january and february

january and february are so great.....

..starting with making resolutions for the coming year..

.a good time to look back on the past year and take lots of notes, about all the good thngs and also what went wrong , what we could change..

..i try for lots of talk about the year and what to do different.....dh gets all our numbers out...with charts!!! so nice...and lots of good discussions with him...

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i try to get everybodies input, from my favorite discussion place, country busines, to dh and jon and whoever will talk about business with me.

...my feeling for the year is ...its going to be tough so i want to be real careful and get some good things going..

and keep our prices as low as posssible......

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..this year we .......

.. actually reset lots of areas of the store...i so believe in this...but its a lot of work...and often it doesnt get done....but this year we did better than usual...fluffed the foo foo...went deep into key west, complertelly changed the antique dishes, have great plans for the garden gazing balls and fountains...

..... did the 80/20 thing, to help figure out what to carry.. and then studied the chicago gift show website and then went to chicago and bought like crazy....hopefully lots of things the buyers will like..

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......finally got the blog thing going... in january i really had the time to go thru the horrible learning parts...im still at a loss on lots of parts of this...but its kind of perfect for me...lots of little parts that i can do in snippets of time....my dil...terri...set the 2 blogs up in just a few minutes... amazing!!! now im kind of hooked...and hoping to get some good content on them....the other one is http://www.magpiecottage.blogspot.com

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.....also have worked on the wholesale part of our business...mainly making flyers and direct mail..... we have the right stuff, imho, but we are in the economically depressed cornbelt...and dont plan on moving....we live in a woods and have the grandkids across the street..and an established 28 yr store still going strong, .so somehow we have to keep getting buyers to come to us....

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also found some new places on the internet.

.new chat, new forums, new ideas,

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business and weather has been horrible for most of january..

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.. but im happy with all the stuff ive gotten done..

.and im definitely trying to stay hopeful for the spring and the new year....