The Sweet Spot Between Excellence & Efficiency

In this episode, I discuss how excellence and efficiency can coexist in creative entrepreneurship.

Episode Highlights:

• Finding the balance between providing excellent service and maintaining profitability
• The difference between excellence and perfection
• Creating a "sweet spot" where excellence and efficiency intersect
• The importance of developing signature techniques and systems

Key Insights:

• Excellence means quality work without getting trapped in perfectionism
• Efficiency requires developing systems, signature techniques, and time management
• Tracking time helps establish fair pricing and improves profitability
• Batch processing tasks (client meetings, invoicing) increases productivity
• Developing expertise in a limited set of designs/offerings creates both quality and speed

Resources Mentioned:

• Machine quilting for beginners course
• YouTube live stream playlist for quilting shortcuts
• Pricing spreadsheet for quilters: stitchedbysusan.com/pricing

Sponsor:

• Cozy Earth bamboo sheets - Use code "MEASURE" for 40% off at cozyearth.com

Want to try free motion quilting but don't know where to start? Here's 3 simple steps to get going.

Transcript

Susan: 0:48

Welcome to season five of Measure Twice. Cut Once. This whole season is an exploration into behind the scenes of not just quilting, but building a creative business that truly lights you up. As someone who's navigated the exciting and sometimes bumpy world of turning a passion into a profession, I'm excited to pull back the curtain and share my own experiences. Some episodes will be just me delving into my personal journey. While others will feature guests who are also navigating the world of creative entrepreneurship. We'll explore the nitty gritty of building a creative business, the lessons learned and the unexpected challenges that come with transforming your craft into a thriving enterprise. And don't worry, I'm not leaving storytelling behind. Instead, I'll be weaving them into the conversations about what it takes to grow a business while staying true to your creative spirit. So whether you're dreaming of starting your own business, or you just love hearing about creative entrepreneurship, this season is for you.

1:48

Hey, quilters, do you have a pile of unfinished quilts as high as a North Dakota snowbank? And does the thought of machine quilting them feel just too overwhelming To even begin? Over the last 10 years, I've quilted more than 1400 client quilts, and I understand exactly the paralysis that's holding you back. My brand new machine quilting for beginners course cuts through that paralysis with practical tools and techniques for assessing and prepping and the actual quilting process for both domestic machines and long arms. There's no fancy tools or complicated methods. Just clear step-by-step guidance to get you quilting with confidence. You'll learn the exact methods I use to achieve high quality results. Find the direct link in the show notes or visit stitched by susan.com and follow the learn tab to start your quilting journey today.

Susan: 2:39

Every ethical entrepreneur, service provider and maker wants to provide excellence to their customers. Am I right? It's a matter of pride. It's a matter of fulfillment. It's a matter of personal satisfaction. But there's another side to this coin as self-starters, as entrepreneurs. We also need our venture, whatever it may be, to be profitable. It's also a matter of pride and fulfillment and personal satisfaction, and often it's quite essential for our bread and butter. It's our living. We count on it. So we have to be profitable in order to continue to be in fact sustainable. So can these two things coexist? Can excellence and efficiency be simultaneous? My opinion. Yes. Yes, they can. In fact, I'd like to show you how each can enhance the other. Merriam Webster defines excellence this way. The quality of being outstanding or extremely good, and notice excellence does not equal perfection. More on that later. What does excellence mean to you in your venture? Are you a writer and you want your work to be well formatted and grammatically correct and really engaging? Or maybe you're a custom cake baker and you need to deliver cakes that taste as good as they look and bring your customers back for the next special occasion. Or perhaps you're a machine quilter and you need your stitches to be beautiful, your patterns to be precise, and your finished quilts to be square and flat. Well, let me take you into the quilting studio for just a moment. Imagine you're standing in front of your longarm quilting machine, A customer's precious quilt top is loaded. It's ready. And mind you, this isn't just fabric, it's hours of their work, possibly family memories, definitely creative expression. What does excellence mean here? While it means good tension and even stitches, it means smooth curves and graceful lines. It absolutely means no puckers or tucks on the backing of the quilt. And it means that sometimes elusive flat and square quilt, when it's all said and done, it means design choices that enhance the piecing rather than competing with it. And it absolutely means a client who feels you did justice to their lovely quilt. Here's where many quilters get stuck. Excellence can become a trap. Have you ever spent eight hours on a custom quilting design for a quilt that maybe the client is paying you$150 to finish, or maybe you've ripped out and re quilted the same section four times because it wasn't perfect or stayed up until 2:00 AM finishing a quilt because you added extra details. The client didn't even request if I had a dime for every time a quilter said to me, but the quilt deserved it. That's reaching for perfection, and that's excellence without efficiency. And for an entrepreneur, it's a recipe for burnout and financial struggle. Let's think of excellence and efficiency for a minute as a Venn diagram. I don't know if you remember this from grade school math, but a Venn diagram is when you have two circles, two quantities, and somewhere they overlap, and where they overlap is this little melon shaped sweet spot. That's what we're talking about today, thinking of efficiency on one side. Excellence on the other side and the sweet spot where they overlap, where you're not too far into one or into the other, but a balancing of both. So, efficiency for a machine quilter might mean having some go-to designs that you can execute quickly and confidently. It might mean a consistent intake process and discussion with your client of any extras that are not readily visible, right? It might mean. Creating systems, repeatable methods for how you load and quilt and finish and bundle up and fold each project. It might mean tracking your time to know exactly how long different types of quilting can take you, and certainly it means getting to know your machine so that you can quickly troubleshoot issues and not get bogged down. Also, think for a minute about a quilter whose work you can spot maybe in your Instagram feed. It's kind of like going to a, an art gallery and recognizing an artist. We can do this for quilters too. And you know, it's that particular quilters because of that perfect ribbon candy motif that they use so often, or a very distinctive swirly fill. These signature designs aren't just beautiful, they're strategic. These quilters have developed motifs that flow naturally come easily from their hands designs They can stitch without hesitation or struggle or hardly having to think about it anymore. And what began as a favorite pattern? Has evolved into both their artistic signature and their efficiency secret weapon, and here's how their hands know that movement so well. They can achieve really beautiful results in half the time. That it might take to learn and execute a totally new design for them. And that is a brilliant intersection of artistry and frankly, business savvy. We talked a little earlier, briefly about a cake baker, another creative profession where the excellence slash efficiency balance is crucial. So let's think about that for a moment.'cause you might not be a quilter. You might have another occupation. And I want you to see how this could apply to you too. So think about this baker who maybe spends hours and hours on elaborate fondant decorations for every cake. Maybe they insist on making custom flavors for each and every order. Maybe they stay up all night perfecting sugar flowers. Their work might be superior, definitely excellent, but if they're selling celebration cakes for$150 each and spending 15 hours on each one, that's$10 an hour, less their costs. That's hardly sustainable, right? So an efficient baker would develop systems, they would perfect a few versatile base cake recipes that they could rely on. Every time, they wouldn't have to test them. They wouldn't have to risk failure. They could be confident in them. They might create some signature decorating techniques that they use over and over again with confidence and with speed. They might prep components like buttercream and cake layers in batches, and they might need to learn how to understand when a cake is beautifully finished versus when they're just draining time, adding details out of proportion to the time invested. So they need to learn to understand that sweet spot between excellence and efficiency, because efficiency without excellence on the other side of our pendulum swing is just rushing. It's just cutting corners. In quilters terms, it's it's slap dash work. It might have wrinkles on the backing. It might be a quilt that's not square when it's finished or even it came to you square and you've kind of wrung it out of shape. That's not work that's going to make you happy. That's definitely not work that will keep your clients coming back. And that's not what we're after. We are looking for that sweet spot, that magical middle of the Venn diagram. That's where you're doing excellent work within efficient systems. We talked a little about this earlier, what it might look like for a quilter. Let's elaborate a little bit and be specific about it for a quilter, how about you develop a collection of 12 edge to edge designs that you can execute beautifully and quickly? Now, this comes a little bit from my. Personal preference of quilting. Totally free motion. Edge to edge work. So what about I plan my time and I learn 12 different designs in a variety of tastes and styles, and I know them all and I know them all well, right? So I can become so skilled at these, or you can, that you can quilt them in your sleep practically. Your clients love them because they're gorgeous, because there's a broad variety and you love them because you can price them appropriately and complete them. In a timeframe that keeps your business happy. How about you batch produce some of your work? For example, maybe every client fills out the same intake form so that all the pertinent details are in one place, their phone number, the type, the color of thread that they want, um, the date that they would like it by all in one place. So you're never looking for that, right? Maybe your client meetings all happen on Monday mornings. Maybe your invoicing is all done Friday afternoon. In this way, you're using your time much more efficiently with a system, or maybe you simply look for tools. You intentionally look for tools and methods that make better use of your time while maintaining your high standard of excellence. You've perhaps, over the years, heard me talk about my method for loading quilts on the long arm. It has some significant shortcuts. And it's quite different from the standard method that most long arm machine brands recommend, but I have found ways over time to keep the excellence and to gain the time. For example, I can load a queen size quilt in under 10 minutes on my long arm, so that to me is a no brainer. I do love. To do a thing really well when I'm going to do it, but I also love, it's just in my nature to find a faster way to do it. In fact, just the other day, my sister was teasing me about this Trust you, she said to find a shortcut, and it's true. It's true that is just in my nature. I do a lot of live streams on YouTube and I have digital courses as well. And these all really highlight a lot of these efficiencies. If you'd like to see how I load my quilts and many other shortcuts, I have put a link for my live stream YouTube playlist in the show notes so that you can watch some of these things in action and it will be maybe more clear. But truly there's nothing that makes me happier. Then seeing or helping another quilter transform their process, watching them go from feeling a bit overwhelmed to confident and chiefly, it's a result of these efficiencies, these methods of getting things done, and the magic really starts happening when excellence and efficiency start feeding each other. The more efficient you become, the more quilts you can complete with excellence. The more excellent your reputation becomes, the more you can earn making your efficient systems even more profitable.

13:33

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Susan: 14:28

One of the concrete ways that I've been able to see my efficiencies grow is through tracking my time to establish my pricing. For the first many months of quilting for clients, I literally clocked with a stopwatch. All the time spent on a particular project, and I tried to track all of it. The time spent with the client, the time spent loading it, the time spent. Standing and thinking, what am I gonna quilt on this? That was all time invested in that project, and I had to know how much time I was spending in order to set a fair price. So then I worked backward from what I needed to earn per hour divided by how long it actually took. And then from there I established a rate per square inch of quilting. That's a very common method for machine quilters to charge by the square inch so that it's directly related to the size of the project. But the magic kind of happened here as time went on and I did more and more quilts and got smoother and more efficient in my processes. I went from loading a quilt in 20 minutes to 10 minutes. And troubleshooting time or unpicking time went down per quilt as my skill, as my knowledge increased. So my rate per square inch didn't change then, so therefore I'm now earning a better rate as I get faster and more efficient and more skilled. So that's on me. I can get a better rate of pay as I grow in skill and speed and my own inner character demands that I maintain my high level of excellence. So excellence and efficiency are not opposing forces, rather they're partners in your quilting business or whatever your entrepreneurial business is. One leads the other, follows and builds on the first one, and together they create something that is in fact beautiful and sustainable. What's one area in your business where you could achieve more efficiency without sacrificing excellence or where you could elevate your excellence without sacrificing efficiency? That sweet spot is just waiting for you to find it. if you are in fact a quilter for hire, I have created a really helpful spreadsheet for you. It's a practical way to think through your costs and assets and then to arrive at a price point for your quilting services. So if that's something that you are struggling with, take advantage of that spreadsheet that I've built out for you to help you. And you can do that by going to stitched by susan.com/pricing. Until next time, may your sorrows be patched and your joys be quilted.