The Business Plan for 2012

Things CHANGE so rapidly! Since we started Brass Hammer Designs in late 2011, we've learned that there is a lot of "social media stuff" out there that people have no idea about. Some people know how to use it and others have no clue. Too many times, we, ourselves, have fallen into the "no clue" category as well. Shoot.... we just learned that when you "follow" a blog, that means that at the bottom of your blog home page, you will have a newsfeed of the latest posts from the people you follow and a preview of their posts. Who knew?! LOL! It's all rapidly changing, so we need to figure out our plan or we'll be left behind! Five years ago, Facebook was the latest craze and MySpace about 10 years ago. Now there's Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and who the hell knows what else. Every time we turn around, someone is asking one of us if we're putting things on Craig's List, Etsy and so many other web-based selling lists. And I just had a friend tell me how great Pinterest would be for our DoItYourself series we want to eventually do on the blog. It's so early in the stages for us that we haven't sold anything and haven't built up any significant inventory to do anything with it. We're still learning a ton, and we're so thankful for all of you telling us what potential places we should be tapping into. Please NEVER STOP SHARING your resources!

It's craziness and making a business and marketing plan can, alone, be a daunting task!  We've attempted to make one, so that we do not get too overwhelmed with the flutter of information that you all have shared. We thought it'd be good to share it here with you. Brass Hammer Designs is trying to do this the "right way", which might seem slow to others. We're taking our time though because we want to make this part of our retirement plan when we move to "Our Island". And it can take years to build a business anyway, so we know we have time. Hopefully the below list though will take us about a year. And then we can re-evaluate our plan for our next set of stages.

• We started a webpage which we are still working on and learning how to manage: Brass Hammer Designs Web Page.
• We have a Facebook page that we handle pretty well, but are learning how to be more active and "in your face": Brass Hammer Designs Facebook Page
• We are trying to blog here once a week to keep your interest! (Please follow the blog if you don't already!)
• Jen is tweeting some about it - feel free to follow her: Proud_Boiler
• We are following small businesses, artists and other ADD posters on their respective social media outlets including blogs, Facebook pages and twitter accounts. And we're learning from their experiences with how to market, where to find material resources and what business tools work best (like Evernote and Google Calendars, etc).
• We're buying better tools so that we can build an inventory efficiently.
• We have a goal to build the inventory to the level that we can sell product at the local festivals and get exposure locally.
• We are trying to support local and small businesses any way we can through buying products, negotiating, bartering, advertising each others' businesses, etc. 
• Let's face it - Word of Mouth is one of the best methods, so we're trying to use that to the best of our ability as well.

So there's the plan - written out all pretty and sweet. I think that it looks pretty good, but it will probably be tweaked through the year. For now, this is what we're attempting to do in order to build our success story for the ultimate end goal of owning BHD on a street on our Island.

Until Next time.....