Design Your Creative Business Workflow Map

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Sarah Douglas, business process manager and creative business owner. I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be when you're an artist entrepreneur or small business owner trying to juggle so many balls at once. It can sometimes feel like you're chasing your tail, trying to keep on top of all the things you want and need to do. In this class, I'm going to help you move forward in a practical way by showing you how to capture all those things going on in your business and shape them into a creative workflow that works for you. We'll start by capturing all the different things you work on in a brainstorm, and then we'll transfer them to a beautiful process map that will give you confidence and clarity in the way you manage your business and your time as creatives. It's not often that we step out of working in our business and work on our business. But making time for an activity like the one I'll show you in this class is crucial if we're to reflect on the way we do things, identify what works and what doesn't, and even identify some new opportunities. By the end of this class, you'll find yourself saving time in your working practices and enjoying a greater confidence around decision making for your creative business once it's all mapped out in front of you. I've used my years of experience as a business process manager and my qualification as a Lean Six Sigma black belt to pack tons of helpful hints and tips into this class to help you shape your business into something flowing enjoyable and beautiful. Instead of wrought with tension and uncertainty. My small business sticker kitten has lots of different facets. I design and make craft supplies and stickers, but also handmade earrings. I teach on skillshare exhibit at craft fairs. And I'm also branching out into art licensing. I have e mail newsletters and social media posts to keep on top of too. If you're like me, there'll be so many things buzzing around your head, it's hard to even know what to focus on at any one time and you end up procrastinating. So let's get clear on our businesses together, you can decide how you want to create your business map. Good old paper and pencil, posted notes, whiteboard or on screen. This is about making something that works for you. Are you ready to get started? Let's dive in. 2. Class Overview: Hey there. I'm so glad you decided to join me to level up your creative business. The focus of this class is on learning how to create and interpret a process map, a visualization of the workflow for your business. But there's so much more extra you'll learn along the way. First, I'll give you an overview of the class project and explain some key terms. Then it's over to you. We're going to get brainstorming to capture all the aspects of your creative business that you've got going on. Next, I'll talk you through putting them into a process map. And finally, we'll talk about how to interpret and use your new map of your business to help you reflect and make decisions. 3. Project Overview: For your class project, I'd love you to work along with me and create your own brainstorm and process map. As I show you how, this is how you'll truly get the most out of the class. You can do everything with pencil and paper and post it notes, or you can draw on a whiteboard. But I recommend creating your map on screen, either with software you already have and are familiar with, or using a digital whiteboard such as Miro, which is available online and specifically designed for process mapping. It's free to sign up and that's what I'll be using in the class afterwards. Upload a screenshot of your finished process map to the project gallery here on Skill Share. As long as you feel comfortable sharing, you're behind the scenes And I'm happy to give you any personalized feedback you'd like on your business map or any ways that you can get the most out of it. Now before we get started, let's talk about a few key terms. 4. Key Terms: Firstly, let's talk about what I mean by a process. It might seem obvious to you or it might not. A process is a series of steps taken to reach a certain result in your business. It could be the process of making earrings, or packing and shipping an order. The process of creating artwork. The process of setting up and delivering a workshop. What we're going to be doing in this class is noting down all of these little processes and visualizing how they connect together to make up our business as a whole. What is a map? When I say a process map for this class, I'm talking about a simple flow chart with my background and Lean Six Sigma. I know there are many different types of map we could do, each with a different purpose and offering different insights. But this is an introductory class, so we're keeping it simple with a flow chart Now, without any further ado, let's jump into the first activity. We're going to get started with some brainstorming. 5. Brainstorming Introduction: Okay, grab a piece of paper and a pen or pencil and maybe a cup of tea, and we're going to get started with a brainstorm. This is a way to capture all the things going on in your head to do with your business right now. We don't need to worry about any order or structure yet. We just want to get things down on the page. I'm going to start by putting a question to myself, what's on my plate right now for stick a kitten? This is the bit you might find most cathartic, just getting it all out of your head and onto paper. Bear in mind that this isn't a to do list. Don't make it too specific, but also don't make it too vague that it's not useful. 6. Create Your Brainstorm: Grab your paper and pen or pencil, and then just write down everything you can think of to do with your business. That's in your mind right now that's occupying your thoughts? The way that I phrase mine, I'm going to put what's on my plate right now. A mind map like this will just help you to start to untangle all the different things that are in your mind, in your head, that are going on in your business that you want to start to fit together in your creative work flow. But first, let's just get them onto paper. So we've got something to start with. I'm going to start with my website and the products that I have on it. The main things that I sell are craft supplies. Then I also have an store main things that I sell are stickers. This doesn't have to be neat, this doesn't have to look beautiful for anyone. Although if you want to, you can make it look nice with different colored pens or some stickers or however you want to do it. But for now, I'm just doing mine as simply as I can to get my thoughts down the other thing I sell and the website as well. But I tend to associate different products selling on different platforms. Right now, this is just, whichever way your mind works, just get it all down on paper and we can untangle it afterwards. Earrings, plan charms and that's grouped into three D printed items, make stencils to. When I think about stickers as well, a lot of what we have is what I call icon stickers, things like little cats or little plants. But we also have planar sticker kits. Other areas of my business, I'll have a separate one for skill share classes. I also upload our designs to print on demand sites. I have a few of those. Red Bubble Society, six public. There's a new one I've come across but haven't tried yet called contract. We also have a website integration for print. I also want to branch out into art licensing. Even though that's something I don't do right now. It's something that's occupying my mind a lot of the time because I'm thinking ahead about things that I want to do with our business. I am going to add art licensing here. For that, I want to finish my portfolio. I need to think about pitching or agent. I do also have a patrion account which has paused at the moment, but it's still something that occupies my mind. There are other aspects as well as want to focus on developing my practical artwork skills. I'm going to put artwork over here. Digital link to that. I'm going to write collection club I subscribe to Patrion Collection Club run by Christina Hookans, who is a top teacher here on Skillshare. Each month we design some artwork around a new theme each month. I just love it. I think it's such a fab way to push myself to actually create artwork and to move past that barrier of fear or thinking I can't do something. I'm going to put that down because at the minute I am spending time on that, I also want to work on my physical artwork skills. At the moment, I'm enjoying doing water color, if I can spell it. Other things that I work on as a part of my business are e mails. There are different things that I want to do with my e mail automations. Segmentation and just keeping up a regular e mail practice to customers. I also do the news letter promotions such as free shipping. I guess linked to that, I'll put it coming off the same branch as social media. Although I have put a lot of that on the back burner. It's not a top priority for me right now to just keep up that social media posting in the way that maybe I used to do. But I still want to capture it on here because it's something I think about other things coming up. I've got a couple of craft there, you can see at the minute, this doesn't look much like a process. This just looks like me scribbling down different things that I can think of that I work on at the moment. That's okay. This is if you're feeling in a muzzle, in a tangle to get these things out of your mind and onto paper, it doesn't matter too much how you link them up. The only thing that I would say is, don't be too fake that it's not helpful. Don't be too specific that you've created yourself to do list If your page is filled with tiny, tiny writing saying must send this E mail to this person or must list this particular product on the website, then that's probably too granular. If you find that that's happening, what you can do is just create a separate section or grab another piece of paper and just write down anything on your mind that you think Actually that's a bit more of a to do list item. It's a one and done rather than something that's a continual part of your business. Once you feel like you've put down all of your main categories, you can just have a look over again, see if there's anything else that you haven't thought of for the website. I've remembered that we are working on a big update right now. A refresh and a revamp. We'll put down redevelop site linked to that. We are also creating a new logo that is a one off type of activity. But for me, redeveloping the website may be something that keeps happening over time. It's a big enough thing that I've put this down here also linked to craft supplies. I want to just note down considering wholesale, as that's something we have done in the past but aren't doing right now. I'm going to read round and just see if there's anything else in terms of my artwork. I do also want to work on my digital skills for Illustrator, Photoshop. Procreate learning is really important to me to help my business develop skill share classes. I have some classes on card making, and now I'm also branching out into helping small businesses manage their creative workflows. Let's split that out into cards, watercolor, small business. That's the types of classes. Anything else? I can always come back to this if you want. You don't have to do this all in one go. You can come back to this over a series of days. As you think of things that crop up and you think, oh yes, there's an area here that's also part of the way I run my business or a different type of product that you make. That didn't jump into your mind right away that you can come back and write those down as you think of them. But once you're happy with it, then this will be the basis for starting to make your creative workflow map. 7. Review Your Brainstorm: Now that I finished my brainstorming, I did go back and add a few items. I left a little while and thought about it. I added a few new categories, stationery, homeware, and art prints. Because even though these are things that I don't do right now, the things that I've been thinking about, I have started some of the processes for these. I've got some printer for six to do, lists and calendars and greetings cards. I've got some sample towels printed, and I'm thinking about designs for art prints. I've included those here because they're part of things buzzing around in my head that I want to try and capture when it comes to putting this together to a creative workflow. Before we jump into the software to start making our workflows, first I'm just going to reflect on everything I've written here and start to think a little bit about the order of things and how they connect together. For me, the crux of everything I do probably starts with artwork over here. First thing, artwork Without artwork, I can't do any of the other things for you. That might be something like making earrings, if that's what your small businesses, you might have those on your website, on an Etsy store. You might sell wholesale. You might go to craft fairs. But before any of those things happen, your starting point is making your product, whether that is artwork or a physical product, or even if it's a suite of services that you offer. You could use this approach to think about how those connect together as well. First of, artwork is going to be the place that my workflow begins from. Then the next thing to reflect on is what represents the core of your business. Even though, for example, I do print on demand right now, that is not my core focus, that's not my core offering. If I were to include that as the first step on my map, that would feel a little bit out of sync with how my business really looks, how it really works. I would picture for my particular business. The next step would be somewhere over here. My website and my Ets store. Stick is one of the core things that we do and craft supplies. I'm going to group these together and this is going to be, let's put number two here for craft supplies and stickers as well. I think of those as one category. Then the things that come off here, earrings and planer charms, they are not our core offering, but they are something we're very actively working on right now. I might put those in their own little bubbles. The third item of importance, as it were, again, this isn't a science. This is just something to help you start to piece together an order for the way that you run things in your business. For example, if you sell things wholesale, you might not put that near the start if that is something that happens at the end of your chain of working on things. For example, you might use your artwork to create your products. You might upload it to print on demand. And then it's not much further down the line that you consider whether those products might be sold wholesale. On the flip side, if you're a business where you're creating something primarily for wholesale, then you would perhaps put this further ahead in the process. There are other things as well that you might not feel fit into a workflow right now. For example, I've got skill share classes here, our website redevelopment here, that doesn't really fall into a chronological flow of things. That's okay too. I probably won't give them a number for now. I could just leave them on here as they are. Then when I come to piece together my process map in our software online, we can consider whether this becomes part of it or whether that is a standalone thing that isn't dependent on something else. For example, I could create a new class about Christmas watercolor cards that you can make. That wouldn't be dependent on whether I'd done any artwork for my stickers or products that it's a facet of my business, but it is connected in the workflow. And that's okay too. Not everything will be same with things like social media, e mails, promotion, or maybe craft fairs. Not everything will fit nicely into that workflow bracket. But when we jump onto our software and start to piece things together, you should find that it starts to flow a little bit more easily as to what's separate and it'll be easier to do what. We can see that on screen. Let's move on to that next. 8. Mapping Overview: Before we start creating our workflow maps, I'll talk through some practical tips and some key principles of mapping. Your finished map will look something like this, everyone's will be different. You're going to create your map in a way that works for you and is appealing to you. If you're using paper, you may prefer to do your map in pencil so you can rub out if you change your mind. Or even Betty, you might like to use little sticky notes so you can move things around. If you want to do this as a one off exercise, a whiteboard or post notes on a wall will work well. But if you want to keep your map and return to it and tweak it, I recommend creating a digital version. Use any software you're familiar with that allows you to create shapes and text. Or use a digital whiteboard such as Miro, which is free to sign up to and use. And it's pretty intuitive. It has mapping tools built in to make it really fast to create and tweak maps. That's what I'll be using. 9. Create Your Map: As I mentioned in the previous lesson, you can do your workflow map in whichever way suits you. But if you're following along with me, you'll see I've opened up Miro here. Go to Miro.com and sign up for a free account. And then when you've logged in, you'll see this view here next to me. I've got my brainstorm. I can use that as the basis for putting the map together. What I'll start with first is a new board. I'm not going to focus too much on how to use Mio. It's quite intuitive. It will also give you some tips and tutorials if you're new to it. But I will give you some hints as we go through to move around. Use your mouse or track pad, then scroll or a pinch zoom to move in and out. What I'm going to start with is very importantly, I think, making the board look pretty, which will also give you a chance to test out how to use the shapes. I'm going to make some flowers to decorate my board to begin with. Before we do any pieces of the map using the shape on here, I'm going to go to All Shapes. It pops up some options here, need to go trawling through unless you particularly want to have a look. But I'm going to grab a few clouds that can represent our flowers that you can drag to change the size. What you can also do is change the colors. Here I have added our custom stick, a kit in color, my business color. You can do that by hitting the plus button and typing in the hex code of the color you want that fills in the inside. And then for the border of the shape, I'm just going to make it the same because I want mine to look flat. I'm going to add some circles to be the center of the flower. If you hold down shift, you can get it to make an even size circle, then we can change the color again. It's quite simple, quite intuitive. And you can zoom in and out to place things as you wish. The other helpful thing is that you can highlight and control C, control V to copy and paste. As usual, I can make a few flowers here, oops. If we want them to move together, we can also, if we select, should be a way to group them. Can I do it here? I'll try ang to group. That worked. Okay. Kanji will group your images together so that the flower stays with the circle when you're moving around. I think I've only done one of them, haven't I? Let's group those. Kang and then I want to add some stars as well. So go back to our shapes on the side. I'll choose the star. Then I'll click and drag to draw the star. I'm happy with that color. You see that it remembers the last design that I used. I'll do hold down shift to make it even again. Do a couple of different sizes. Let's have some small stars. We'll have some big stars. Oops, I'll do it one to narrow. Sometimes it does things you're not quite expecting. But this is just a chance for you to have a play around and get used to the software. If you've not used it before, copy and paste again to make a few more tiny mini stars. I know many people would put this at the end of the process, this kind of decorating and making it look nice. But it's important to me, I'm starting with that. But there we go already. I'm feeling better because I'm not staring at a blank canvas anymore. We've got some we've got some lovely stars and some lovely flowers. It's looking nice. You don't have to do stars and flowers, of course. Whatever you like. Whatever ideas you have, however you want this to look. Okay, there we go. Now we've got some items on the board. It looks lovely. Let's group these stars together. I'm going to click and drag to highlight them again. And command G to group them. And then I can move them around as a group. I can also command V to copy and paste. You can rotate and move them around. Have a play around as you want to get used to the controls and to make your board look nice. Now let's move on to Mapping. As I mentioned earlier in the class, we are going to put together a flow chart. I'll decide on the boxes that I want to use. I'm going to go for rounded boxes because I like the look of them. You can go for square boxes. And I'm also going to change the color of this. I'm going to have them as my sticker kitten default business color. When you double click on a shape, you can type in it. I've identified from my brainstorming that the core starting point, the kickoff for everything I do is creating artwork. That's what I'm going to put here, create artwork collection. Because normally if I design something, I don't just design a couple of things. I'll do a range of different artworks that all match together an artwork collection. I also want to change the text to be white because I think that looks nicer against this color. Next step, as we did when we reviewed our brainstorm before, we looked at the core things that we do for our business and we decided a rough order to start putting them in. I marked artwork first, and then next I noted down stickers and craft supplies. And then after that, earrings and planer charms. As I go through, I'm going to keep referring back to my brainstorm here and pulling out what I think flows naturally in the process. If there's anything that doesn't fit yet, that's okay, I can leave it to one side. Or if there's something I'm not sure about, I can just put it in and move it later. This way of working in Io is quite flexible. If you need to go back and add something in later, you can do it. Doesn't have a problem with formatting or managing extra pieces put in after the fact that you always have the option to move things around, change connections, and redo anything that you're not satisfied with. I've decided what I'm going to do is all about stickers. Once I've made my artwork, you'll see that when I hover over this dot here, it suggests that, that I might want to drop in a next box. If I click, it will drop in that box for me. It'll put in the connecting arrow and it will put the box there ready to type in my next step after creating my artwork collection, Look through it and decide which elements I want to pull out for stickers. Pull out elements for stickers. When I did my brainstorm, I simply wrote down stickers. But now that I'm describing this as a process, I want to use active words, create, put, doing words, verbs. This is because the focus now is rather than on things, or products or ideas, it's on what do we do, What are we actually doing at each stage? Create artwork. Pull out elements for stickers, following them. For that, I create sticker sheets. Whoops, ever gets caught up. Create sticker sheets. Next in my process, there's a couple of things you can think about here. The first is, how granular, how detailed do you want to go here? What I could do is go off on a tangent about how exactly I create sticker sheets, about testing them, about printing them, about cutting them. But because I'm not treating this as a process, I'm treating it as kind of a higher level capture than that. I'm not going to put that complete breakdown in. So I'm going to skip over the whole printing cutting testing phase in detail. I'm going to skip straight to photograph. Photograph. Yeah, it's being a little bit slow. Let me go photograph because as you'll see when I move on this photograph stage won't just be what I do for stickers, that's what I do for all products I create photograph. As I mentioned before, you can pinch zoom to move in and out if you find you need more space. If we zoom out really far, you can see that you've got absolutely plenty photograph. I would list those stickers on our website Sticker Kitten and on our Etsy store list of Nk. I do want to put in here about sharing on social media we'll in the next. Lesson about how to make good use of our maps when we've completed them. I want to use mine as in some ways a checklist reminder of all the things I want to consider or I want to do whenever I make new artwork and make new products. So I'm going to include sharing on social media here as a prompt to myself to do that part. When we get to that stage, fire e mail and social media, and then I'm also going to put Pin images because I have a Pinterest board as well. Let's see out a little bit. The other thing I'm going to do is think about things that I don't do yet but that I might want to do. I'm going to put those in a different color, so if I add a new box here, I'm going to write down, notify wholesale customers in brackets, craft. Now, I don't sell my stickers wholesale, but I do offer other items I did. It's not something I do right now because that's the part of my business that isn't active right now. I'm going to change the color of this would be a nice color should we go for this nice bright teal. That's just one line, one flow based on stickers with this extra bit here. Depending on what you have in your brainstorm, you might want to think about what else you can pull out that is directly springing off this artwork. Starting point or whatever your starting point is. Or you might want to think, oh, do we diversify into other things further down here? There's no wrong way to create your map. It's just whatever feels more flowing for you, Whatever is more useful. Remember as I said, you can easily change, create these differently later on if you need to. Say, for example, I decided I needed another step in here. There's a couple of different ways you could do it. But I would just copy and paste a box. Put in extra item. Then I can highlight all of these, budge them along a little bit, drop this guy in here. And then we can drag the arrow to change it, and then pop a new arrow in here. You can see that took me a matter of seconds to add in that extra item. Let's undo that for now. Controls to do, we'll get rid of that extra box. The other things that I noted down as some of my key business processes that I work on, paper craft is the other main elements. Stickers is one. And then any artwork that I create, I think, do I want to make this into a stamp set or a paper pack? Consider papercraft. What I'll do is start a new row down here. Because to me, that is a next step, a different step in the process. I wouldn't join it on in the end here, because I don't want one massive, great, big, long trailing thing. It's not something that has to happen afterwards. Let's call this consider for Papercraft Collection, papers stamps, ephemera paper card toppers. If your text doesn't fit, you can change the size of your box. But I like the look of keeping all mine the same. I'm actually just changing the font size to make them fit the box. Okay. Consider for paper craft, as I was saying, because this isn't something that's dependent on these. I wouldn't put it over here. It's something that can happen straight after this first step, that's why it has its own new line. Then what we can do is just have a new arrow coming from this original start point here and dropping down here. I'm going to look over my brainstorm again and just start pulling out the other elements as well and adding those in. Okay, so as you can see, I've just gone through and added down the main items from my brainstorm that kick off following the artwork creation fit. I might budge all these up a little bit so they fit on my screen. The way I've done these as before, I've used the blue to mark items that I am. Looking into, or that I want to be part of my business workflow, but that aren't yet here. Adding my designs to a collection cell sheets which were linked to art licensing. So I'm going to add those next steps in a moment. I've also got some more down here. Consider for stationery. Consider for art prints and nursery wall art. Consider for homewares. These are all areas of the business that I don't do right now, but that I would like to be part of my workflow. I wanted to include those because as I did my brainstorm, I captured things that I'm thinking about or I started looking into or I started work on, but that aren't necessarily the core of what I do right now. From each of these, I'm going to go through again and think about how they link up or what the following steps are for each one. You can do this whichever way suits you best. You might prefer to just add one item at a time and then follow it through its journey. Or you can do as I've done and pop down all of the main ideas first. And then think about each one in more detail as you get to it. Items that I think about papercraft collections for. The next step would be to design and print those products. I'm not going to go into detail and break that down here. If I wanted to have a separate document where I captured all the steps involved in designing and printing a paper, craft collection, I could definitely do that. We can talk in the next lesson about why that might be useful, but for now, this is enough detail for what I need once those products are made. You can see why I did this one. First, we link back up here because the process is the same following that I would photograph the items, list them on my website and net store, share that on social media, and then notify wholesale customers. That's why I did this lane first and then moved on to the others. Next, consider for three D printing items, earring, stencils, charms. The following step for that would be to create those products. Then you've guessed it, that can link straight back up to photographing them here. One of the nice things about Mira, you can see that when you drag that arrow, it meets it up for you and joins it together so you don't have millions of lines all over the place. Next, add to POD. Currently, I upload our designs to several different POD sites. I do actually want to break that down here because it just if I am going to then use my work flow as a checklist later on, I want that visual aid to help me go through and say, upload to this site. Upload to this site. Did I consider this site? Let's pop all of those in as their own little boxes. But I don't think I need a great big long box for each one. What I'm going to do is make a smaller one for each line. Let's align that, then. I'm going to copy that down. This one and another. There we go. Then I do also have a website integration with printful, but I don't use that fully right now. It's more of a something on the back burner. We'll mark that as blue for something that's not cool then, because I like everything to look neat. I'll shift these up a little bit. You can play around with the formatting and alignment as you wish, but I like mine to look nice and neat and evenly spaced. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to shift the little boxes a tiny bit at a time so that they fall into the right place. It depends how important that sort of thing is to you. I like it to look neat, I spend the time on it. Then we can just drag the arrows to join our boxes here. Or I can use the arrow tool to grab a new arrow and connect that over like this. Then for all of these, because they are uploading to print on demand sites, they don't involve photography or website listings. We would skip, possibly to straight over here to sharing on social media. If I added a new design, any T shirt design, for example, to my print on demand stores, then the next step from that would be to let people know about that new design via e mail and my social channels. There we go. You can see that that links to this, but it's not relevant to this. If you're being strict about your creative workflow map, you might not want to have things linking that aren't relevant here, but just do things in whatever way feels natural and comfortable and usable for you. I don't mind too much that this is applicable only to these two lines. I think my map is going to be simple enough that that won't confuse me or complicate anything too much. But if you are unhappy with the way you've linked something up or it's not working for you, then of course you can play around and change it. Let's have a thinker there. Any more? Next step, add to collection cell sheet. Then the next thing I would want to do is add to portfolio. So let's pop that in. Take portfolio then. It would be a case of pitching new designs. Then you might take a little bit of time here to think abstractly. If you have captured items that aren't part of your current workflow, I haven't finished my portfolio yet. But it has started, I haven't pitched our designs for art licensing yet. But if I were to, I think I probably would want to share those designs on social media too. I'm going to link it up here to this social box as well. Down here. Consider for stationery. The next step for that would be for me get print quotes. Then the following steps would be to design product, manufacture product. And then we'd link back up to photography. But because this is still, um, in its infancy, things I don't do yet, I'm actually not going to add that detail yet. I don't want too much detail on the things that I'm not actively doing right now. But of course, that's completely up to you If you're designing a work flow that is a lot more comprehensive than what you have now, something that you want to try, and you're kind of testing out different ways that that could work for your business, then you might want to add a lot of detail on these items. Or you might have gone the other way and decided that actually you don't want to include anything that doesn't represent what you do right now. It's entirely up to you. So I'm going to leave that as it is, even though it doesn't finish off anywhere. I'm okay with that for now. And then for this one here, I'm just going to add a note for myself. I'd love to have our designs as art prints or nursery wall art. We have some cute dinos and unicorns and mermaids and things like that, and I think they'll be so lovely as like personalized prints for a nursery. When I was thinking about those, I did think about two different options. One of them actual art prints, physical prints, and the other downloads. I'm going to capture those as two different possible workflow ideas here in two boxes. One of them would be a print product. Let's make that a smaller box then. If I copy and paste, this box would be a digital download. It's enough for me for now to have captured these as ideas without spelling out how exactly I might print them or the mechanisms for download. And then this one here considered for homeware, towels and mugs. There's a few different ways I could go about that. I could set them up on print, on demand sites, I could order them from a wholesaler. I could get myself a heat press. I could make them myself. But for now, I'm just going to leave that as it is because I haven't explored that option any further yet. For me, this is looking near finished. It's not hugely complex and that's good. I don't want my business to feel too big and complicated right now. There was something else that I thought of as a precursor step to the way I work right now that is actually doing some research on current trends and designs. Before I start creating artwork, I'm going to add that in as a new preliminary step. Maybe if I just shift over my flowers a bit. Me flowers, look, you can also shift them all in one go. And we rotate them a bit like that. And then they can go there. I'll add some more flowers at the end. I'm going to copy this blue box paste over here. Then my new kickoff step. I'm thinking, because I don't do it yet, could be research design trends before I start creating artwork. So let's link that with the arrow Ab. Okay, now take some time at this point to reflect on what you've got noted down so far. You might want to tweak some things, move some things, or you might want to leave it and come back another day. You might want to go back and review your brainstorm again or even add to it. When I was kind of putting together my practice ideas. I've done this once before as a practice, so I could figure out exactly how I wanted my work flow to look. You could do the same if you wanted. You could do it on paper before you did it on the board. Here though, I do think this board is flexible enough that if you're not happy with what you've done, you can change all around. Yeah. You can come back and you can add things or you can take things away. Yeah, just take some time to feel kind of comfortable with what you've put together And anything else I want to add? Yeah. The other thing I would say is that if you've got items left on your brainstorm that you didn't add to this map yet, then just have a think about if you need to capture them on here. One of the things I noted down was our website, rebuild and redesign. Which I wanted to capture because it was something that was on my mind and I was thinking about and I knew needed to be done. But I've not put it into my workflow because it's not something that I am going to be doing often for me. If it was something that did need a regular update from me, then maybe I would capture that. But now I'm happy to leave that off. Same with creating skill share classes, for example. That doesn't fit into my product workflow here, Even though that is a part of the way I run my business right now, I haven't added it here. If I did want to capture it, what I might do is to create maybe a little island down here with some extra items that didn't fit in the workflow. I could do this by using a shape. Should we go for this nice cloud shape again? Maybe I'll make it this nice gold, yellowy color. We can say, let's add a box, copy and paste a box. Create skillshare classes that can just live in this bubble here. Whilst I think about how to integrate that, or if I want to integrate it, or if I just want to leave it separate and have my own little flower island here of things that aren't part of that product workflow. Let's pop in the website. Rebuild here without an R website rebuild. The other thing you could do if you find it more appealing, is to create all of your items as boxes beforehand and rearrange them on the page. And then once you're happy with the way that you've set them out, you can then add the arrows to connect them together. It's entirely up to you. Then you can also spend some time adding some more detail decoration, some more flowers and stars, or however you want to do it. However you want to lay this out to make it look most attractive to you. That's it for creating our maps. In the next lesson, join me as we talk about how to get the most out of our maps. See you there. 10. Reflect on Your Creative Workflow Map: Now that you've finished your map, let's talk a bit about how we can use it as a tool for reflection and to help with your creative business. You can see that I've adjusted the flowers on stars on mine a little bit to make it look a bit nicer. And I'll probably continue tweaking them as well. Once your process flow chart is complete, some things to think about. A firstly, how do you feel about what you've created about the process of brainstorming and creating this map? Did it feel good for you? Do you more organized? Do you feel more clear on your business or was it difficult? Do you feel more confused? Do you feel that you have a lot of disparate parts that don't match up? This is just something you can use to reflect and decide what you want to do about that, if anything. Next, how do you feel about each part of your workflow? So now that you've put all these elements in together, as you go through and look at each box, how do you feel about each thing? How do you feel about your start point, the core of your business? How do you feel about each step that comes after? How do I feel about creating sticker sheets? Really good. How do I feel about photography, enlisting? I feel really good about all these things. How do I feel about these other elements, the things that I don't yet do in my business? How do I feel about that? Creating stationery, creating art prints, creating homeware. At the minute, I feel a little bit overwhelmed. This looks like a lot. And I think that for me, that's a sign that maybe I can't suddenly rush into all these extra elements. What I can see now I've done this, is that it's a bit clearer to me what the core of my business is right now. And that these items, even though they would be great fun to do and to get stuck into that. If I feel overwhelmed by them right now, I might not have capacity for that at the moment. So it can be useful in that way. It doesn't just have to be a kind of a data or a sort of strict process view of what you do. It can be a way to reflect on how you feel about what you do as well. Other things to think about. Is there anything that you want to start or stop doing, anything that you've marked down that you don't yet do in your business? Do you feel particularly excited by that? Do you wish that you did that instead of something that you currently do? Is there anything that you're looking at that you think, Wow, I really don't enjoy this bit. I don't get much from this bit. This feels like a bit that I want to take out of my workflow. It, it doesn't bring me any joy. So that's something to consider as well. One of the ways that you can use your map, as I'm going to do for mine, is as a checklist. So whenever I create artwork now what I will do is open up my map and just run through each of these things. Are there any elements I want to pull out for stickers? Do I want to use any of this for a paper craft collection? Are there any three D printed products that I could make from this artwork? Do I want to upload the designs to POD sites and then in the future, do I want to consider them for these other avenues as well. And then for those that I do take forward, I can follow the steps as I've laid them out here. So creating the stickers in the products, photography listings, sharing on socials, which may seem simple I suppose when I lay it out like this, but that's what I'm hoping for. What I actually find is that I have a lot of projects on at the same time. And that I might be photographing something over here, but starting some new artwork over here. But I'm considering something that I created months and months ago for stationery. So if you feel a little bit like you're jumping around, then this might help you to feel that you have a workload that you're in control of by starting with one thing and following it through. For example, if you keep creating artwork, but always get stuck at a certain stage without moving on, and maybe you can dig into the reasons for that, that's something helpful to consider as well. Where are your blockages in the process? So do you get, for example, the photography stage and you have 20 different projects waiting here that you haven't got round to photographing yet. And if you notice, there are points in your flow chart where work tends to build up a bottleneck of work. You can then start to investigate further. You can think about why is that? Why do I get stuck at that stage? Is there something preventing me from doing that part of the process? Is there something that was getting in my way or is it that I just don't like that part of the process. Once you've identified those things, you can start to work through them and to improve that to help you move forward with your workflow. The other things that you consider that you can consider to take your map to the next level, perhaps adding some timings. Say for example here I might want to start looking at how long it takes me to do each stage. Let's add a new shape. We'll make this, we have an orange star this time. I might want to say creating artwork takes me, let's say, five days, depending on what it is and how complex it is. If I'm spending five working days and that we can put that there, pull out elements for stickers, How long might that take me? Well, all in, maybe not very long, maybe half a day. Half day to decide what I want to make into stickers. You could probably do these, in what's the word I want, consistent timing. So if I'm starting with days, I keep with days. Or if I'm starting with minutes, I keep with minutes. If I'm starting with hours, I keep with hours. Whatever works for you, however you want to do it. And then creating sticker sheets. How long might that take me? Well, if I've got quite a few to do, maybe I would give myself two days for that and so on and so on. If you find that useful, you can start to do that for your workflows, just your core workflow, all the other things as well. You might want to do it for aspects of your business that you don't yet do, to see how long that would take you in reality to see if that is something you could actually build into your workflow. Or whether it's far more commitment in terms of time than you'd anticipated. Once you've done that, that again, gives you something else to reflect back on. What takes the longest in your business. Is that proportional? For example, if I'm finding that listings are taking me days and days and days instead of a matter of hours, I might want to think about why that process is being dragged out to dig into whether the time I'm spending on listings is very long or whether it's just that I'm leaving a long gap in between doing each listing. And is that how I want to work? Is there something I could change there? These are all different ways that you can reflect on your business. One other thing you could add as another tool for reflection is revenue. You could say, for example, okay, I've created my sticker sheets. How much revenue does sticker sheets bring in? And you could decide on the time period for that, whether that's over a month or a year or a quarter. You could then go and look at your other avenues. So creating earrings. How much revenue does that bring in? And then maybe I would add another shape here, or a star, something with that information attached. I could also come down here and do a projection. If I were to move into doing stationary items for six to do pads or cons or greeting cards, how much revenue would I expect to bring in from those particular items? If I got X many made, took out the manufacturing costs, what is my revenue that's left, and then attach it to here. So remember this. Would this map be in terms of each artwork cycle, each time I created an artwork collection, what would I expect to be the revenue for any stationery I decide from that collection. Obviously, that would take you some time. You would have to do your numbers, work that out. Probably have your spreadsheet set up if you don't already to capture that kind of information. But you may want to attach those kind of headline figures to your workflow map to help you spotlight things that are key for you in terms of revenue. Or maybe spot those things which are disproportionate in terms of time spent versus revenue it brings in for you. That's one other way that you can take this map forward to a next step. What else might we want to consider probably revisiting it. I think for me, because I want to use this map as a checklist, I'll come back to it fairly often. But I would say if you've done this as a one off activity, come back at least every three months to revisit your map and just do the same reflection that I've talked about in this lesson. So is there anything that feels good for you? Still feels good, doesn't feel good anymore. Anything that suddenly takes a lot more time. Anything that's a new avenue that you want to add in or you want to explore, all those kind of questions you can go through again every three months just to help you take that time to step out of your business and look on it as a whole and reflect on where you are with things. Now, I hope this has given you an idea of how you can use a creative workflow map like this to organize and reflect on your business. 11. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, You have reached the end of the class. Hopefully you are now feeling a little calmer, more organized, and more inspired about the workflow for your creative business. Head on over to the project gallery and upload a screenshot of your finished process map. If you're happy to share your business processes and I can give you some tailored feedback if that's something you'd like. You can also use the discussion tab below to ask any questions about mapping or figuring out your process or anything else you're feeling stuck on. Finally, I'd love it if you could leave a review of this class in the review tab below. It will really help me to know what you liked about this class, what you find useful, and what you would like to see more of or differently next time. So I can keep making content that helps small business owners and creators like yourself. If you haven't already, please also hit the follow button next to my name to follow me as a teacher and be notified when I post new classes. You can also find out more about me and my small business over on my website, which is Stickerkitten.com dot K. And you'll find me on Instagram and Facebook too. I also encourage you to sign up to my e mail newsletter to hear about all things Sticker Kitten, and about new skill. Share classes from me too. Thank you for joining me in this class and I hope to see you again in another class soon. Bye.