An Open Letter to My Readers

It’s been a while since I wrote something non-technical and straight from my heart, so I thought I’d do that today. We’ve officially kick-started our fourth year of Clothed In Scarlet! Hurray! 🙂

When the website was launched in 2013, I was a content, full-time work at home mom. My husband had a regular (albeit, stressful) job that required him to travel for a few months, but we made it work.

Early last year, we took the plunge and decided to start our own business. It has pretty much shaken me out of my comfort zone and kept me clinging to God every step of the way.

We started our business with a very limited capital but we’ve seen it grow considerably over the past year. My transition from a work at home mom to working mom took almost a year. Some days are better than others, but it’s constant work to maintain the delicate balance between different aspects of running a business.

Business development tasks and planning strategies for various products takes time. While we do have a team to work on different projects, I need to train them, assign tasks and monitor their work. Everything goes through me, so it takes up a lot of my time.

All this to say, it’s been a challenge to balance my work projects and the ideas I’ve been wanting to implement on Clothed In Scarlet. I love creating content for Clothed In Scarlet, coming up with article ideas and designing freebies. But the time crunch is real.

Time and again, I’ve had to take a step back and reexamine my priorities. Right now, my family and paying clients require most of my attention. I need to uphold my integrity and deliver what I’ve promised them.

I know this is just a season, and I’m trying to embrace it the best I can. I could attempt to do more, but I’m choosing not to. This is not because I don’t care about you here at Clothed In Scarlet. But there are constraints that delay the execution of ideas that I have for this site.

Clothed In Scarlet is, in a way, my ministry. By God’s grace, I’ve been able to share as much of my knowledge as I can here on the site. I have also been able to give away most of the resources I’ve created for free. I’ve gotten a lot of guidelines from God on how to run this website, and so far I’ve been able to keep it up.

At the same time, Clothed In Scarlet does have a running cost. We are thinking of ways to keep the site going smoothly and offer more helpful resources in the days to come. There needs to be some way to support the operational costs of Clothed In Scarlet.

I’m in the process of developing a few inspirational resources that you’ll find useful, which will at the same time, also give us more margin, so we can do more through this ministry. I’m also working on streamining all content here and making the website more functional and user-friendly.

There is tons of content here on the site that most people aren’t even aware of. I hope to soon establish a membership portal where you’ll have organized access to all the content you need as you try to set up and grow your online business.

So, this is where we stand now.

This community has been a great support to me. It’s become an integral part of who I am and what I hope to accomplish. I want to provide more resources, but I do need a team and the right tools to get it going. That is what I’m envisioning for CIS.

We had a vision to take it forward, but life happened and priorities needed to be reset. For now, I’m going to focus on getting systems in place and fine-tuning some processes, so things move ahead smoothly.

This has been a raw and honest post, sharing my struggles and my journey with you. But I do want to leave behind some advice – from one business owner to another…

As an entrepreneur, different seasons will come and go. There will be times when life is looking up and your business will flourish. But you will also face seasons when you feel stuck and inundated with work, yet your efforts don’t seem to bear results.

At those times, you need to prioritize what’s on your plate, focus on just the top few and leave out the rest for a while. Eventually, you will get a good handle on running your business and you’ll be able to focus on the other areas as well.

You may be struggling to keep up with your business, but don’t give up. Just take one step at a time, focus on just the task at hand. Keep moving forward and you will see the growth you envisioned.

That’s all for now… 🙂

Love from India,

Sunu Philip