Reverse Engineering Your Finances | Claire & Elise Surma | Episode 688

Claire & Elise Surma | Episode 688

Claire and Elise Surma are the sister-in-law duo with a passion for clay, community, and customer care. Claire and Elise started making pots for friends and family in a small corner of our home garage. After running into hiccups with purchasing making materials, our pottery hobby quickly spun into a larger business idea. At Garage Clay Claire and Elise aim to make ceramics more accessible to potters at any point in their creative journey. At both garageclay.com and at their physical retail shop, Claire and Elise sell clay, glazes, pottery tools, their own line of comfy clay-approved swag, and their own select finished pots.

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Why is it so important to reverse engineer your goals?

Claire: So I think goals can be really overwhelming, cuz right? You’ve got a sense that we dream big so we have these really big, lofty goals and then with this reverse engineering it makes it in these little bite-sized pieces that we are able to take a super huge, lofty goal and make it into nice little action steps that’s achievable. I don’t know, I am a big to-do list person so the action of crossing something off and knowing that it is going to a bigger end goal feels just so satisfying to me.

Elise: So I come from this as more of an accounting perspective and I love the term, back-packing into a number. And also throwing a creative spin on it so reverse engineering , we have this goal that we need to achieve, and it’s so important because, okay what are these direct action steps that we are going to do, whether it’s money wise or creativity wise to back into this number. And it gives us really, really clear direction. When we have this goal set in mind we kind of come up, I think , with some of our best ideas, that then serve our community in ways if we didn’t have this need, we probably wouldn’t have thought of. We wouldn’t have set aside the time to think about that goal.

Claire: That’s so true.

Do you use any automation in terms of setting goals? Do you have things that pop up to remind you to do a, b, and c?

Claire: For awhile we were using Airtable. and honestly that was a thing that I loved. But it didn’t work as well for you Elise. And since we are a two person business if it doesn’t work for one person you have to switch gears and make some pivots. But that was a great automation tool for me. But now I think we have kind of reverted back to the old paper and pen. We have a calendar we live by, writing stuff down on that. And we have a shared notes on our iPhone that we are constantly changing and making updates to it as a to-do list. So we have a growling to-do list that both of us can update. And then both of us can cross things off of.

Elise: That is probably as automated as we get.

Claire: Yes, that is probably as automated as we get in terms of goal setting.

Elise, I am wondering as an accountant do you use anything automated services to keep your accounting going in the right direction?

Elise: So our point of sale is Square, and that syncs to our QuickBooks. And then in-between that Square syncs to Woocommerse so Woocommerse and WordPress is how we operate out whole online platform which we’ve put a lot of time into. Our whole business has been our online platform. So one of my duties is managing our QuickBooks.

Does diversifying your line of offering help you to achieve your goals?

Claire: Yes. A thousand percent. And we are talking in a unique time in that we offered our in that we launched our physical space two weeks before the State shut down for covid. So we had to diversify. Our online and our shipping, the garageclay.com, became huge. And then we had to pivot more and offered at-home classes. So diversifying to meet the needs of where people are at that given time is so important.

At what point does diversifying become cumbersome?

Elise: It definitely does. Sometimes we come with all of these ideas, and if we had many many more hours in a week than we do, we would be offering more things. So now we are asking, Where are we good? Where aren’t we good? And knowing where your strengths are and focusing in on those, and then either hiring out and just not focusing on your weakness.

Claire: I also think that offering too many things is not only cumbersome for us, but it also becomes cumbersome for the consumer because they don’t know who you are any more. I think that is something that we always want to be clear on is who Garage Clay is.

How does business mix with family life when you are at family gatherings?

Elise: Honestly I think in day to day life I forget, I think in a good way, that Claire and I are family. So we operate first as friends and second as business partners. So when we do get together as family, it is kind of a pleasant surprise. And I think we try not to overwhelm everyone with our Garage Clay talk, but we come from a business minded family so everyone is always very supportive and encouraging and is excited to hear about everything.