Managing Your Music as a Business

1. Introduction : Hey there, I'm Olivia Arm Carlo, And where the okay factor in the are a cello violin duo based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and we've been writing and performing our original music together for seven years, touring across the United States on and along with that, sharing educational programs with students of all ages. We created this skill share class as a way to share what we've learned over the last almost a decade of performing. We have been managing ourselves on running this business with our art with our craft. So we wanted to share two key concepts that we think will be really helpful for you as you get started in your own career. Those classes focus down musicians, one hopeful that the concepts you'll learn could be applied to any discipline. In fact, we both have side hustles outside of our musical careers that we have used these concepts for us to help you figure out how to best manage your craft as business. We're gonna dive into two core concepts in this class branding and strategic planning. Branding will cover who you are and who your audiences, and once we know that we can start to come up with a plan for you for the next 10 years. For the next five years, For the next three months, you know, we're gonna we're gonna dive into how to create a kind of strategic plan for you to move forward in your career. By the end of the course, you will have your own customized creative that will indicate the who what, where and why of your business to help you kind of navigate through each season. Along with that, Each lesson will have a worksheet for you to bring certain ideas about your vision where you're at now, where you're headed, and at the end of the course, you'll have an opportunity to gather all your nose and input all of them into your creative road map. So you're all set just by checking this class out, you're already on your way to taking your career to the next level. Being an entrepreneur requires a lot of energy, time and focus, and our goal here is to give you a solid foundation to build on that front. So you know exactly where you're going and exactly what to do and how to spend your time. So we want to thank you for giving this class ago. You should think yourself for investing time and energy into your career. We can't wait to see the amazing things that you do with your business. Let's get started. 2. Who Are You?: way. Welcome to lesson one. Who are you in this lesson will explore what you value, where you want to go and how you're going to get there, which is essentially your brand. Any business with a core plan as two very important things a vision statement and a mission statement. And these two things are really important aspects of any business. We're going to do something a little bit different, though, because creative pursuits like music or any art discipline. Um, our personal and vulnerable. We're gonna craft something that's a little bit less corporate, a little bit more creative. So we're going to craft a statement of intention, and this will be a sentence or two that defines who you are and why you choose this calling . The statement should be inspirational. It should look to the future. It should invite your audience in and invite them to go along with you on this journey. It should get you excited, and it should feel authentic to who you are as a musician or a business owner, Um, and explain your ultimate goal for pursuing your art. We've developed a simple template for creating this statement, so it'll be your business or artist's name well, and then the ultimate purpose of your business. So or two. And then why you do this work? So as an example, the okay factor will bring stories to life through music to make the experience of being human a little more joyful and kind. You'll notice that this template is pretty simple, as it should be. We want you to start out simple and then really expand as you like, so you can edit this down or you can expand it. We really just want you to make this your own. This kind of statement is something that we have referred back to over and over again throughout our years as performing musicians. It's something that we ask ourselves. Are we actually bringing stories toe life? Gerard's? Are we purposefully making our audiences lives more joyful and more kind in moments of doubt, when we have questions about the direction we want to go, what projects to work on? This is the statement that we come back to to help us make those difficult decisions. Remember, too, that this is a broad strokes statement, so there are a lot of things that we as musicians or business entrepreneurs of any kind have to do behind the scenes, Um, that aren't necessarily are driving passion. However, they're necessary to keep our business running. And so, while those things might not be taken into account as you think about your statement, do you think about those things that just give you that passion that Dr on that really push you forward? We've included a worksheet in this lesson to help you start to craft your statement of intention. It's got a few questions on it that asks, See things like, What do you value? Um, who are you doing all of this art for? What is your creative purpose? Things like that just so that you have a bit of a template as you get started working on your statement. So we've also included are answers as the okay factor so you can see what a functioning statement of intention looks like for our band. So grab your worksheet and get started brainstorming your statement of intention. You can also post this in our class project section so you can inspire others. You can ask questions. Let us know if you have any thoughts about that process, so excited to see what you do. You 3. Who Is Your Audience? : way, have a clear vision of your business's purpose. We're gonna move on and talk about who your audience is. So in this lesson will really define your audience and why it's important to understand who they are. Your audience makes up the people who purchased things from you. They come to your shows. They purchase your products, your CDs, your art, whatever it may be. There are also the people who are a part of your virtual community online through social media. Your email list. If you have, like a patronage system set up, all of these different people are included in your audience. So when we first started our career, we were pretty inward focus. It wasn't necessarily about things, but we were definitely interested in the art that we want to create. And while that's still the case, we have found that our career totally shifted when we started taking our audience into better consideration. It's much more of a collaborative approach now, and we found that it helps us to be more passionate, and it definitely helps us connect with our audiences on a more meaningful level. It's definitely a fine balance, though, if you listen to your audience too much. You might lose yourself in that creative process. If you don't listen to them enough, though, you might lose their interest. But it's much easier toe have that collaborative approach with them when you know exactly who they are and what they love about your art. While it makes sense for businesses, even creative businesses, to think about audience as the ideal client or singular, one of the things that makes music so unique is that it's experience in community and its most powerful when it's done that way. So we would like for you to think about audience as the collective group of individuals who experienced your art together and how they best do that. And when we know exactly who your audience is, it's much easier to make decisions around the types of venues. You're gonna play the kinds of merchandise products you're overall vibe, your branding, all of that kind of stuff is much, much, much easier when we know who your audiences. The worksheet for this lesson includes an audience questionnaire, a series of questions aimed at honing in on a particular group of people. You'll want to think pretty broadly about your audience. Consider things like their general age, income, occupation, marital status, etcetera. We've added a couple blank spaces at the bottom of the questioner as well for you to focus on any other things that might come up for you around your particular brand of art. Um, and we've also included our own answers as an example for you. Take a look at so feel free to ask any questions you might have and good luck. 4. Where Are You Going? : while there is so much more to branding that we didn't cover, like your visual identity and the experiential identity between brands and their audiences , The two things that we did cover about branding, who you are and who your audience is are the foundational pieces for planning your next steps. So now that we've got those things figured out, the next step is taking those brand essentials and using them to guide your decision making . We call this strategic planning. So in this lesson, we're going to focus on strategic planning. Talk about what that is and how we can come up with an action oriented plan to carry you through your business. The idea of strategic planning sounds fancy, but all it is is establishing benchmarks for your business. You conduce strategic planning at any time during the year. Typically, we actually do it at the beginning of the year because we love the freshness of a new here . But we also check in periodically throughout the year to see what needs adjusting. We're going to use five key areas for creating your strategy or what we call your business breakdown management brand projects, growth and lifestyle. These are broad categories to help us pinpoint what areas of your business need to focus and clarity, but feel free to adjust these categories to best fit your business. Management involves everything administrative about your business, accounting, email and communication, conflict management and the systems you used to run it all brand involves your story as an artist, the vision and values we talked about in addition to the visual identity of your logo website design, etcetera. We've also included things like your marketing strategy, social media presence and the products or services you offer projects. Ties into the actual work you dio albums, commissions, collaborations, touring, educational outreach Growth encompasses a few analytics like social media and website stats . Your team members like a booking agent or accountant, your audience and any professional development to further your skills as an artist. The last category lifestyle considers who you are outside of your business. The entrepreneur life is no joke, and you'll quickly burn out and taking care of yourself, resting and making time for him. A myriad of other things like your relationships and family and also your mental, physical and emotional health. The next few lessons will include worksheets that use this framework to evaluate your past and where you're headed. Um, your statement of intention will also come in handy as it's really important to keep that and focus when you think about your vision for your future and as you thought through who you are and who your audience is. Perhaps you stumbled upon a few new ideas about how to look at your business that will influence your goals for your future. So keep your notes nearby and let's jump into next. 5. Evaluating Years Past: Welcome to a lesson for evaluating years past. In this lesson, we're gonna take a look at how things have gone for you in the past 365 days or so by identifying the challenges accomplishments that your business has faced along the way. So it's really important to consider where you've been in order to build a solid foundation for moving forward and for a long term growth in your business. There's unfortunately no secret formula for this. However, your business breakdown will help you a lot in evaluating each specific category as it pertains to your business. So take a few minutes, download the worksheets for this lesson, do some reflecting and we'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Visions of the Future: you didn't way. All right, here comes the fun part. In this lesson. We're gonna dream really big about where your business could go in the next 10 years, five years, and then coming. So we want you to think about a couple different things. The 1st 1 is the biggest, wildest dreams that you could ever have for your business. 10 years down the road, we've heard people call this the big, hairy, audacious goal. The one that, like, sends goose bumps down your spine and makes you say what know how could i e? I couldn't do that. Um What What is that dream for you? What does that look like? So when we did our annual strategic planning for 2019 we had a lot of fun brainstorming. What are big 10 year goal? Would be, um, one of our goals was to be grossing six figures and traveling worldwide internationally. Just saying that makes are some external. That's crazy, right? Like, how could we ever do that? And we really struggled with that point of the how How could we ever get their try to put those feelings aside? For now, it's not gonna be helpful we want you to really dream big. And don't worry so much about how you're gonna get there cause we'll talk through that because we want the school to be specific and finite. Go ahead and dream big with Brad stroke ideas like I want to make more money and then hone in specifically on what that looks like for you to ring. Roll, for instance. So all of our big, hairy, audacious schools are gonna look different from person to person, from creative to creative, from business to business. They're not all going to be the same. You might not be interested in making six figures, and if that's the case, then think about something more geared towards who you conserve in 10 years. How many people can you have in your collective audience in that amount of time? Um, if not that think about other artists you want to collaborate with who's a big name in your world who would be amazing, like dreamless to to make art what we want to think about something that is concrete and specific and inspiring. Teoh. You make sure that you're also thinking about your audience and your statement of intention as you're going through this process because those will be too helpful tools and figuring out what this Big Harry dream looks like. Once you feel really good about your 10 year goal, the next step will be figuring out our five year goal. Keep in mind that this is the halfway point to your 10 year goal, so I'm thinking about the how comes into play here a little bit. What are some of the steps you need to take to get to that big 10 year goal? For us? I'm touring internationally. Making six figures meant a few different things. We have to consider management the fact that maybe we can't do this on our own, Um, entirely a booking agent again, keeping our audiences in mind. What will they want to see? What will they want to hear? Different recording projects, potential side hustles. All of those things come into play for our how for five year old to get to that 10 years. So the final step in this process is going from our 10 to our five down to one year thinking about what you can do in the next 365 days, in order to get to that halfway point. We always want to be keeping that 10 year goal in mind. But don't think about that so much right now. Now we want to focus on those actual tangible, actionable strategies that you can do in the next year. To get towards that five year halfway point, you will find an additional business breakdown worksheets included in this set of worksheets to help you break down those 365 day goals into actionable steps for each area of your business. So what do the next 365 days need to look like for you? For us, it means looking into management possibilities, considering different artists to collaborate with to expand our sound a little bit different. Recording projects that we can take on all of these are things that we're considering actionable steps that we can take in the next year to get us toward our five and then 10 years old. All right, so let's do this. Grab your worksheets for this lesson. There should be three of them and get some working on figuring out what that 10 year goal looks like, what your five year vision is, how you can move forward towards those steps and next year 7. Seasonal Planning: you didn't. How does it feel to have a strategic actionable plan for the next year? For us, it was a game changer. It was a real weight lifted off of our shoulders, feeling like we had a clear, concise way on to move about our business day today. So we talked about strategic planning. Next, in this lesson, we're going to talk about a seasonal planning, and this will just give you more tools and more clarity on what you can work on today specifically to get toward those goals. So here's something you don't often hear. It's okay if your visions grow and change. We can't predict our futures. You can't predict yours. There's no point in feeling stuck in something when things happen. It's called life. We all get it. So the point of this type of planning is not Teoh set in stone. What you're wife is going to look like but rather give you something to work towards. And as a freelancer, when you're in charge of your own time, helping you understand what it is that you should be working on and figuring out if that is actually the direction you want to go in this really helps avoid getting disappointed when you don't meet your year long goal. Um, we get most disappointed when we're not following these day to day actionable plans. And so when we remind ourselves of those things, it really helps us focus and understand that life is life and we're just gonna continue to move forward in the direction that we really want to see our business going. So seasonal planning is a lot like quarterly planning, which is how the business world functions. But because we're all creative individuals, we like seasonal planning because it means that you don't have to do it. Um, at every quarter of a point in the year, rather, you can think about it in terms of actual seasons. What you gonna do this fall? What is your summer look like? Um, having three month periods for you to focus intentionally on what needs to be done is much easier, much more actionable and bite sized toe help. You move through your year in a very successful way. So really, the whole point of this planning is just to give you structure as freelancers as creative business owners, we need structure. We need a clear, actionable plans that we understand what our day to day looks like and how we can achieve our goals in a strategic way. So what you're going to do now is take the worksheet for this lesson. Use your don't from the last couple of lessons and figure out in each category of your business that break down. What's the top goal that you can work towards in the next three months? So by the end of this worksheet, you should have clear couples five goals for over the next three months. Go ahead and get started and we'll see you next lesson. 8. Defining Growth & Success: you didn't. Holy cow are almost so close. You have done so much work on thinking about who you are as an artist, who your audience is evaluating your past so you can make plans for your future. Um, and now the last thing we want you to think about is how you define growth and success. And this lesson will talk about how to define growth and success on your terms so that you can move through the coming year with a lot of clarity. So remember that everybody's version of success looks different, and that's OK for musicians. Some of us might have dreams of selling out Madison Square Garden, right? Huge venue, huge space. Others of us are. Gold might just be to share music with whoever will listen. And that is successful. Um, it can look different for everybody. Sometimes success is tied to money. Other people don't care so much about the monetary value of their work. So it looks different for everyone. For us. For instance, this past season I was on maternity leave, so Carla basically single handedly for sure singlehandedly ran our business. And so in that season, success honestly just looked like keeping your business afloat. I'm taking care of the date of a tasks like emails answering phone calls, some of those things just to keep the business running while I was out of commission. Depending on where you are with your business, growth might look a lot of different ways for you to while Olivia was on maternity leave, we had to come to terms with the fact that growth in this particular season would look a lot different than it has in the past. Usually are, summers are extremely busy and full, and this year it's been a lot quieter. So coming to terms with and figuring out how we can keep continuing to take steps forward in this a little bit slower season was important for us to figure out. So it remember that business breakdown there was a category called Lifestyle and Lifestyle is one that we don't want you to count out as you're thinking about growth and success. While your lifestyle traces might not direct, you might not think they directly impact your success. They dio. It's a part of your overall health. It's a part of your overall ability to function on a level that will achieve success and growth for your business. So as you kind of work through this lesson, don't count out that category of lifestyle as you plan. So now that you have a solid plan for the next three months, your job is to take the worksheet for this lesson and sit down and define what growth and success are going to look like for you during this particular season. We'll see you in her last left. 9. Your Creative Roadmap: you didn't way. You have made it to the final step. Congratulations. You put so much thought and effort into your business and your well on your way to achieving those bunch mark goals and to defining what growth and success mean for you. So we're really excited in this next lesson, we're going to create a creative roadmap. And so this will take all the pieces from all the work sheets that you filled out, all of these bits of ideas and dreams that you've had rolled them all into one creative roadmap for your business. So you're creative. Roadmap is really just a fresh place for you to put all of those benchmarks, goals and ideas that you had into one singular place that you can post and look at and keep in the forefront of your mind. As you move through your year. We both know what it's like to have pages and pages of notes and not really know what we figured out. So we created the space for you, Teoh to take those five business breakdown goals, your benchmarks for growth and success. You're 5 10 and one year visions and put them all in one place, so you have them toe. Look at whenever you need to remember, though, that this is not a stagnant document. Nor should it be eso thes should change as your visions and your goals change, you'll notice that we've included extra worksheets at the end to revisit your plans for each new season of the year or each new season of your business. You can certainly revise this plan at any time, but the three month period is enough time to see both growth and success, and we'll give you a good idea of where you need to course correct. For the next season, Though our work as artists is never quite done, you dio have a finished plan that you can go back and look at any time revisiting it is important allowing your visions to grow and change is important. Um, and you've completed the last step in this class, so we'll go ahead and see you over in our conclusion video and give yourself a pat on the back for all the awesome work you Justin 10. Conclusion: So take a look at all that you've accomplished. This is so exciting for you and for your business. You've done so much work and we are really pumped for the future of your craft. We do encourage you to take a few days and let all this work settle. Give it some space to breathe and rest and come back in a few days time and revisit what you wrote. If it doesn't resonate with you at that point, you can always download the worksheets again and start fresh way. Would love to see what you came up with for your business. Um, and so you can share your created road map in the class project section. Um, and that will not only keep yourself accountable, but it will also allow you to share your dreams with other people and encourage them to do the same. Thank you so much for taking the time to take this class and for sharing your dreams with all of us. We hope to see you in a future class down the road. Um, feel free to post any questions you might have here or shoot us an email over at the okay. factor at gmail dot com. You can check out our website the okay factor dot com to see what we're up to. Follow us on social media. All the things we would love to keep up with you and see how you're growing in your business. Best wishes to you in your business endeavors friends. And we'll see you soon. Thank you. Ready? Okay. I didn't even know you are also your audience is stopping what you are doing what you're doing way Just told you a short That is great. It's fabulous. Just wait.