Leah Ashley Jewelry Designs Creates Stunning Custom Jewelry

(Me and my dog. Photo by Bosley Creative.)

My dear husband suggested that I write a post about all of the things I’ve learned while running my own business. So here goes the tell all of all of my dark secrets…

I am not an outgoing person by nature. I am shy and practical, not a sales person. When clients send an inquiry via my website, I personally respond to every single (legitimate) inquiry that comes in. I have had to really deal with my fear of talking to strangers (I think my parents did too good of a job when I was little on that one.) I try to respond to every inquiry that comes in as soon as I get it in my email box. Some days I have a lot of trouble with that because the idea of sending an email to a stranger is too much to handle at that moment. I’ve learned that if I am not in the mood right away to send an email back, I can put the email aside for awhile and work on building myself up to feeling up to it. Once the conversation gets going with a client, that fear goes away and I look forward to the correspondence.

The practical part of my personality can also be a hindrance to my business. I don’t like to “sell” people jewelry. I create a great product. If you want to buy it, great, if you don’t, that’s cool too. I don’t do sales and discounts because I’m never going to charge a client an outrageous price just so I can discount it. All of the prices I give are hard prices, bottom line, that’s it. This is not how sales people do it. If you go to a jewelry store, if you stay there long enough, they will keep dropping the price and dropping the price until they get to the price that I would have given initially. I don’t like playing the games. Sometimes, I think that means I make fewer sales. I also think that people usually do end up appreciating my way of doing things more eventually so I am not working on changing my blunt honesty.

And the biggest reason for writing this blog post: As far as pricing, I will never go back on what I said the first time. I recently did a job for a client where I made a mistake on the pricing. That client will never know that that mistake was made. If I make even $5 on that piece I will be lucky. I’d much rather lose money on one piece and have a happy client than go back to someone and tell them they need to pay me more because I made a mistake. I will also never pad other clients’ prices to make up for the loss on a different piece. A mistake is a mistake and you learn from it and move forward.

Zappos recently made a major pricing mistake that cost them over 1 million dollars. See the whole story here. Even though the chances of me making a mistake worth that much money are slim, I think the principal is the important part. I am obviously a for profit company and my goal is to make enough money to support myself but I will not do that by pissing off my clients.

In the last year or so, the most important thing I’ve learned is that I can run my company how it works for me. I can pull from the good things I see other companies doing and learn from what they have done wrong. In the end, what really matters is if I am happy doing what I am doing.