So I’ve made the announcement that I’m going to quit my job (to you at least!)–but please don’t think that I’m just going to dilly-dally around all day after I do so. My plans are much more grandiose than that

Currently, I sell jewelry and handmade items on eBay, Amazon.com Marketplace and Fulfillment By Amazon, and Etsy (I use the term sell pretty loosely for the Etsy gig right now since I’ve only made 1 sale so far!), and run two additional blogs: FFT (I used to have the actual blog name/link here but had to remove it because folks at work started to find out that I have that site…which can easily be linked back to this site…which could potentially get me fired before the 3 years are up! and Holiday Craft Projects.  With an active 4-year old and all of my side projects, my days (and nights) are pretty packed right now–and probably will be for a long time!

So here’s my plan:  Make these side projects profitable enough to support myself and my son!

Obviously, a lot of my crafting, jewelry-making, and blogging is done in the early morning and late at night.  With minimal time to spare, I feel that being uber-organized in the next 3 years is going to be vital to my success.

Since this is still the early stages, I can be a bit more “high level” with my goals, but I’m going to go ahead and brainstorm on some of the goals that I need to achieve in the near future:

Done! Begin advertising on Holiday Craft Projects and this blog – I have advertising on FFT currently.  I advertise for Google Ads, Amazon.com, Alice.com, eBates, and several individual companies on FFT.  What I do not, and will not advertise for is companies that I do not personally trust and would not personally deal with.  I feel that is unethical and would not compromise myself or my readers in that manner.

Begin advertising through my RSS feeds for all of my blogs using GoogeAds for feeds – This *should* be turned on as of this blog entry for 3yearplan, but I honestly won’t know until I post this It is definitely not working for FFT though (What am I doing wrong?! Does it just take time to go live?! EEK!)

Get back to listing daily on Etsy – I took a bit of a break here.  This was actually the result of my frustration with the poor quality of my photos.  Jewelry is apparently incredibly difficult to photograph without proper lighting and no matter how amazing the piece looked in front of me, I couldn’t get past the horrible quality of the pictures.  I currently have at least 20 new pieces just waiting to be posted but I cannot get the photos to show the quality of the items! Which leads me to my next goal:

Done! Build a light box for photographing jewelry – According to everything that I have read, this is the key ingredient that I am missing in my pictures.  I’m looking at several plans right now and I’ll let you know what I come up with soon!

Obtain a business license – Yup.  It’s time.  I haven’t earned enough yet from my side projects to require that I do so, but clearly, I plan to.

Focus on Holiday Craft Projects more – I haven’t touched it in a while.  It’s a great domain name, I have great ideas for it; I’ve just been short on time lately.

Cut costs and stockpile money – Realizing that I am planning to cut off my family’s main source of income in 2013 and that I may need a cushion to live off of to get this thing going,  I need to cut my costs, stockpile cash, and get prepared.  Again, I have to make this leap responsibly.  This is something that I have already been agressively focusing on and I will discuss further in future posts.

Eliminate Debt - Again, this is something that I have aggressively focused on recently and I currently have only 2 debts besides my mortgage – my car payment and a 401K loan that I took out to cover the costs associated with my divorce and subsequent custody battle.  I will discuss my plan of action for this goal soon as well.

Organize and consolidate my office/craft rooms – Yes.  I said rooms.  Currently, 2 of the 4 bedrooms in my house are occupied with my office and art supplies.  In order to be more productive I need to get these rooms completely organized and efficient–and in the interest of seeming like a more gracious host, I need to convert one of these rooms into a guest room (with supply storage, of course!).

Done! Upgrade my existing blogs: FFT and Holiday Craft Projects are both on a very very old version of Wordpress that apparently has some vulerabilities and lacks the functionality of the newest version.  This blog is on the newest version and I have to tell you, the back end of it ROCKS compared to the old versions!

Aggressively train my replacement for my current job - I truly believe in the mission of the company that I currently work for–it’s just not my dream.  The company has been very very good to me and I absolutely will not leave them in a tough spot without someone to fill my shoes.  The position I hold is a role that I created and developed.  Thankfully, I have an excellent staff that will just need a bit of grooming and one of them will definitely be ready to take my spot when I leave.

That’s the plan.  I’ll let you know when I think of more