes after it and I had hit an impasse.
My scrapbooking lady booked a demonstration and it was a successful one, except that I had to travel more than 20 km to get to her house and all the profits got eaten up in products used and petrol and postage.
I was determined to get the classes off the ground and so did another round of training, this time in cardmaking. I liked making the cards and of all the things I made while working with this business, it is those cards of which I am proud.
Once again, I advertised, but no-one was interested. I figured it must have been me and spent hours thinking about how to do things differently and how to get these classes going.
It never once occurred to me that the problem lay in the business model, but more about that in the next instalment.
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