47 | Bad Day Plan [TDTH Challenge #14]

Your t-shirt business can feel like it’s falling apart on days when nothing “lands” a post gets crickets, the site feels quiet, a customer message hits your nervous system, and suddenly you’re questioning everything. I’ve been there, and I don’t want you solving a temporary slump with permanent decisions. So we’re talking about what to do when it feels like it’s not working, especially when you run your shop from home and there’s no clean boundary between work and life.

We start by naming what a bad day actually looks like, then we use two simple filters to stop the spiral: what’s in your control and whether you’re seeing a one-off moment or a real pattern. From there, I break down what not to do when you’re frustrated: don’t vent to your audience like they’re your business partners, don’t overcorrect with sudden discounts or nonstop posting, and don’t disappear without structure.

Then we go where the truth lives: your website metrics. If your goal is income, social media engagement can’t be the scoreboard. I walk through a clear, website-first diagnostic order for t-shirt sellers and Shopify store owners: sales, website traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate. You’ll hear practical ways to boost visibility when traffic is low, plus common reasons shoppers bounce or abandon carts like surprise shipping fees, unclear pricing, confusing turnaround time, and dead-end pages with no next step.

If you’ve ever wanted to torch your strategy after one slow day, this is your reset. Subscribe for more calm, practical marketing for creative small business owners, and if this helps, share it with a fellow t-shirt seller and leave a review.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Turn Down the Hustle. Today's episode is I wish one that every t-shirt seller had saved somewhere or could listen to, definitely come back to. It's something that I wish I had as well when I first started. This is not about what to do when everything is working for this episode. It's about what to do when it's not, or more importantly, and probably more likely, what to do when it feels like it's not working out. I'm talking about some of those days where your business just feels off. And sometimes you might get into funks where maybe weeks or months it just feels off. You're doing the same things you normally do, but nothing quite seems to be landing. Posts aren't getting engagement like they used to. Maybe your website feels slow and your motivation starts to drop with those low-reach posts or low traffic days. If you run your t-shirt business from home, this also hits a little bit different because there's no separation sometimes from work and business. Your business is right there with you. It's on your phone, it's on your computer, tablet, iPad, it's sitting in the corner of your room and in the form of blanks, prints, whatever, orders waiting to be made, or maybe your craft room or office. So when it feels off in your business or something feels off, it's not something you can just leave at the office, drive in your car, decompress when you get home. It seems to follow you. And that's why today isn't about pushing harder. It's about having a plan for when things feel off so you don't spiral or start making decisions that aren't actually helping your business.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

You're listening to Turn Down the Hustle, the podcast dedicated to transforming how you run your creative online teacher business by working smarter, not harder, so you can spend more time with your why, people and passions that matter most in your life. So throw on your favorite graphic T and turn up the key press. Because it's time to turn down the hustle. Here's your host, digital marketer, culture lover, teacher maker, freckled hype girl, and owner of Sunkissed Virtual Assistant, Amy.

Two Filters For Clear Thinking

What Not To Do When Spiraling

What Metrics Actually Matter

Build Your Bad Day Plan

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Let's actually define what a bad day insert air quotes looks like because I think a lot of people feel this, but don't actually say it out loud. A bad day may look like posting a new design that you thought would go viral. You were excited about it, and then crickets you thought it was cute, or you thought your customers would love it, or you threw up a poll and asked people what they wanted, and this seemed to be exactly what they said they were gonna want, and it just didn't click. Or it might look like checking your website throughout the day, not seeing any orders come through, maybe it was a fresh drop you had, or maybe you did have one order, but somehow that doesn't feel like enough compared to what you had in mind in your head. It could be a customer question that cuts you off guard, or a sizing issue, or something small that just adds the feeling of uh today is not my day. I've had that before, like just getting a random customer message that maybe it was unmet expectations, maybe like delivery time where they thought their order would be done when my turnaround time says a certain thing. I don't know, just anything about a customer message. Sometime if they're un upset, I'm an empath, so sometimes maybe I take on some of the feeling they may have. And then your brain starts to do what your brain does best. You start questioning everything. Maybe do I even know my customers? Do I know what they actually like? What is wrong with my posting? Is my business slowing down? Is this a sign that maybe I need to close doors? Do I need to completely change something? Is maybe my messaging not clear? And now it's no longer maybe just a quiet day or a slower day. Maybe people are worried about paying for gas like right now. So maybe they're not buying t-shirts, or maybe they are all on vacation, so they're not really on their phone. It's just a quiet day, but somehow for you, it feels like a failing business. Now, the reason why it hits hard is because it's a layered problem. Very rarely is it just one thing. It's a quiet post plus a slow day. Maybe it's being a little bit tired already, and then everything else in your life building up, and then you're thinking about the things you're falling behind in your small business. And that's when it feels like it's all starting to stack up. Your brain might be trying to make meaning of it, and more often than not, that meaning may be negative versus you know what? I'm a strong business owner, that's why I'm facing all of this adversity. Usually that's not what we're thinking. And what I'm trying to get after is then you start tying your business success to how that one day feels, not to your actual sales over time, not looking at how much your business has grown, or maybe even those back-end systems that we've been talking about in these challenges. Look how much you've established or made your business better. You're just thinking about that moment, and here's the truth feelings, they are real. Many of us started our small business based off of a passion, not looking around, hey, I need to make money. What skill can I teach myself? It's typically the inverse. I've never met anyone with the ladder that I just described. So, yeah, feelings do matter, but when it comes to business, they are not reliable indicators of how well your business is doing. They're based on what's happening right now, and it does not consider the full picture. So before you do anything else, I want you to slow down and filter out what's happening. And I can give you two filters, I guess you could say. The first filter is pretty simple. You can just ask yourself, is this in my control? Because a lot of what you're reacting to is probably not in your control. You can't control when your audience is scrolling, you can't control if your post is getting shown. You can't control someone else's mood or reaction. Let's say they do see your post, but then they don't even respond. But you can control how often you're showing up. What is your mindset or energy when you are showing up? How clearly are you communicating your products and the value? Or what do you do when things don't go as planned? How are you responding to that? That alone can start to give you back a sense of control. Think about the things that you tell yourself in other areas of life. You might give this advice to others, or maybe it's to your children. You control what is in your control. You worry about those things that are in your control and let go of the things that are not. Those same practices and mindsets also applies to business. Okay. The second filter, ask yourself, is this a one-off, or is there maybe a trend here or a pattern? One slow day is not a problem. A couple slow days, not a problem. One quiet post, not a problem. Maybe a week of quietness, not necessarily saying your strategy is terrible. One customer issue saying that maybe you accidentally swap sizes or something, not a problem. But if you're starting to see that same issue over and over again, that's when you can adjust, or I like to say pivot. And this is where you stop emotionally reacting and start thinking like a business owner about what you're going to do. Now we're starting to get into insanity is doing the same thing over and over again when it's not working. We need to learn to read the signs. Let's shift gears here to talk about what not to do. Let's talk about what not to do, where potentially bad days could come into what not to do. Let's talk about that for a bit, because this is where potentially bad days turn into bigger problems. I always tell myself, if maybe I'm running a little bit late to work, all right, don't let one mistake compound into another mistake, like getting pulled over for speeding or getting into an accident. Okay, yeah, I made a mistake. I didn't calculate leaving the house on time, but let that be my only mistake. Same thing is true whenever you're having a bad day in business. Don't make emotional decisions. The best advice or the worst times I see this played out is the Facebook post when you're having a bad day and you make sure all of your audience is aware that you're frustrated that they're not engaging, that you're wondering if anybody is still there, you're not sure if your business is going to stay open much longer. Now, if you are serious about shutting doors, I don't see that's a problem to announce it or however you go about that. But all of your thoughts out loud, your customers are not your business partners, right? So you need to either find a business partner or a mentor or a coach, someone in the industry that could be there to bounce ideas off of, but your audience is not one of those. So I do not recommend voicing your temporary thoughts out loud to your audience. Or even in our industry, if somebody, I guess you could say, crosses you. I don't think a Facebook post with a direct tag is the way to go. I never see that play out well. This is not the day to start repricing your items, scrapping your designs, or maybe pivoting your entire direction. Those decisions should be coming from what we talked about, those patterns and data, not from one-off feelings. Do not overcorrect. You don't need to, one post isn't getting seen. You don't need to suddenly post 10 times. Throw together a flash sale and mark everything down, or panic launch something new. That usually just creates more noise and confusion, and you can't isolate what is actually the problem. And please do not disappear. Taking a break for the rest of the day is fine, but disappearing from your business for days or weeks because maybe you're frustrated, it only makes it harder to come back unless you have a planned break. You know, you tell your audience, look, website is down right now, that's actually current for my retail website, website is temporarily closed, I will return on this date versus just turning it off and then ghosting my business. Bad dates need structure just as much as the good dates do. All right, Amy, you keep talking about data. Make decision off of patterns and data. What exactly do you want me to be measuring here? To start, I see a lot of people measure their business success based on the engagement that they're getting in. For starters, I see a lot of people measure their success or they're attempting to measure their success based on their social media return and engagement. You're looking at your likes, comments, views, and I get it, because that's what's right in front of you, and it is so tempting. But engagement is not your business unless you have some kind of deal where Facebook is, you've monetized your Facebook group and you're starting to get paid for it, which even then I've seen some influencers share their behind the scenes of reels that are getting a million views and they're getting a$70 payout. Now, their sentiment is that they're thankful that they could get paid for things on social media, but a million views, come on now, that is insane. Typically, engagement is not a business strategy whenever you are in the t-shirt business industry. Your website, though, is a great place to start. Social media is great for how people may find you and you might get a few sales directly from social, but your website is really what needs to be optimized. What I mean by that then is if your post is not performing well, that does not automatically mean your business is struggling. I can get a couple orders a day in my retail business and not have posted anything online. It just may be that, hey, a few moms were talking at the elementary school, talking about how I can offer school spirit work, where did they get it from, and then three orders just from word of mouth, but it had nothing to do with social media. So if I was going to measure my business success based on, wait, social is not active today, that really stinks. But I made maybe$150 that day in t-shirt sales, you see how those two don't correspond. What is actually your end goal in your business? I highly recommend you divorce the two. Engagement does not equal sales, right? We want to look at those metrics differently depending on what our goals are in our business. So on those days where you're starting to feel maybe bad about your business, I actually want you to start with your sales. Did you truly have no sales that day, or did you just not hit your expectations for the day? Because those are two different things. If sales are consistently low, then yes, I recommend you start looking deeper. But one slow day is not enough. Next, start to look at your traffic on your website. This is why I love when people have a website so you can get some of this data. Are people clicking your link and visiting your site? Are they actually making it there? If your traffic numbers are low, and I highly recommend you compare this month to last month, this quarter to last quarter, so you can see what is normal for your business. If your traffic is low, then your focus is not your product, it's your visibility. So before you start thinking, I thought this product was gonna go fly off the shelves. Are people actually visiting your website to see this product? So maybe you do want to focus on traffic. What can you do if your traffic is low? You can start to reshare some designs that have sold before, sort your website by bestsellers, and I'd start by sharing those. Show your shirts on real people or in real life. Can you press yourself a shirt and throw it on? Can you take a picture of yourself, take a picture of the shirt made, and then ask AI to throw it on you with a mock-up so it looks like an in-real life photo of you. Go live for five to ten minutes, maybe talk about this one product, email your list and remind them what you have available. There's a lot of different options you can do to drive more traffic to your website. So for that instance, you don't necessarily need more products, you need more eyes on your products. Now, let's say traffic is steady, it's average, it's about where it needs to be for this point in the month. People are clicking, but you notice that you have a metric called bounce rate that is higher than normal. So they're clicking the link, but they are not staying on your website long. That's called, again, bounce rate. This usually means that your first impression maybe wasn't great per se. So sometimes it could be because there are hidden fees. Maybe they build their cart, they get to the checkout page, and then next thing you know, they're hit with this huge shipping fee. Or maybe you have, if you use infinite option, if you haven't upgraded to like the bundling feature, maybe your prices aren't clear. And then whenever they add it to cart and build all of their menu items, then it's adding on an extra$15 they weren't expecting. They don't understand what the turnaround time is potentially, so they'd rather just not order, not knowing if they'll have the shirt there in time. Maybe the mock-ups aren't very clear or they're pixelated. Whatever it is, there could be a multitude of things that are contributing to a higher bounce rate. Like people are not saying on your website long. There's also an app, I can't think of the name off the top of my head, for Shopify where you can actually use this app and it will screen record what people are doing whenever they're on their your website. So it's possible that they are making it to a product page and then they're exiting out on the same page, or they're exiting out once they scroll down to the same portion of the home page. Does your home page not actually have any buttons that say shop now? It's a dead end. That's a big thing for e-commerce. No dead ends on your website. There should always be when somebody's scrolling, reading something, there should always be a call to action to do something else to your website. Like now check out more products like this, or now add Descartes, something to that effect. But I highly recommend whatever platform you use, look into those apps and see if you can look into some of those screen recordings and see if you can isolate where is the majority of my customers leaving my website. Okay, so moving on. Potentially people are staying on your website, but they're not buying. What is going on? That is your conversion rate. And this is where some of the small tweaks can make a big difference. It goes hand in hand with bounce rate. Think about bounce rate being somebody leaves your site pretty quickly. They're like, oh, I'm good. And then conversion rate is where maybe somebody just isn't quite buying. They've really spent a good bit of your time on your website, but they aren't buying. So some of those contributions or ideas I gave you to bounce rate could also work for conversion as well. Maybe your product descriptions aren't clear, or maybe their sizing charts aren't very accurate. Or it just some people just might not want to shop. Maybe they just want to buy. And the next thing I know, I'm deleting the whole cart. I don't know why I'm like that. But it could be the same thing for your e-commerce website as well. They might just not be convinced to shop. So don't look at your metrics just one day at a time. I never have my Shopify homepage of just today's metrics, unless I'm running a targeted event or sale, and I do want to see how that day is performing, then I'll do that. But more often than not, I have it set to monthly view so I can see as the month has been progressing, how am I doing holistically for the month? So now that you've looked at everything clearly, here's your plan moving forward. One, pause. Don't react immediately, and don't make any posts on social media until you've actually looked at the data and thought clearly about what the issue is. Ask what's in your control. And then I want you to decide is this one-off or is this a pattern? So you need to find a way on how to establish if this is a pattern. And I want you to check your website data, not necessarily your engagement metrics, if your goal is to make money, if that makes sense. So if you're like, man, sales are down or my engagement is low, I'm not making any money, whoa. I want you to start with your website first, and then if traffic is truly your issue or traffic is down, then you can go back to social and see how you could up that revenue stream. Then I want you to do one small task. If you do end up deciding that it is a one-off instance and you truly are just having a bad day, I just want you to do pick one small tax. It could be finishing up the orders that are in your queue, updating a listing or looking into SEO, prep just one day's of content for social media, organize your receipts or update your business listings and expenses for the month. Just one little thing, something that moves your business forward without overwhelming you necessarily. And then just stop there. Just do one task because you don't need to fix everything today. You're gonna make mistakes in your business. You will send the wrong size, ask me how I know. You will overlook something, ask me how I know. You will have a customer situation that feels uncomfortable, that does not mean you are bad at business. What matters is how you respond. So my question to you now is do you have a bad day plan? Did you have a bad day plan before you listen to this podcast episode? Whatever it looks like, develop a plan so when you are having a bad day. You have a plan. Think about maybe somebody who's trying to eat healthier, right? They have a plan for whenever maybe temptation occurs, or maybe they get hungry and they're out and away from their house. Do they carry some kind of protein bar in their car? Do they make sure that they're has have a snack ready to go right when they get home from work? Because me, for some reason, right when I get home from work, I'm always hungry. So if I have a plan of what I'm gonna eat when I get home, it takes away me eating everything in sight. Having that plan will help you not to spiral. You just stick to the plan. Bad days do not mean you are a bad or failing business. Consistently matters more. I promise you. Look at how many businesses are no longer in business today, for whatever reason that may be. But when you think about some of the businesses that maybe just gave up because they couldn't get social media to work for them, that makes me so sad because maybe they spent way too much time on social media and not optimizing their website where the true metrics lay. And that, my friend, is how we turned down the hustle. Until next time.