QuickBooks helps Clay With Me craft organized opportunity out of growing pains

Gabriela Angulo, owner of Clay With Me in Toronto, Ontario, has had quite the learning curve in life and in business. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, she studied ceramics in college, then spent the next decade teaching and working on her craft. 

“Then I married a Canadian guy and came with him to Canada,” she says. “I didn't know any English at that point, so it was very hard for me to be part of Canadian culture. I like talking, but because I didn’t speak the language, I couldn't.”

Angulo went back to school — this time to learn English. At the same time, she continued to create. “I’ve always had my little wheel and my kiln. That’s where Clay With Me started — in the kitchen of my house,” she says. 

Clay With Me is Angulo’s business, stretched across two pottery studios which play host to her many programs, including workshops, camps, private events, and more. As for how it began, that had everything to do with Angulo’s daughter and her friends. 

“All the moms took turns taking care of the four girls after school. We had play dates once a week,” Angulo explains. “When they came to my house, they’d see me using the wheel. And they started asking, ‘Can we make a bunny? Can we make this or that?’ So I started this work without intention; it was like an after-school program.”

It wasn’t long before other parents started hearing about Angulo’s play group. They asked if their own sons or daughters could join. “I started with four kids. After a while, I had 15. After four months, I had 30. By six months, I needed to find a little space to have it — my house was a disaster at that point,” says Angulo.

“That’s how Clay With Me started. Really organically. It was natural, spontaneous, and with a small community.” Angulo’s first location was across the street from her daughter's school. There, she focused solely on kids. Then parents started asking if she could teach them too. 

Rapid growth brought rapid changes, including new locations, new schedules, and new faces. It also brought challenges—minor disasters and silly mistakes. Angulo had a lot to learn.

Getting organized on a financial level was an important step. For that, Angulo’s accountant recommended QuickBooks. “I use it every day,” says Angulo. “It's very visual and easy to manage.” 

Here’s how Clay With Me is using QuickBooks to stay organized, giving Angulo more time to focus on her business and her passion.

QuickBooks helps Clay With Me keep on top of taxes

It can be challenging to balance being a business owner and an artist—just ask Angulo. “Being a business owner is tough. I feel lost sometimes, because I need that balance. Sometimes I need to be more of an artist than a business owner,” she says. 

Other times, particularly in the past, Angulo has struggled to loosen her grip on the business. Like many small business owners, she’s struggled to relinquish control. “In my mind, I’d think, ‘I can do it. I don't want to waste time teaching someone, when I can do it faster.’” Eventually, though, she realized she couldn’t do it all any longer. “That was a revelation for me,” she says. 

One part of the business Angulo decided to get help with was her website. Unfortunately, the people she hired made one critical mistake. “They didn't add the taxes to the prices,” she says. “They didn't tell me that the website didn't include them. So we went for almost a year without charging people taxes.” 

But it wasn’t just the website that was the problem. Not being from Canada originally, Canadian taxes actually were a foreign concept to Angulo. “I didn't know anything. I wasn't educated about taxes or business, because I didn't grow up here. So I needed to learn,” she says. 

Within a year, Angulo had her business incorporated. But she faced a fresh set of frustrations when she realized she hadn’t saved all the documents she needed to be successful at tax time. “It was a big worry, because when I was making mistakes, it was serious. I didn't want to ruin my business over taxes.” 

Fortunately, Angulo has since found a better, more organized path forward. “I'm so serious about organization,” she laughs. “We cleaned everything up with QuickBooks. It's perfect.”

Clay With Me’s relationship with QuickBooks started with Angulo’s accountant. She helped Angulo set up an account, then showed her how to use the program. “Now I have the QuickBooks app. Every time I buy something, I take a picture of the receipt,” Angulo says.

She also relies on QuickBooks reports to help her make smart business decisions. “QuickBooks has all the sales and reports, and every two or three months, we get together and we study our numbers. We can see what the business is spending, how much we are making, and where the business stands. It’s great for me to see those numbers organized; it's amazing.”

Even when they’re painful, mistakes make everyone stronger

It takes courage to admit to your mistakes — but there’s no teacher like experience, and in Angulo’s case, those mistakes have certainly played a part in making Clay With Me better over time. For one thing, they led to her decision to build a bigger team. 

“I made mistakes for many, many months until I said ‘I need help,’” she says. “At one point, during Covid, I was answering the phone, answering emails, trying to do it all. But I couldn’t do it all. I was losing a lot of people because I wasn't answering the phone. I was so overwhelmed.”

And communication wasn’t the only problem. “I have two studios. I don't know what I was doing, but one time I accidentally fused two classes from different locations into one,” she recalls. “I ended up having 20 people come to the same studio, and there's only 10 wheels. So 10 people needed to go. It was overbooked.”

In that moment, Angulo realized she’d stretched herself too thin. “I said, ‘I need a person who can organize this program.’ The reviews were killing me; people were very upset.” She decided to invest in a business manager — someone who could take on the communication and organization side, while Angulo focused on teaching and everything else. 

“After that, we started to figure it out. I hired a marketer to design some flyers and social media posts, and to do some local marketing so people could find us. I paid another person to create a new website.”

Today, Angulo has a team of around 20 people — some employees, some contractors. 

“We have a great team. It's like a family, friends of friends. The manager is my friend and her daughter is one of my daughter’s friends. So I have known her forever.”

For Angulo, it’s important to have people on the team who not only care about the work but care about one another as well. “Clay With Me is a growing community,” she says. “It helps people and it fixes people. And it makes people happy. That is, I think, the point of Clay With Me.”

Making mistakes may not be fun, and in the moment, those errors can sometimes be painful. But if Clay With Me is any example of what can be built from daring to climb one steep learning curve after another, it seems clear that the view is well worth the journey. With tools like QuickBooks working behind the scenes, there’s no telling where Angulo may take her community next. 

QuickBooks customer paid for their time.

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