Erin's advice for the week: Ask for help.

Pin It

If you're like me, asking other people for help - even just advice - feels like a huge imposition. It's something I rarely do if I can help it. What if the other person is annoyed, or offended, or thinks I'm rude? It occurs to me now that by nursing those worries, I'm judging that other person pretty harshly. People like to help each other! It's one of my favourite things about us. Sometimes, though, it seems so easy to forget that I can be the one asking for help. Is that pride, or pessimism, or just a misplaced sense of being considerate? Whatever it is, it's silly, and I'm working on getting past it.

Starting a business, especially for someone who tends to be more artistically-minded than pragmatic and number-savvy, requires the acquisition of many new things. Some of them are tangible, and others not so much. Here is the list I have been working on:

A serger
A dress form
A quality digital camera
Pictures for my original pitch
Information about online marketing
Advice on pricing items and predicting sales
Information about getting products into a store
Understanding of how to manipulate photos and layouts
A vocabulary that includes phrases like "minimum order," "wholesale," "overhead," etc.

Over and over this week I have found myself working up the nerve and "putting myself out there" to get these items ticked off my list. And you know what? It's not so bad after all. The response has been wonderful.

So thank you to Alex for the camera advice. Thank you to Helen for telling me about Artfire. Thank you to Mom for taking pictures, spreading the word, and figuring out how to "follow" a blog even before I did. Thank you Nikki for your indulgence and advice. Thank you to Megan and Aunt Jean for my first encouraging feedback. And thank you to Cathy and Emilie for your generous and unsought praise.

To everyone else, thank you for indulging me in this long and rather personal post. I won't do it too often - after all, this is about Business. Big, serious Business with a capital "B."

But don't you think any enterprise is the better for all the generous hands that touch it?