5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship: Recent Episodes
Eric Holter
This audio guide helps you accelerate the mastery of business skills for your creative services practice. We discuss business concepts, systems, principles, and practices so you can maximize the time you have to create.
Episodes are organized around the five business themes of Money, Minutes, Marketing, Management, and Motivation.
When you get control over your marketing, you’ll no longer be subject to the variable winds and waves of a fickel referral networks. Instead you’ll gain the stability that comes from a steady stream of qualified leads. And when you have plenty of leads you get to decide which clients and projects to take on. Those might include the clients with the best creative opportunities, or the best budgets, or both.
Professional services are not sold in the same way as consumer products. Professionals sell through reputation and trust. And cold, technical digital marketing methods don’t help with that kind of effort—in fact, they’d more likely hurt. So you can ignore 90% of the fast-paced, technology-driven, methods. That said it's still essential that prospective clients find out that you exist, and keep you in mind for projects when the time is right.
The time table from the first steps in forming a marketing program to the time you start enjoying its fruits can take up to eighteen months. Now it is possible to shorten this timeframe through fast decision making, and extra exertion in the preparation involved. But other aspects of a new marketing program can’t be rushed. And so the sooner you start the sooner you’ll get to that harvest!
In the introductory session of my new course, Marketing Mastery for Creative Entrepreneurs, I review the three essential resolutions that are necessary for any successful marketing program. Like a three legged stool, if any one of these resolutions are lacking the other two stop working, and your marketing efforts will fall flat. In fact, as I’ve listened to creative entrepreneurs describe their frustrations with marketing, I can always connect their past failures to missing one or more of these three essential marketing resolutions.
Welcome to episode 100 of 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship. To mark this milestone. I’d like to let you know about a new digital course I’ll soon be releasing called Marketing Mastery for Creative Entrepreneurs. And at the end of this episode, I’ll have a special offer to all my podcast listeners.
Your total compensation is capped by available time, multiplied by your hourly rate, minus overhead. But what happens when you have available time, but no billable work to fill it? Downtime for the creative entrepreneur can be deadly. Every creative practice will experience gaps in their project calendars. The question is, do you have a plan to make the most of your downtime?
Creatives don’t go into business to make a killing, we still want to be well compensated for the value we deliver to clients. But while making good money from our work is great, that’s not the only reason we’re in this business. We’re drawn to creative entrepreneurship because we love the work, as well as whatever financial rewards it might deliver. But when we combine our love for the creative process with the realities of running a business, that joy can soon turn into sinking grief.
When creative entrepreneurs launch, they don’t imagine massive cash infusions from investors, or of taking their company public. More often than not creatives pursue creative control, and better creative opportunities. For creatives business is more of a lifestyle choice than as a business investment. But do creatives need to be content with mere income replacement, or can creative entrepreneurship deliver higher returns?
Managing time is essential for creative entrepreneurs since our services are so often sold by time and materials. Becoming accurate in estimating is a necessary skill in this business. The only way to improve these skills is to build a data source that helps you keep a birds-eye view on project performance. But once you start building all this valuable data, how exactly do you use it? And how can you use past projects to estimate future ones, especially since no two projects are exactly the same?
Humans have an interesting relationship to time. While the clock ticks by at a perfectly constant rate, our experience of time is highly variable. Vacations seem to fly by. But if you’re laid up with a bad back, time slows to a crawl. There are similar perception-based time distortions in running your creative practice. And when your profits come from the use of your time, these business time warps can seriously distort your performance, and undermine your profits.
When you run your own business as freelance creative, you might find it difficult to take time off. If you shut off your phone and close your laptop, there’s no one else to take over. And if you charge by the hour, taking a day off means no revenue. But everyone needs to rest. So if you find it hard to take time off, let me make some suggestions to help you free yourself up for a much needed vacation.
Creative entrepreneurs not only face external struggles, we also face the struggle within. The creative process is marked by struggle. We agonize to find that perfect solution. This angst ridden process is baked into creativity and adds an extra layer of difficulty to our form of entrepreneurship. In order to push through all these challenges, it can be helpful to remember the incredible privileges we have in our creative callings.
There’s no question that being a creative entrepreneur is not the easiest path. Going into business for yourself demands considerable effort, diligence, determination, and plain hard work. When you’re just starting out you may need to hustle and grind. But that can’t last forever. Eventually you need to get strategic, and find a more sustainable path.
Does your company’s operating budget adequately anticipate infrequent future expenses? Planning your budget based on our known monthly expenses, doesn't prepared you for when an expensive annual software license comes due. You need to regularly set aside revenue to cover unanticipated future expenses. If not, you might end up facing a budget crunch that can crush your business.
Last time we explored the topic of creative methodologies, and how they can improve your sales and marketing. A proven methodology that focuses on solving specific problems not only boosts your sales game, but it also leads to efficiencies that enable you to increase the margins you retain from your project fees. A well-oiled methodology will make you more profitable, significantly increase client satisfaction, and improve the impact of your work.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for very long you’re probably acquainted with the five motifs that structure 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship: Money, Minutes, Marketing, Management, and Motivation. Well there is a sixth motif that could be added, and conveniently it also starts with the letter “M.” Your creative Methodology can be a powerful addition to your marketing and radically improve your closing rate on sales opportunities. But only if your methodology is truly unique.
Throughout history new technologies have always had beneficial, yet disruptive outcomes. The printing press put many scribes out of work. Photographic typography ended the careers of linotype operators, and digital photography has put tons of pressure on professional photographers. Today, the Internet’s enabling of world wide crowdsourcing, is having similar effects on creative freelancers. How are you supposed to do battle with Upwork, and win?
The creative service business is made up of two main parts. Creativity and service. Obviously. But the path to bringing these two things together professionally is neither obvious nor simple. Providing any kind of professional service is challenging. But if you can learn the skills of excellent client service, you will reap the rewards that come from establishing trust and deepening the value of your professional creative services.
Very few creatives launch their practices planning to cash out with a big exit down the road. We get into our trade out of love for our craft, not so much for the financial rewards. But if you were planning to sell, like a typical entrepreneur, you would pay much more attention to your bottom line. And so managing your practice, as if you were going to sell it, could help you improve your profits, and would lead to other positive outcomes.
Back in episode 23 I talked about how marketing is a marathon, not a 100 yard dash. I’ve been thinking about that analogy recently, and I need to revise it slightly. Really marketing is more like training for a marathon than actually running one. If you want to run a marathon you would need to make a plan and stick with it. Marketing, like exercise, demands discipline. It depends on building new habits, and keeping them up for months, and years at a time.
The best approach for marketing a creative practice involves PinPoint Positioning followed by a consistent content strategy. The long-term benefits of this approach pay huge dividends to creative entrepreneurs. Of course executing on a content strategy requires a significant time investment. If you make weekly or monthly deposits into your content investment portfolio, you may want to consider some additional opportunities to diversify and extend the impact of those contributions.
Mastering the basics of marketing your creative practice can take many years. So you might not be thinking about what comes next. But when you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level—start thinking about finding speaking engagements. Speaking opportunities can be extremely powerful ways to deepen your position in your chosen market.
We all hate time-wasting intrusions of spam marketing. And so we surely don’t want to be counted among those that use such irritating methods. And yet, at a basic level, much of your marketing involves reaching out to prospects who don’t yet know you. Is there a way to approach a cold prospect and not be immediately lumped in with the spammers?
As creatives we help our clients by producing media that they use in their marketing campaigns. In many cases their marketing channels include advertising, direct mail, and other mass media broadcast channels. When we spend so much time focusing on broad business-to-consumer marketing methods for our clients, it’s no surprise that when it comes to our own marketing, we think along the same lines. But business-to-consumer marketing tactics don’t work for creative practices.
Over the past few episodes we’ve considered growth in the light of the goal of remaining involved in creative work. While this is a common goal, it’s not a common outcome. Without a carefully planned hiring process, the path of least resistance will lead you away from creativity, requiring you to become a business manager instead. But how can you find the right people to fill your carefully designed roles?
Should your first overhead hire—and be a client facing account manager, or a market-facing account maker? If you try to economize with one person for both roles, you may end up struck in the growth gap. But that’s not the only gap you’ll face in growing your creative business. There are other points along the path that have similarly difficult obstacles, which, if you aren’t prepared to maneuver, can likewise get you stuck.
Growing a business is one of life’s greatest challenges. There are millions of people, with business training, who have failed to accomplish this dream. If building and growing a business is hard for people who’s entire training was toward that end, what chance do creative entrepreneurs, without business training, have to establish a growing practice? And if we do succeed, will the demands of running a business take us away from the creative work we love?
When your creative practice takes off, your inclination will be to hire other designers to lighten your load. This sets off a chain reaction. Soon you’ll find yourself consumed with managing projects more than doing creative work. And you’ll feel the pressure to keep work coming in. If you prefer creative work over business management, you’ll need to hire someone. But should it be for sales, or for client service?
As creatives begin to build up a client base, and demand for their work starts to grow, we inevitably face the question of what to do when we’ve tapped out our own personal time resources. Do we simply say “no” to new clients, or do we expand our capacity by hiring help? This is a pivotal decision. Because without intentionality, and careful planning, growth can quickly turn from the fulfillment of all your dreams, to your worst nightmare.
This past year has been tough on many small businesses. Certain sectors of the economy were entirely shut down. If you’ve been listening to 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship for very long you know how important PinPoint Positioning is to marketing a creative practice. But what if your industry focus was in the live entertainment space, or the travel industry, or event management? If you focused on any of these areas, this past year may very well have been your last.
But sometimes projects are doomed from the outset, regardless of how well a creative delivers. There are bad clients out there—clients that don’t engage in good faith, who’ll use any excuse to blame creatives, just to save money. How can you avoid toxic clients? When should you run away from an opportunity as fast as you can?
Creatives work hard for their money. And not just in the studio. It takes a lot of work just to find projects in the first place. We have to build portfolios, market our work, make presentations, and write proposals. Only then do we pour ourselves out to produce our work. After all this preparation, anticipation, and energy is spent, it can be extremely frustrating to have to wait for that all important check to arrive that keeps it all going.
Being a creative entrepreneur involves making decisions, sometimes risky decisions. Wise decision making requires having good information to guide you. And one of the best sources for good information is your money. But in order to “hear” what your money has to say, you have to maintain an ongoing conversation with these numbers. One way to keep this conversation going is to do your own books, a skill and that pays dividends.
You may have a budget for your money, but what about your time? As important as financial budgeting is, I would argue that a time budget is more important. After all, you could inherit a windfall. But you can never add even one hour to your days. Both you and Bill Gates get 24 of them in a day. So managing your most valuable, non-renewable, and limited resource is an essential skill.
Among the many points of failure in business, there is one that hurts the most. The failure to accurately price our work, so that we end up taking a bath on our projects. When we underestimate our work, we are forced to either damage the client relationship by asking for more money, or—more commonly— we absorb those costs ourselves.
When a creative has launched out on their own, they’ve entered the path of entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. Entrepreneurship involves risk. Even a simple solo-preneur freelance practice assumes all the risks associated with being in business for yourself. If you’re going to make it as an entrepreneur, you’ll have to overcome your fear and courageously face the possibility of failure.
If you’re a fine artist, or illustrator, or designer who prefers the freelance path you’re going to need to build a freelance practice. And that means running a small company, even if it’s a company of one. You think of yourself as an artist, not an entrepreneur. And so you end up being cast into the world of entrepreneurship without ever considering whether or not you’re even cut out for that path.
This week we wrap up our Shark Tank series by considering a flaw that the Sharks often point out to founders as they seek an investment—the serious challenge of customer education that can present barriers to effectively marketing their products.
It’s common for partnerships to fail. And so considering the kind of partner you’re looking for, what their buy in costs will be, and working out how you’ll handle a possible future dissolution is critical before you make a deal.
With the investor path closed, creatives sometimes look for help in the form of a business partnership. Not only can a partner provide business or marketing skills that we may be lacking, partnerships often appeal to creatives simply because of the loneliness of being a solo-prenuer—but before you go down that path you might want to think about this major decision like a Shark.
Creative entrepreneurs can’t patent their talent. We simply have to contend with the reality that the creative marketplace will always be offering up young new talent that’s willing to work for rates that established creatives can’t match. So how will you protect your creative practice from the competition?
Keeping a careful eye on your burn rate can make the difference between managing growth on your way to success, or crashing spectacularly when you reach the end of your runway, never having gained sufficient momentum to take off.
If you have ambitions to grow your freelance practice into a small firm, or even into a larger agency, then you need to be aware of the costs associated with scaling a creative practice.
When creatives enter into business they often fail to consider the longer-term soft-costs involved in running their businesses, which can end up dragging them under.
For creatives establishing the value of your business can be quite difficult, especially since the biggest cost center is your own time. And what’s that worth? In today’s episode we’ll consider how to calculate this critical part of the valuation equation—and some of the serious consequences that result from getting it wrong.
Equity is ultimately established through calculating the retained earnings of a company—its revenues less all the costs that were expended to produce those revenues. Investors are interested in a company’s total sales, but what they really want to know is their profit margin. This week we’ll evaluate the profit margins of a typical creative practice.
What exactly does an investor buy, when they make a deal with a founder? They buy equity in the company, and so the value of that equity is essential to the transaction. This week we ask the question—what’s the equity of my creative business worth today?
Have you ever dreamed of being on Shark Tank? Well, those dreams will have to remain mere flights of fancy since venture capitalists don’t invest in professional service businesses—creative practices are simply not scalable enough. But what if there were a Shark Tank for creative entrepreneurs? Would you be ready to answer all their scrutinizing questions?
Since most creatives rely on referrals, it’s critical to understand the downside. Though referrals deliver clients without any extra effort on your part, the biggest liability is the flip side of that benefit—that no effort on your part controls when you get a referral. If you decide to ride the referral train, you don’t get to choose where you end up, and if it breaks down—you can be left in the middle of nowhere.
Creative entrepreneurs frequently suffer from feast or famine cycles. Fixing the famine problem is what effective marketing is all about. But how do you fix the feast problem? Granted that’s always a better problem than the alternative, but it is still a real problem. And if you have not thought through how you might respond to an extended feast season, what may at first seem like a dream come true—could soon turn into the nightmare you never expected.
The sober reality is that overhead tasks involved in running your business will soak up at least 40% of your time. Since that’s such a significant portion—let’s make sure that we use that time efficiently.
One of the most common problems I’ve encountered, as I’ve consulted creative business owners, flows out from a basic mis-allocation of their time—based on wrong assumptions about the amount of overhead time involved needed to run a business. This week, I’ll share some specific breakdowns for your overhead time—so you can reevaluate your overall business plan, and plug holes that may be slowly sinking your ship.
If I had to list the two most fundamental parts of a marketing program for creative entrepreneurs they would be PinPoint Positioning and Prospecting on LinkedIn. In today’s episode I’ll share even more practical advice for leveraging LinkedIn and organizing your marketing program.
LinkedIn is far and away the most effective platform for engaging in marketing a creative practice. Because of the professional context of LinkedIn, users are more open to making professional connections. But there’s even more power to the LinkedIn platform, and in this episode I’ll reveal some of my best, hard earned tips for using it effectively.
All the many and varied strategies you might employ to market your creative service, can be categorized under one of two main heads. Outbound marketing and Inbound Marketing. These two approaches are often pitted against each other as combatants in a winner take all competition. But in reality you don’t have to choose just one approach, in fact, by turning these two into allies, rather than enemies, you can benefit from the advantages of both.
There is no question that online advertising has changed the marketing world. And there’s also no question that it works. Online advertising 100% measurable. When you get it right you can start counting the clicks and conversions—and when you misfire, that failure has nowhere to hide. While online advertising absolutely can work for certain kinds of products and services, it’s not the best fit for marketing a creative practice—in your case it’s almost always a complete waste of money.
Of all the channels where you can and should engage in marketing your creative service, social media is the most debated. Your own professional experience and opinion of social media’s effectiveness likely corresponds with how much you engage with it in your personal life. But using social media professionally is different from how you might use it personally. And your expectations for how social media fits into your marketing plan may need to be adjusted.
Marketing in today’s complex world requires the use of multiple channels and platforms. And with channels and platforms multiplying as fast as they do, it’s hard to keep up, or to even evaluate which ones are worth investing in. But there is one platform that’s tried and true, and though it’s not the latest and greatest it’s still a necessary and fundamental part of your any marketing system—that platform is good ole fashioned email.
One of the benefits to writing is the occurrence of “long tail” search traffic. These occurrences have extremely high value, but they often fly under the radar, and therefore remain sadly underappreciated. As a result, we may neglect the opportunity to build up our content libraries, which deliver these serendipitous but powerful engagements.
There are number of benefits that come from writing for your business—including how written content helps potential clients discover your work through search. In order to increase these valuable discoveries you have to give some thought to how search engines work—so that you can optimize your content and be found by prospective new clients.
Creating compelling content has to have to become a steady, regular, ongoing part of marketing your creative practice. If the thought of having to come up with new ideas month after month, for years on end, is a bit terrifying for you, keep listening, because there is a secret to keeping the content coming.
Over the past few episodes I’ve been focusing on the importance of writing for marketing your creative practice. Writing is hard work, and creatives are often uncomfortable expressing themselves with words. But another barrier, when it comes to the essential business skill of writing, is coming up with ideas to write about. I’ll have more to say about this in upcoming episodes, but today let’s consider some low hanging fruit for content subject matter—the very work already in your portfolio.
Since content marketing is the most effective way to market a creative practice, writing has to become an essential business skill. But what if you’re a terrible writer? Or, perhaps, just lack the confidence to write? If you feel that way, you’re not alone. Most creatives struggle to express their ideas verbally. If you ever want to find an example of this, all you would need to do is get your hands on anything I wrote when I was just starting out in the creative business.
Content marketing requires content—and content requires words. Even if you choose to create videos, or produce podcasts rather than written articles, developing scripts, and building effective stories is essentially a writing and editing task. Could it be that one of the reasons creatives so often fail to market themselves effectively is a basic fear of writing? If you can’t get over this barrier, effective marketing may forever elude you.
Before you start thinking about marketing channels, you need to think long and hard about what messages you intend to send through those channels. Ultimately you need to let prospects know you exist and have a service to offer—but what is that service? And how can you make your services stand out among a crowded marketplace of similar services?
You need to always be marketing. A steady, consistent marketing campaign will do more for the long-term health of your practice than any other effort you might make. And so let’s get down into the details. Let’s explore the ins and outs of what a sustainable and effective marketing plan for creative entrepreneurs looks like at a practical level.
Since few creatives are motivated by the dream of acquiring multiple vacation homes, or fancy yachts, we’re going to need to come at the fundamental issue of profitability from a different perspective. Because at the end of the day, without strong profits, your business will eventually run aground. So let’s consider how running a profitable creative practice can benefit you in additional ways—besides simply having more money to spend.
Since creatives tend to maintain rates much lower than other professional services their profits are pretty slim. But the idea of raising your rates can be scary if you think your clients won’t be willing to pay them. But assume for a second that they would—might you still be reluctant to charge what a lawyer or accountant charges? Might there be other reasons creatives hesitate to push toward profitability? Might there be other factors trapping you in cycles of unprofitability?
Creative entrepreneurs often suffer from a liability that slowly digs them into financial holes. It’s called the unearned revenue problem. This liability is exacerbated when you bill your projects half up front and half on completion—and if you don’t compensate for it, you’ll be sinking deeper and deeper into debt.
Maintaining a cash flow projection is essential to running your business. Keeping it accurate and up-to-date needs to become a weekly, and often daily habit. But as you make frequent updates to cash flow, there are some subtle decisions you can make, which if you’re not careful can begin to distort this basic representation of your business’s life blood—your money.
Reviewing the past is helpful for analyzing your business, but seeing ahead helps you make timely decisions to avoid serious cash flow crises. And so maintaining a cash flow projection system is critically important to your creative business.
When a creative strikes out on their own as a freelancer or small business owner, there are some financial basics that they need to master. And one of those basics is understanding your bottom line. And to get that, you have to crack the code of understanding your balance sheet.
One of the most fundamental parts of managing a business is accurate budgeting. There’s nothing worse than surprise expenses that throw our operations all out of whack. While we can’t plan for every possible contingency, there are some business expenses that surprise us, that we should have seen coming a mile away.
Running a business requires keeping a close eye on the ins and outs of your money. If you ignore this life blood of your business, you may soon find yourself out of business and deeply in debt. Learning to read your profit and loss statement can keep you out of debt, and give you insights into where your financial pressures are coming from.
Your money has a voice. And that voice will never lie to you. It won’t flatter you either. Your money has important things to say, and you need to learn how to listen to it, if you’re going to run a sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable practice.
As you keep track of all the time you spend in your work, everything from the work itself, to your administration time, financials, and marketing you’ll be building a valuable resource. Drawing upon this data can have all sorts of benefits for your business.
In order to make the best use of our time we have to budget it, just as we do our money. But we can’t even begin to budget our time if we have no data to work from. That’s why it’s so important that we track all the time we spend working in our creative practices.
We generally keep better tabs on our money then our minutes. But really it should be the other way around. Because while we might wish we had more money, it is possible that this wish could come true. But no matter how hard you wish for more than 60 minutes in an hour, or 24 hours in a day, it’ll never happen. Time is a constant, you can’t ever expand this resource. And when it’s gone, you never get it back.
Marketing your creative service starts with narrow-positioning. This is followed by crafting content that demonstrates and validates your message. Then you need to build a list of fitting prospects, and stay in touch with those people until the time is right. But as a busy creative professional, especially if you’re a freelance solopreneur, finding the time to maintain contact can seem overwhelming.
The ability to easily build a targeted list is a key test of whether or not your positioning is narrow enough. When your target market is anyone who needs creative services, then practically anyone could be added to your list. And when everyone is a target, no one is—at least as far as building an actionable list goes.
How many times have you made the excuse about the carpenter’s door, or the cobbler’s shoes when it comes to your own website and marketing efforts? When we make these excuses we usually chalk it up to not having enough time. But I don’t think the problem is lack of time. I think it's because, when it comes to marketing our own services, we don’t know what to do.
In order to maintain a full pipeline of opportunities, you need to always be marketing. If you’re not continually preparing the soil, and planting seeds, don’t be surprised when your fields are bare at harvest time. Or, to change the metaphor, marketing is a marathon, not a 100 yard dash.
When creative freelancers start to become successful they often decide to hire help. But the significant step cost in hiring that first employee—can be a step right off a cliff.
The experience of most creative entrepreneurs is one of feast or famine. But have you ever had a season where you had several ups in a row—more feast than you could consume—more work than you could handle? Many creatives, in an extended feast cycle, decide that it might be time to hire help. But this big step can lead to a place you had no desire to go.
New business involves executing a marketing strategy, which will typically consist of producing content, and initiating lead generation. Your schedule needs to allow time to produce content that validates your positioning claim, and to deploy that content on various platforms such as email and social media.
Every business needs customers, or in the case of creative entrepreneurs, clients. Without your clients you don’t have a business. And so managing the client relationship is essential to running your business. And client relationships, like all relationships, can be complicated. You have to take care of client relationships—because your clients, ultimately, take care of you.
Could anything be more boring to a creative professional than administration? Yet have to face some administrative realities. Not only can managing administrative details be confusing—but as creatives, we tend to revolt at administrative minutia in general. But if we ignore these tasks, they don’t go away—they just become harder to deal with.
Over the past 16 episodes we’ve taken a flyover of the five main subjects that structure this podcast—money, minutes, marketing, management, and motivation. Creative entrepreneurs face unique struggles in each of these areas, as they strive to turn their talents and creative ambitions into profitable, enjoyable, and sustainable businesses.
Creatives tend to identify more deeply with their work than others. We also face artistic angst, and seem to have a deeper appetite for meaning in our work than other kinds of professionals. All of these tendencies can conspire to demotivate us. But there is one thing we can do to maintain motivation in our work...
The pursuit meaning in our work, while a universal pursuit, and a fitting goal, also has a universal trap—which if we’re not careful, can leave us desperately unfulfilled.
Medical residents push through long hours to become doctors. Athletes “leave it all on the field” to be the best. And artists? Artists labor over their work, striving for creative solutions. This striving, or angst, often compels the process. How can we take control of something so deeply personal as artistic inspiration, and tame it for the sake of a profitable business?
The typical creative entrepreneur deals with a double-dose of trouble in business. They contend with the inner struggles of the creative process, as well as the outward pressures of being in business in general. Now all forms of entrepreneurship will face troubles, but overcoming the doubled pressure of creative entrepreneurship takes an incredible degree of resolve. Very few creatives break through.
Being a creative entrepreneur requires wearing a lot of hats. You’re going to have to learn how to swap hats efficiently as a chorus of demands clamor for your attention each day. How can you learn to swap efficiently without losing your head?
How will you manage the competing time demands of being a creative entrepreneur? Whether you’re a founder building a firm, or a freelancer, you have to find the work, estimate the work, do the work, bill the work, balance the checkbook, communicate with clients—and take out the trash. That’s a lot of hats to wear.
In this episode, I suggest taking a DiSC profile to help you increase your self awareness of the tendencies you face in managing your varied responsibilities. You can find the DiSC Classic 2.0 profile here - https://www.discprofile.com/products/disc-classic-2-0/.
Creatives don’t like repetition, we want—well, to be creative, to invent, to explore, to experiment. And so we resist the wisdom, and proven effectiveness of specialization, to our own detriment. Is there any way for creatives to adapt or even thrive if we surrender, and take this proven path of narrow positioning? Yes, we can be more like Leonardo...
There is something in the creative heart that resists the idea of limits, or long-term repetition. We want to explore, to experiment, to try new things. Doing one kind of work, for one kind of client, forever—or for the foreseeable future is antithetical to the creative impulse. But if you can put your inner Jack Kerouac in check, and declare a focus—once you know what you do, who you do it for, and how it specifically benefits your prospects, everything gets easier, and more effective.
Getting control over your sales and marketing is the brass ring every creative entrepreneur is reaching for. But the reality is that steady sales and marketing are the result of diligent effort in proven and repeatable methods. Not on luck, or on a desperate reach.
The creative service business is, after all, a service business. You’re not collecting orders and shipping products, you’re delivering your expertise to people who need it. As with any service business, there is a great deal of communication involved—being a creative entrepreneur means engaging with clients. You’re often going to be on call, as you respond to urgent needs. If you structure your services carefully, this availability can become a source of ongoing revenue. If you don’t—it could mean death by a thousand cuts.
Mastering the business of creative entrepreneurship depends on maintaining complete and accurate time records. But the deeply engaging "creative zone" causes us to completely loose track of time. Does that mean that the more diligent we are in managing time, the less effective our creative product will be? Is there any way to resolve this tension?
When was the last time you completed a project at or under budget? Is hitting that target a regular pattern in your creative business, or a rarity? There are all sorts of ways that projects spin out of orbit—and some will always be out of your control. But others are up to you. How do you know which are which? And how can you regain control over the patterns and practices that you’re contributing to project bloat?