Waiting for the glue to dry
A few weeks ago, some friends and I put together a Maker's Market as a fundraiser.
My contribution was to make 13 cutting boards to sell and donate the profit to our animal welfare charity.
I've made a lot of cutting boards in my short woodworking journey, but I've never made them in batches.
The process is pretty simple...
One thing I learned about making a lot of cutting boards at one time is you spend half your time just waiting for the glue to dry.
Since I only have clamps to glue up 5 boards at a time, I realized I could get five boards glued, and use the drying time to do other steps on a second batch of boards.
Still, it took way longer to get those boards done than I expected. Sanding and glue drying took up 80% of the time to produce a board.
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It got me thinking about how much time we spend in business waiting for the proverbial glue to dry.
I recently saw a graphic that showed it takes, on average, 30 days for an email newsletter to generate any income.
It takes almost 120 days for a blog post to generate any income. Long-form video takes about 40 days.
Given those long wait times, it makes sense to produce your content in batches and get other work done while you're waiting for results from it.
It also means that you need to reset your expectations for how long it will take to see results from your content.
You can't just drop some content and expect sales to start flowing in. You'll need another strategy to help with short-term cash flow.
Here's my question for you this week: what are you doing to balance your long- and short-term cash flow so you're bringing in sales consistently?
PS: I'm making another batch of cutting boards for a fundraiser in May. If you like info on pre-purchasing a board, reply to this email. I'll send you details about the boards and the charity they benefit. Just so you know, boards are $95 plus $10 shipping.