Each month in the Longarm League membership, we discuss a topic relevant to longarm quilting and business. This month, we are bringing to the forefront various organizations and resources that exist to help small business owners. These are organizations that may offer business consulting, webinars and other online courses, and in some cases mentorship. 

SBDC

The Small Business Development Center (SBDC) provides free business consulting and at-cost or low-cost training to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit organizations. The SBDC has been around since 1975, but its services have evolved over time as technology has changed the way people do business today. As a result of COVID, webinars, Zoom calls, and other online learning platforms have revolutionized the way we are able to learn regardless of our locale.

We chatted with Rebecca Mixson of the SBDC with the University of Georgia. Rebecca is a business consultant who works with business owners in all stages of business—...

The first question I'm going to ask is: Are you making it easy for quilters to hire you for longarm quilting services? What might be holding them back? How can we overcome objections to hiring you?

I recently asked my Instagram audience from my @threadedquilting account: If you're a quilter who has never hired a longarm quilter, why not?

I left the question open-ended and collected responses for the 24 hours the Instagram Story was live. I got some interesting responses!

The top reason given was that the quilter wanted to do it all themselves from start to finish. I was actually surprised that this reason ended up being the top response! But I also understand this thinking. Personally, I fall within the same category. I've never hired a longarm quilter because I have always really liked the quilting process myself and wouldn't want to "outsource" my favorite part!

The remaining reasons for not hiring a longarm quilter were varied but fell into another nine categories.

This is where I want...

Early on, when we were just starting to offer our Rookie Season course, we had a student mention that she did not have to pay sales tax on her longarm machine because she had a business with an EIN already established when she bought it.

Cue the record scratch! 

I don't remember ALL the details of buying my longarm machine (it had been nine years prior), but I definitely remember paying sales tax on it. I would have had a sales tax permit at the time, too, I just didn't realize I could've used it to get an exemption on paying sales tax in my state. I bought my machine used without a computer, so this would have "only" been a savings of ~$700, but STILL! That money could have been put to good use applied to other start-up costs. 

The more I started asking around within the Longarm League community, the more I realized that this is a legitimate thing and available to more of us than I realized! I even called a machine manufacturer to discuss, just to make sure it was valid and legal. :)

It d...

Megan Ellinger—a member of the Longarm League—asked if she could interview me for her YouTube channel, and I heartily agreed! Her YouTube channel and business name is Tiny Orchard Quilts.

Most of our members provide longarm quilting services to clients, so I was intrigued about her business model as it's a bit more "non-traditional". Naturally, I asked if I could also flip the tables and interview her for a behind-the-scenes look at her business. She agreed and we had so much fun having two back-to-back and totally different conversations about quilting and the business of quilting! 

The interview that we recorded for her channel went live last week, you can watch it here. We covered a lot of ground! Her audience had a lot of great questions about what it's like working with a longarm quilter such as typical costs and turnaround times, and we talked about the League itself, including our Rookie Season course. Megan even did the work of breaking our interview out into chapters so you can...

From a longarm quilter's perspective, there can be a lot of fear and anxiety in what to charge clients, especially if you are just starting a business. I was right there, too, especially at the beginning of my journey.

I just looked back at some of my invoices before I got my longarm. I started taking on miscellaneous sewing projects in 2007, and I charged someone $120 for making a twin quilt on my home sewing machine. This project would have required me to buy the fabric, batting, and thread, baste the layers on my kitchen floor with a lot of safety pins, free motion quilt it through the small throat space, trim, make and apply the binding... the whole shebang. A small saving grace is that it was a whole cloth quilt (no extra piecing required) made with solid fabrics (less expensive than some designer prints) with a simple meander requested as the quilting motif. The project cost me probably around $60 in materials (buying retail at the store with no wholesale accounts), which would...

I was so honored to be a guest on Elizabeth Chappell's podcast called Craft to Career. Listen to the episode here.

Maybe this makes me a monster, but I really liked this episode! Am I allowed to say that allowed without sounding braggy? There was a time where it made me really uncomfortable to hear a recording of my own voice, but I guess I'm over that now that I'm 40. 😜 I really liked the questions Elizabeth asked and how the conversation flowed.

As she mentioned in the episode, we met each other at QuiltCon in Austin, Texas, in February of 2020—right before the world shut down.  At that point, I knew that we had memberships in common, so I immediately struck up a conversation. I had just started mine not quite 6 months prior and I was obsessed with trying to improve and grow the Longarm League (still am!). She had started the Quilters Candy digital membership by then, too, and so we quickly found ourselves comparing and contrasting our offerings, at one point trying to find a quiet...

Should you offer Custom T-shirt Quilt Services?

You have a longarm quilting business and someone asks you to make them a t-shirt quilt. What do you say?! 

Maybe you love tshirt quilts? Maybe you hate them. 😬 Feelings aside (but really, I would never tell you to put your feelings aside), does it make financial sense to add this service to your menu of offerings as a longarm quilting business?

Custom quilts or custom quilting can mean different things in different contexts. For the sake of this conversation, I mean "custom" in a start-to-finish way with specific materials (t-shirts) provided by the client. Custom here does not refer to a specialized kind of layout or that areas of longarm quilting are specific to certain areas of the quilt.  

I asked Longarm League member Kristen Lee of Mashe Modern for her perspective. Watch a clip from our call in the video player above.

Early on, when her hobby was just starting to morph into a business, Kristen made custom quilts for people. Then,...

'Business Builders' are members that have already started their longarm quilting business but are looking for ways to optimize their systems or grow their client base.

On the third Wednesday of each month, our Business Builders meet for a Group Call. We meet via Zoom so that it's interactive, but then we also record the calls so that anyone who is unable to attend the live meeting can watch later. Anyone who joins the Longarm League at the Business Builder level can access our whole library of previously published lessons and recorded calls. 

Today was our one year anniversary of adding the Group Call feature. In the last year, we've covered the following topics:

• easing the fullness of a quilt
• additional income streams
• cloud-based accounting
• Profit First
• creating a brand
• collaborating with designers
• search engine optimization (SEO) for beginners
• small business taxes
• running multiple longarm machines
• common Instagram mistakes
• Sew Tites Magnum magnets and other loading methods
...