Transcripts
1. Expanding your Creative Business: Hi, I'm Christina and I'm the brand owner of Tiny Curl. A crochet business centered around fun designs and products. As a small creative business owner, I know what it's like to do everything for my small business, myself, from branding and marketing to business planning and strategizing. Although my business is centered around crochet, I'm passionate about all small creative businesses and using my knowledge to help fellow creative business owners design the business of their dreams. In this class, I'll walk you through the ins and outs of brand strategy, help you refine your financial business goals and give you a high-level view of many different income generators that you can apply to your business. This class is the perfect antidote for creative business owners that feel like their business is in a rut or need a spark of inspiration and guidance to move it forward. If you're just starting your business, this class will give you a great foundation with a business strategy and revenue streams that are aligned. But you'll need to do a deeper dive into branding, business strategy, and marketing to have a really solid business. Whether you're creative business is photography, illustration, fiber arts, or baking, you'll be able to apply these strategies and revenue streams in different ways to suit your business. Because creative businesses are highly varied, some of the tips and strategies won't apply to your business, but I do recommend giving them a watch because you never know what will spark some inspiration for your business. At the end of each video, there will be an action task for you to complete. All of the prompts and actions in this class are included in the Expand your Business workbook, which you can find in the class project tab. The prompts in this class, especially the brand strategy aspects, will require a little deep thinking and soul searching. This can be hard, especially for someone like me who loves right answers. But I promise that if you do the work in this section, you'll end up with a really strong business foundation that will set you up for success. I encourage you to revisit this class or the expander business workbook anytime you want to make sure your business efforts are aligned. In the class projects page, feel free to share any or all of the following: your business's mission, vision, why, and customer base, their revenue streams, and your business idols, and what their businesses look like.
2. Brand Strategy: Mission & Vision Statements: Your brand strategy is a filter to make sure that all clients you take or products you create are aligned. In defining your businesses, mission and vision statements, your why and your customer bases. You're creating a foundation for your business and a way to make sure that the strategies you're implementing are all united. Even if you've already developed your brand strategy, it's extremely important to revisit it to make sure it still serving you and your business. I like to go over my brand strategy every six months or so to make sure that it doesn't need any updating or adjusting. The first element of your brand strategy is your mission statement. It is the what of your business and it's based in the present. Your mission statement describes your business as succinctly as possible. At its core, it's one or two sentences that describes what your company does, who it serves, and its competitive advantages. It's a short written statement of your business goals and philosophies that serves as an overall guide for how you run your business and how your business interacts with the world around it. For example, the Tiny Curl's mission statement is Tiny Curl designs products and content for creative entrepreneurs and makers that inspires creativity, expands knowledge and instills confidence through the lens of authenticity and honesty. Take some time to reflect on the following questions before you write your mission statement and remember, there are no right answers. These notes are for you. Just let the ideas flow and see what pops out at you. What specifically do you do? Who do you do it for? How do you do it? What value are you providing? What principles do you stand behind? What advantages do you have over your competition? What is unique about your product or service? Then with the notes you took from those questions, write your mission statement. Remember, you want to get it as close to done as possible, but it's the living mission and it can change and adapt with your business. The second element of your brand strategy is your vision statement. Think of your vision statement as the where of your business or where you want your business to go. It's future-focused and it's an inspirational vision of your business. Think goals, dreams, and aspirations. The vision statements really helpful in making sure that what you're doing day to day is going to get you where you want to go. The keys to a good vision statement are that, it's future-focused, it clearly describes what your business will be doing several years from now. It's directional. It serves as a guide for plans and strategies. It's specific. It's clear and focused enough to shape decision-making. It's challenging and inspiring. It inspires you to do great things and achieve a higher level of standard. It's unique and memorable. It highlights what makes your organization different and why it matters. As an example, my vision for Tiny Curl is, to empower others to discover and use their creative talents. Now take some time to reflect on the following questions. As with the mission statement, just like your ideas flow and then see what jumps out at you after you've done some brainstorming. Where do you see your business going? What is your definition of success for your business? What difference will you make for your customers and your own life? Now take some time to write your businesses vision statement.
3. Brand Strategy: "Why" & Customer Bases: Along with your mission and vision statements, your 'why' is the reason for everything you do, the products you create, and the decisions you make. I find that the 'why' really helps when I'm second-guessing myself or I forget why I'm doing what I'm doing. The 'why' is particularly helpful when things get hard, and similar to a mantra, it's your unique reason to keep going. For example, Tiny Curl's 'why' is, create to make yourself and others happy. Take some time to reflect on the following questions to discover your 'why'. Why do you do what you do? What do you want to be known for? What excites you about your business? Using the answers to those questions, go ahead and write your 'why' statement. Knowing your customers helps you create products and services that are uniquely geared toward them. As Seth Godin says, "Don't find customers for your products, create products for your customers." Customer bases can be mass market, which is a large consumer group with similar needs, for example, stay at home moms. It can be a niche market, which is a segment with specific needs, for example, new moms in their early 30's who work from home on a creative hand-made business. As a small business, I strongly recommend that you focus on one or two niche markets so that you can really accurately serve those customers. You can have multiple niche markets that you serve separately. Identifying your customer bases helps you envision who you're creating for and you'll more accurately identify the needs of your customers. You want to make your customer bases as specific as possible. Remember, you'll probably have some customers that fall outside of these bases, but for the purposes of your brand strategy, you want to make sure that your customer bases are as targeted as possible. For example, Tiny Curl's customer bases are fiber family, crocheters, yarn companies, and crafty publications with a penchant for color, doll making, and quirky design, and handmade soloprenuers, creative women focused on making a business out of their craft. Take a moment to brainstorm and answer the following questions. If you already have an established business, who is your current customer? Is this market targeted enough? For each of your customer bases identify the following: Demographics: age, gender, location, income, and job title. Psychographics: values, interests and lifestyles. What do they do for fun? Where do they shop for clothes? What are three adjectives to describe them? Think of a name that describes each customer base to make them easier to visualize. With the information you gathered from those questions, you should be able to craft a customer profile for each unique customer base.
4. Defining Your Financial Goals: Whether you're creative business as a part-time or a full-time gain setting your financial goals will help you pick revenue streams that will get you there. In this video, I'll be going through several topics for you to consider so that you can set your own financial goals. Whether your business is part-time or full-time, will depend largely on your own responsibilities and goals. Many creative entrepreneurs start their businesses on a side until it can make enough income for them to take it full time. But what that full-time income number is for you specifically, will be very personal. Owning and growing a business is a miracle not a spread. Remembering that will help keep your goals and expectations manageable. Creative businesses come in many sizes and I find it really helpful to think about how you like to work to determine what size you want your business to be. For example, would you prefer being a solopreneur, just working with yourself and avoid having to manage employees. Then you'll want to keep your business manageable for a one-person team or maybe you'll find a small team really helpful and manageable. So you're going to want to set goals to make a small and close-knit team of employees or maybe you're hoping to grow a really large company and potentially have a bigger company, purchase your company. Whatever the case is, whatever scale that you determine is right for you and your business, thinking about it in these terms will really help you define your goals and set your prices and products to achieve those goals. Achieving the perfect work-life balance is the pinnacle of success for many entrepreneurs. But you're going to need to identify what a work-life balance means to you. Consider these questions and maybe jot down a couple notes. What do you want your schedule to look like during the day? Do you want to have a lot of free time to spend with your family and friends or would you like long swaths of time in which to work? Thinking about what work-life balance looks like for you will help me set better expectations of your potential income. If you know that you want a lot of flexibility and want to be able to take a lot of vacations during your year, you might have set up more revenue streams that are passive, which we'll cover in the next video. Even if you're a solopreneur you can budget for certain tasks to be outsourced. Outsourcing tasks that you don't want to do can lead to potentially higher revenue by freeing up a lot of your valuable time to make more products and services. Common tasks that people outsource can be accounting, manufacturing products, or photography. Outsourcing elements of your business that take up your time and don't really need you to complete them, will free up your time to make things that will bring in a higher revenue that only you can do. Now take the next 15 minutes to get a better idea on your financial goals. Take some notes and brainstorm on the following questions. What are your goals for income this year? What are your goals for expenses? Do you have an amount in have to make to cover your living expenses? Envision your daily work schedule. What are you spending the majority of your day doing? How can you structure your business around this vision? What would you like to outsource in your business?
5. Revenue Streams: Active vs. Passive: If your brand strategy is the foundation of your business, then the revenue streams are the bricks that make up the whole. Making your brand strategy, deciding on revenue streams for your business or tweaking, refining, and adding to the revenue streams you're currently using will be a whole lot easier. Your brand strategy will help you decide which bricks to add to your foundation. A revenue stream is a source of income for your business. So basically it's how you plan to make money. Most successful businesses use a combination of revenue streams within their business which can help reduce risk and can make cashflow more regular. A revenue stream can be as simple as selling a product you made to an end-user, or it can be more involved like a subscription service you provide. Revenue streams can be active or passive. An active revenue stream would be one where you actively have to do something to complete the sale. So an artist selling art prints at a craft market would be an example of an active revenue stream because they have to actively be there to sell the print. A passive revenue stream is one where you don't have to do anything to complete the purchase. This usually involves doing a lot of work upfront to create a product and then automating that product for purchase. Contrary to popular belief, passive income and passive revenue streams do not mean no work at all. It usually involves a lot of long-term maintenance and marketing for it to be successful over time, and it requires the upfront time commitment to create the product. An example of a passive revenue stream would be an artist selling digital art prints on Etsy. So when someone purchases the print, they download it and print it themselves. After you've designed and listed your digital print, there's no work required from you to complete the purchase. Here are a few ways you can turn what you've already done into a passive revenue stream. You can make your service into a product. So if your business is primarily service-based, your time is really valuable. At a certain point your income is going to cap because you don't have any more hours in the day to devote to your clients. By creating passive income streams, you can potentially increase your income without permanently losing valuable time. If you're a photographer doing client work, you could set up a class that teaches your core specialties such as portrait photography or food photography, or if you're a web designer that's currently working one-on-one to design websites for clients, you could try creating templates for a multiple customers to buy. You can also try repurposing products that you've already made. So if you're a maker that already has art or content that you've made, you can try looking for another way to solve that or package it. So if you're an artist, you can look for ways to sell digital prints. You could license your artwork to another business. If you're a blogger, you can try combining or expanding different blog posts on a similar topic into an e-book or a PDF for your readers to buy.
6. Revenue Streams: Categories: In this video, I'll be detailing a variety of revenue streams. You will likely recognize a lot of that and may already be using them in your business. The goal here is to take stock of your revenue streams you're currently using and to refine, add to them, or treat them depending on your brand strategy. That's less is not exhaustive by any means, but I'll try to cover the most common revenue streams and the ones specific to creative businesses. Consumer products are products you sell directly to the end-user online or offline or to retailers who sell to the end user. When you sell consumer products yourself, it will typically be through an online job, at an in-person market or event, or in your own storefront on. When you sell products via another retailer, it will likely be for wholesale or consignment. For wholesale, you sell your products to another business, usually at a reduced price, and they sell it to the end-user. Typically, someone purchasing your goods wholesale would expect to pay about half of the retail price for the item so they can make a profit selling it in their shop. In consignment relationships, a store may offer to display and stock your items and you only get paid if the product sells. The store would take a percentage of the sale for their profit and you would get the rest. Products can be hand-made, designed by you and manufactured by someone else or purchased from the manufacturer or wholesaler to resell. They can be physical or digital. Some ways you can maximize your profits from making physical or digital products are, if you're only selling in person or through shops, you can try opening an online storefront through Etsy or your own website. Selling handmade physical products, you want to make sure that you are able to make a profit after you factor in your time for labor and supplies. Depending on your creative field, digital products are a great way to include this revenue stream in your business. It can very easily be a passive income stream if you automate delivery of the digital product to the buyer. A few examples of businesses selling consumer products are: an illustrator who sells prints, mugs, and enamel pins or totes with their artwork on them. Network designer who sells digital knitting patterns, or a jewelry designer who sells their finished jewelry via their own online shop and local source. Consumer services, are services you provide to an end-user or recipient. They typically create a one-on-one relationship between you and your client where you provide them with a customized service. Consumer services can be a great way to beef up your income because one-on-one services typically carry a higher price tag than a prepackaged product. You also don't need a large audience to make a good income from services. Just a handful of climates. If you want to add a consumer services to your revenue roster, I encourage you to think about your current customer base and what they may want from service. Finding lines for your service is the biggest hurdle and making this a reliable revenue streams. So if you start with the audience you already have, it will be easier to get clients. Another thing to remember is, as I mentioned in the previous video, consumer services require your time to complete them, and we all know that time is finite. So you want to make sure you are adding other passive revenue streams to your business to have a more reliable income. Examples of businesses providing consumer services are: a fashion stylists providing personal shopping and styling for a client. A photographer shooting wedding pictures, or a soap maker creating a custom soap for a customer. For memberships and subscriptions, your customers pay a recurring fee to receive access to an archive of your resources or receive something continuously over a certain period of time. This can be a subscription to a library of content you created or exclusive content for subscribers only. It could also be a subscription for a collection of products your customers receive monthly. Your subscription service can function similarly to a consumer service. Where you offer your customers recurring services for a monthly fee. You can also create a subscription service with your physical or digital products. A customer would sign up to receive the product each month. In the fiber world, a lot of yarn diaries have monthly yarn subscriptions where you sign up and get a new surprise scheme of yarn each month. If you have or interested in creating a catalog of online content, you could offer your audience a subscription library. They would pay a monthly fee for access to all the content available there. Depending on your field, you could get creative with what you offer in your subscription library, from music to design templates, to video lessons, and more. Patreon is a great example of a platform that many creative used to create membership content. Patreon provides tools for creators to run a subscription contents service. Members known as Patreons support you for a minimal fee each month to have exclusive access to whatever content you create and share there. You can create a variety of content for the Patreon platform, including audio or video content, crafts, drawings, paintings, music, photography, educational content, or written content. If you have a large and dedicated following already, often Patreons will support you just to see you continue doing your creative work, which that's the dream really. Business services and revenue encompasses services you provide for another business, also known as business to business. This can be project-based content creation and commissions. This means creating content for a business for them to use on their platforms such as their blog, website, magazine, at their events, etc. Working with companies on content and commissions can be a great way to have a reliable income flow for your business. Especially if you create long-term working relationships with these businesses. If you've made her business visible in your field, through your website and social media or through trade shows and events. Businesses may reach out to you directly with a project idea. You can also pitch project ideas to businesses and brands in your field. The main objective here is to make it abundantly clear in your marketing what kind of projects and companies you want to work with or have worked with in the past. This lets businesses know that you are ready and able to deliver for them. An example of a project-based content creation or commission would be, a floral designer creating a floral scheme for business's annual fundraiser, a freelance writer, writing a column for a magazine, or a graphic designer designing a logo for a business. You could create sponsored content for a business. This would be content and you create for your platforms where a business pays you to mention them or their products. With sponsored content, businesses really want to benefit off of your established audience and your expertise to promote their brand. Sponsored content can manifest as blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, social media posts, and much more. Similar to a project-based work, you want to make it known you are available to work on sponsored content with a brand. You can do this by having sponsored content visible on your blog or social media, or having a call for sponsorships in your websites' About Page or Contact Information. You can also sign up for one of many websites that work as go-betweens for companies looking to do sponsored content with bloggers. The sites make a commission for each campaign you got through them. If you want to do sponsored content, then you should prepare what's known as a media kit. It's a one-page document that gives a brief profile of your business, your website and all social media stats, and other brands you've worked with. This lets the interested company know what kind of reached they're getting for their investment. An example of sponsored content would be an interior designer being paid by the Home Depot to create a blog post about renovating your bathroom using products only from the Home Depot. Licensing is an arrangement where you give another company permission to manufacture products using your designs, photos, music, writing etc. Licensing your work can pay in a flat fee, a onetime upfront fee in royalties, and ongoing fee based on sales, or in a combination of the two. The flat fee is then called an advance. You can negotiate the time-frame of usage for the license. Some licensing opportunities will require you to obtain a copyright for your work. Above all, make sure that your website acts as a professional portfolio of the work you're interested in licensing. Depending on your field, you may need to showcase your work to the right businesses via a trade show or include your work in an online licensing library. An example of a business using licensing would be an author licensing their book to a publisher to produce and sell and receiving royalties on books sold. An artist selling via print on-demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble. A musician licensing a song for use in a TV show. Retainer agreements guarantee a certain number of work hours per month to your client at a specified rate for a predetermined amount of time. Businesses do this to block out a person's time, so they're guaranteed to be available to complete projects for them. An example of a business using a retainer would be a graphic designer being paid monthly by a company for working 15 hours a week to create designed specifically for that company, a social media manager being paid a monthly fee to deliver 20 social media posts a month for a company. Teaching your unique skills or speaking about your personal experiences can be a great income generator. You can teach in person via workshops or classes. You can teach online via an independent e-course. This can be what's known as an evergreen course or one that people can purchase or access at anytime, or it could be a scheduled course which is only open for registration and viewing during a certain period of time. You could teach online via an online video class website, like Skillshare. If you're an expert on a topic or have interesting personal experiences to share, speaking engagements can be a good revenue stream for your business. You could create talks for speaking engagements at conferences or meetings. I'm sure you've seen the TED talk or two. This would be an example of a speaking engagement. Examples of businesses using teaching or speaking engagements as a revenue stream would be a crocheter teaching crochet classes at a local yarn store. An animator giving a talk about their work and process at an animation convention. A blogger creating a six-week course on how to start your own blog. Promotion-based revenue streams can be reached through a variety of tools such as blogging, creating online videos through social media channels, etc. You can employee advertising on your platforms to monetize content that normally doesn't cost your customer any money. This can be using ad network on your blogs such as Google AdSense, MediaBind, or a number of other advertising services, or enabling ads on your YouTube channel. Advertising differs from sponsored content because you are not creating ads, think of it like a billboard or commercial. As a part of affiliate programs, you can promote products to your audience and you earn a commission when items are purchased through your links or with your referral. Some popular affiliate programs are Amazon affiliates and rewardStyle. It's important to make sure the affiliate programs you're a part of are relevant to your audience. For example, I'm an affiliate for a lot of crochet.com and online nerds store. This is highly relevant for my audience. So when I provide links to love crochet, my audience isn't confused. Grants are funds given by a government department, corporation, foundation or trust to a recipient. There are many grants available for artists and musicians and other creative individuals or small businesses that could fund a specific project or product. I recommend doing a search for grants in your specific field to see what's available to you. A lot of people call grants free money, which would be amazing as a small business. Looking at my own business as an example, I've used these revenue streams. Under the consumer products umbrella, I sell physical products, in my case, finished crochet dolls and accessories through Etsy and at craft shows. I also sell digital crochet patterns online via Etsy, Revelry, Omega Rumi patterns, and Love Crochet. Under the business services and revenue category, I take commissions for crochet design from crafts magazines, book publishers and yarn companies and I share sponsored content on social media and my blog. Under teaching and speaking engagements, I teach online here on Skillshare and I also use promotion-based revenue. I use advertising and affiliate links to monetize my blog. Before refocusing on my brand strategy, I solely sold physical products, which were crochet dolls and accessories. Not only was I not enjoying what I was doing day to day, I realized I was trying to find customers for my products and not making products for the audience I already had. Through revising my brand strategy and solidifying my mission, vision, why, and customer bases, I recognize that my main motivation was to share knowledge about crochet and creative business and to be transparent about my life as a creative small business owner, and this more accurately fit my customer bases of fiber arts enthusiasts and handmade entrepreneurs. I also discovered I didn't want to make the same thing over and over again. The real fun was in designing new crochet patterns and content. In order to sell physical crochet products, I would need to make the same items over and over again. Now I've moved my focus away from physical products to passive income streams and more revenue opportunities where I can share my knowledge with others. For this video action tasks you're going to, identify what revenue streams you're currently using in your business, decide which of those revenue streams are working for your business and are aligned with your business strategy, your mission, vision, why, and customer base. Tweak, refine, eliminate or add to your current offerings. Remember to think about what you envision your day looking like, and what do you actually like to do.
7. Researching Your Business Idols: One of the best ways to see how business models and revenue streams work in practice is to research your business idols and see what they're using in their businesses. After learning about their variety of revenue streams, you should be able to pick out the majority of income generators that they're using in their businesses. As an example, we're going to look at the amazingly talented Sabina Gibson of Mount Royal Mint. Sabina is a textile artist known for her whimsical and beautiful soft sculpture. I'm going to take you through my process of researching her business to see what types of revenue streams she uses. I chose Sabina because her business is in a similar field to mine, and I could likely apply the same revenue streams she uses in my own business. Google is definitely the best tool for researching your business idols because more likely than not, they're going to have an online presence that you'll learn a lot from. During my search I'll keep a list in my notes about what I find along the way. First, I start by searching the business name Mount Royal Mint. The first site is for Etsy, so I'm going to go ahead and open that in a new tab to see what product she has listed there. It looks like she's only selling finished products, so I'm going to add that to my list. The next site is Instagram, which you can learn a lot from. Most of the pictures seem to be of her finished soft sculptures, which are absolutely beautiful. I'm going to click on this picture because it looks like it's a different product than a soft sculpture. Here in the description, it says, "It's a quilt she designed for Crate and Kids". I'm going to add that to my list as designing products for other companies. Going back to her Instagram page, I'm going to look for more pictures of different products. This looks like a book, so I'm going to click that. Here we learn that she writes and illustrates their own books. So cool. I'm going to add it to my list. It's also helpful to learn that she has an agent which is Catbird Agency. You can spend as much time here looking at different images and seeing what other types of work she shares on her Instagram. I'm going to go back to my Google search and see what the next link is. It's a link for Mount Royal Mint on Anthropologie's website, I'm going to click that. It's not drawing anything here, so I'm going to go do a specific search for Mount Royal Mint Anthropologie. From this image search, I can see that she's also designed products for Anthropologie. I'm going to add that to my list. I want to learn more about her as an illustrator, so I'm going to search for her name instead of her business. I'm pulling up a couple links now that seem to be for books she's written and illustrated. This one is on Penguin Random House, and it shows another super cute book she's written. This tells me she's written several books and that it's probably a big part of her business. I'm going to add that note to my notes. The Amazon link is showing the same book as the last link, so nothing new to add here. From my brief search of Mount Royal Mint, I was able to see that Sabina is using the following revenue streams. She's making consumer products which in her case are physical handmade soft sculptures, sold via her Etsy shop. Under the business services project-based content creation subcategory. She's designing products for companies such as Crate and kids and Anthropologie, and under the business services licensing subcategory, she's writing and illustrating children's books were publishers. Here are some takeaways for my business from searching Mount Royal Mint. Illustration doesn't need to be pen to paper. It can be creative photography of your products in a way that tells a story. This is a huge inspiration to me in how I photograph my own products and in potentially writing and illustrating my own children's books based on my work. I also learned that if you have a strong design aesthetic like Sabina does, you can translate your style into other products for other companies. As we saw through my search, the works Sabina did for Crate and Kids and Anthropologie were not soft sculptures. They were blankets and ceramic piggy banks, both of which she is not producing herself by hand, like our soft sculptures, so for me, designing products for other companies could be a viable revenue stream because I wouldn't be required to handmade each piece being sold. Now it's your turn. Pick three of your creative business idols and ask yourself the following questions for each one. What kind of business do they have? What are their revenue streams? Who is their audience? How are the marketing themselves?
8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. You should now have a solid brand strategy, a definition of your financial goals, and revenue streams that are going to get you there. You're well on your way to a successful creative business. Remember, you can always revisit your notes in the Expander Business workbook or give any of these videos a re-watch if you want a refresher. I look forward to seeing the awesome work you've done in the class project section. Remember, you can share your brand strategy, which is your mission, vision, why, and customer bases. You can share what revenue streams you're going to try and what had been working for you. You can share your business idols and what you learned from them.
Kristina Turner, Crochet Designer • Tiny Curl
