It’s been a while (four years!) since I’ve had the time or the energy to take my small hobby business seriously enough to be an actual business… but the stars are aligning again and it’s time to break out the spreadsheets!

I’m submitting all of my official paperwork tomorrow and will be a real business again as of June 1st.

Being a business means doing things for realz, even if it’s only part-time realz.

One thing I always promise to do (but never really manage) is to properly track expenses and time. Which is why I’ve spent this long weekend working with the small army of spreadsheets.

This time, nothing is going on Etsy without the data to back it up!

Something Old and Something New

The one thing that will be much different this time is that I will no longer be actively looking for custom orders. There will be finished items and paint-your-own kits, but I won’t have listings for custom paint jobs for model horses or magnets (or custom story prompts).

(I will be offering a few open Fat Animal magnet slots to my Instagram and Facebook followers, but I’m not sure when or how many.)

I’m going to be focusing in on standardizing the process of creating my artwork so I can try and get costs (and paint times) to a predictable pattern. Once I know how much time and effort it takes, I should be able to open the custom slots back up with accurate timelines and pricing.

Another big change is that the story prompt books have moved to Kindle Unlimited. To replace them, I’m working on a series of writing prompt exercises PDFs. These will focus on getting your story out of your head and onto paper. These are meant to be printed out and written/drawn on, instead of read on a Kindle.

Do All The Things! …Just Slowly

I took down all of the items in the Etsy store a little earlier in the year when it looked like I was going to have to put aside all of my hobbies for a while. Since that’s no longer the case (thank goodness!) I have started slowly renewing them.

You should see all of the old listings popping up again in the next week or so, as well as lots of items that I finished and never listed. I have a LOT of things hiding in the sidelines so this should be fun! 🙂

You can expect the new-new items to show up towards the end of June. These will include the new sculpts of the Fat Ponies, Fat Pegasus, Fat Unicorns and maybe the Fat Fancy Unicorns.

…But not until I have the spreadsheets to back up the time and materials! 😉