Transcripts
1. Welcome! : The creative process is one of the most magical experiences
we can ever have. To take something that is nothing and turn it
into physical form. To take what's inside oneself and put it
out into the world. It's truly amazing. It's truly magic. To take that creative work and share it with others is bold, and it takes courage to do that. To take our creative
work and make it into a business that just
takes determination, passion, and a plan. I'm Jamie Smith and
welcome to my class, the Creative Business Plan. I'm an artist. I also run an online community of artists
called Thrive Art Studio. Years ago I decided to leave my full-time teaching job and pursue my dream of becoming a professional full-time
visual artist. I have now spent the
last 10 years learning not only how to run my
own creative business, but also how to share this
knowledge with others. I'm really passionate about it. I did workshops, I
designed courses, speak to groups of new
and seasoned creatives, and I learned tons every day by running my own business
at my community. I now have worked with
hundreds of creatives. What I have found, no matter what part of the
creative journey, whether they're just making
work for the first time or they're making
their whole period of living from their practice, they all want to plan and
they're all looking for a path. This class is designed for creatives that want to build a business to sell their work. This could be physical
items like artwork, handmade, digital art, or services like graphic design or any creative freelancer. Running your creative
business has it's challenges, but making a living
from doing what you love is well worth the effort. It's just a lot easier
when you have a plan. In this class, you are going to be creating a vision
for your business, getting clear on the why
behind what you create, making a price list
of your offerings, getting your business
financial numbers organized, mapping out sales targets you
need to reach every month, planning how to get the word out there about
your creative work, like a marketing
plan, and finally, getting a whole goal road-map
organized for the year. I believe we need
creativity in this world, we need more entrepreneurship and creatives
following their dream. What you're doing is important. Let's get organized,
let's create a plan so that your work
can thrive. [MUSIC]
2. Your Project: [MUSIC] Our project for this class is to create the
creative business plan. The class is designed
for creatives who want to build a business
to sell their work. This could be physical items like artwork, handmade goods, digital art, or services like graphic designers or
creative freelancers. Whether you're looking to start a side hustle for your work or intending to live full
time off of your work, the principles of this
class are useful. All you need for this
class is a pen and paper. Yes, that's it. I have designed templates in each lesson on the creative
business plan PDF, and you can get that
in the projects and resource section of the class. You can print this
out, you can type your answers directly
onto the PDF, and of course you're
welcome to follow along in your own notebook
or your own journal. The business plan we're creating is designed
for one year. I create a business
plan every year in December so that I'm
ready for January 1st, but you can start anytime
in the calendar year. I just encourage you
to start where you are and get some things
down in writing, it's going to help you so much. Making this plan for the
first time is the hardest, after that it becomes
easier and easier, you just repeat the system. I'm so excited for
us to get started. I've seen so many creatives reach their goals by
taking on this process, and it is a process. Each lesson has been
built on the last, so some are going to be easier, some are going to
be more difficult, but please stick with it because the end
result is so worth, it doesn't have to be perfect, we're doing this together. The world needs more creatives
living their best lives, so let's do this
together. Let's jump in.
3. Create Your Vision: [MUSIC] We cannot create
what we cannot see. We need to visualize what we want for our
creative careers. Think of your business
plan like a map. If you don't know
where you want to go, then it's very hard to
know how to get there. We're going to use the tool of visualization to map out
where we are headed. Visualization is
a great tool when trying to get a clear
image on what we want. Many believe that this tool
helps our subconscious mind to connect with what
our thinking brain shows us we really want. In our busy and noisy lives it's easy not to
listen to ourselves, not listen to our gut
feeling or instincts. We fill our minds with what
we think we should want, what we should do, how it works is that
I'm going to ask you to get comfortable
and then I will describe a scene for you of your creative business and your creative work
in the future. As I say the words just
let yourself sink into the scene and allow yourself to imagine what your
life looks like, feels like, and the details
that are all around you. Enjoy this process, you get to time travel. You get to go to
the future and see the successful version of
yourself and your business. At the end of the visualization, your job is to write
everything down. The more you get written
down, the better. These details are so important because they're
the truth of what we really want, so get comfortable. You can sit in your chair
or lay on the ground, but we're going to dive
right in together. [MUSIC] Close your eyes.
Big breath in and now out. Big breath in, and let
the energy flow out. Feel your feet rooted on the ground or your back
grounded on the floor. Relax and know you are
safe in this moment. You are safe to picture
yourself one year from now. You are about to
enter your workspace. The place you make your work, the place where all your
creative energy flows and you are so excited to
open the door and walk in. You can feel the anticipation in your hand as you
turn the handle. You walk in and look around
you. What do you see? What does your work look like?What does your
workspace look like? You see where you
make your work. Look around what you
have on the walls. You see the place you
sit and you sit down. What is around you? What materials are
there with you? What are you enjoying about the work that you're
making right now? What are you known for? What achievements are
around you? Awards, notes. What successes have you
achieved this year? This workspace is where you
make your creative work, but it's also the heart
of your business. What is your business like? What do you enjoy
about your business? What projects have you done?Who have you
worked with this year? What business goals have
you achieved over the year? What are you most proud of? What is bringing you abundance and wealth
in your business? What do you enjoy spending
your earnings on? As you sit in your workspace
take a big breath in. You are so proud of yourself. Can you hardly believe this
all happened in a year? Let this sink in around you. Feel the success, feel
everything you have done. Before you come back to
present time with me. Is there anything you want
to say to your future self? Anything you want
to say goodbye to. Take your time to look around. Take your time to be proud
of yourself and sit in that. Look around yourself
one last time. I'm going to count you
in on the count of three and you're going to come
back to your present self. One, take a big breath
in and release. Two, start to become aware of your body and wiggle
your fingers and your toes. and three, start to open
your eyes and take in one big breath
[MUSIC]. Welcome back. How was it imagining the
possibilities of what your work and your business
could be, so exciting. Now your job is to write
down everything you saw. Take time to get all
the details down. I have created a template in the creative business
plan and there are prompts there to help
you remember the experience, but you're welcome
to journey as well. This is truly the foundation
of your business plan. Remember, it's so much easier to create
something when we have a clear vision of what we're dreaming of creating
and we have that now. Now we have our vision of what our business looks
like a year from now. Let's get our map going.The next lesson we're going to focus
on the why. See you there.
4. Find Your Why: [MUSIC] Building a
creative business in life is no small feat. It takes endurance, patience, and passion, but
it is so worth it. Now that you have a clear vision on what you want to create, we need to be very clear on why. The why is what we're going
to dedicate ourselves to, in our creative practice, and our creative career. It's why we started all of
this in the first place. At the end of the day,
having a business, creative or not, has an ebb
and flow, highs and lows. It is our why of what we do that will keep
driving us forward. It is our North Star. It is how we stay on track for the long haul because
it is the long game. We're going to get to a writing exercise to
figure out our why. We're going to create
why statements. I have three
sentences for you to fill in the end of the sentence, you can use the template
provided or journal away. I make my work because, I am dedicated to my
creative business because, I want my work to make
people feel dot-dot-dot. The statement I make
my work because is basically about why
you do what you do. What's the driving force? Why did you start this long before you thought about
making money this way? The statement, I am dedicated to my creative business because is, why do you want this
to be a business? A business is a totally
different skill set than being a creative person and
you are diving right in. That's amazing, but it's
important to know why you care about earning a living
from your creative work. I want my work to
make people feel, so this is really important. If we want this
to be a business, we go from making
work that's just for ourselves that we love to then asking other people to feel a certain way and
purchase our work. We need to be very clear
on what we want of them. There going to be
times you're going to feel like you've lost your way. This is the long game. These statements are what
will come back to you. I highly recommend posting them in your studio
or workspace. Have them displayed somewhere, have them in a journal
that you can pull out. It will just keep you going
through the hard times. To sum up this lesson, all you need to do is
finish the sentences. Create your three
why statements. I highly suggest you
post them up somewhere, so that they are the
heart of your work, and the heart of your business. Thank you so much for getting
clear on your why with me. The next lesson,
we're going to set some goals together.
See you there.
5. Make Your Goals: I find goals are
often easy to set, but a bit harder to do
the work to achieve them. But when you know why
you want, what you want, you have a much higher chance of sticking to them and
accomplishing them. I have found the easiest
way to unravel the deeper why behind the goals is
to turn to my grades. My grades are the
people around me that I admire the most in my field. We're going to answer
some questions together. Of course, you can find this in the template and the creative business PDF or
journal on your own. Questions are, who's creative
work do I admire and why? Whose business do
I admire and why? What are my creative goals
for the coming year? What are my business goals
for the coming year? First, who's creative
work do I admire and why? You're going to list
two-three creatives that are making work that
you really admire. But the important
part here is why? Is it their style, is that the line work, maybe it's the backgrounds they create to even
display their work. Maybe it's the scale
of their work. What is it about
this creative work that just draws you to it? It's super important
to understand the why. Next question. Whose business do
I admire and why? When we are working on making your creative work or income, it can feel like we're getting pulled into different
directions, our creative side and
our entrepreneur side. We need to engage fully in our entrepreneurial
side right now and look at the businesses that we admire that
are in our niche and really figure out
what they're doing and why we appreciate
it so much. Make sure we focus on the why, I am a broken record I know. Is it the easy to use website? Is it their service packages
and how it's laid out? Maybe it's the voice
and the newsletter , gets super specific. We need all this
information because now we know what we
truly care about. We know we're not making goals
about what we should do, what we think is best, what our mom told us to do but we're actually
looking outward. Now we're going to use that
to answer the questions of what are my creative
goals for this coming year. Look to that admiration list. What has that taught you? Maybe you realize, I need to
make bigger work this year. I actually want to work with
a different set of clients, get this written down. You're also going
to use the answers for your business side. Maybe you realized
that website is the game you want to up
their game on the website. We're going to get this
all down in writing. This process is going to help us make these goals
that are rooted in what we truly want because those are things that will
actually motivate us. I've written laundry
lists of things I thought I should
do that weren't rooted in what I
truly cared about, so we want to make that
a little different here. I will say it is easy
in this world right now to be a jealous creative
in the age of Instagram. I encourage you to think
proactively over the year. I encourage you when
you see something that is amazing creatively
or business-wise, ask yourself, why do you
feel this way about it? What does it show
you that you want? Then set your goal
and then go get it. We all have unique gifts
and ways of sharing them. By comparing ourselves,
our art is unique, what we do is unique. Why would we compare
ourselves to another person? It's normal, it's natural. But let's keep focused
on the why behind it. I hope you have some
solid goals now. Have some fun with this. It's fun to make a list. You don't have to do
the work quite yet. You want to hold onto these
and we're going to use it in a future lesson about
building our plan. Next, we're going to
focus completely on our offers and our pricing,
so I'll see you there.
6. What Are Your Offerings?: [MUSIC] It's a big shift
to go from making art solely or any type of creative
work solely for yourself, but then selling that creative
work as a whole new level. As creatives, we have
so many interests, we have so many passions. It's hard what to pick that you want to make and
sell continuously, which is the foundation
of having a business. A pitfall that I
see creatives fall into is they want to
do a million things. Their customers don't
know what they do best, they don't have something
they're known for. We're going to get into writing exactly what we're focused on selling this year and we're
going to stick to it. I like to call the things or services we sell your offerings. You are offering your
talents, your creative work, your services to others
in exchange for money. We need to know how much money we're asking for each offering. You may be completely new
to selling your work, or you may have many
sales under your belt. Either way, creative
should review their offerings and their
prices for sure every year. You want to make sure
that you are price competitively and it's
still what you want to do. Even if you have an
offering and a price list, it's still well-worth
doing this exercise. There is a template, of course, and you're welcome to journey along and listen to my prompts. Your offerings could be items like original artwork
or custom t-shirts, or it could be services like a graphic designer
or making websites. Either way, we still need
to figure it all out. If you're offering a service, make sure you list
out exactly what the client receives in
each of your packages. We do not want more
than six offerings, even that is a lot. Less than that is ideal. Next, we need to
find out what we're going to charge for them. We're going to write
down all our offerings, and now we need to figure out
what we're going to charge. A couple of tips for you. For handmade items, make sure you factor
in your time, as well as your material cost. That's huge, that can
get away from you. Do some research and
look at how other people in the market are priced and make your
assessment from their. Art work, no one seems to know what to price
our artwork at, and no client seems to know
why it's priced that way. It is so important to become
a professional artist and take on that business
side to have a price list. Take the guesswork out of it for yourself and your clients. You want to look at
past sales for artwork, other artists that are similar
career time and style. I find it very difficult to factor in time into pricing as an artist because
the artistic process is so different for others. It's easiest to price by size. You're going to price by
square inch as artists. Services, when pricing
services you want to consider that it's
all about time. Make sure you focus in
prep and follow up and all those little bits
of time that you're definitely going
to give a client, but you're not charging for. Make sure to look at people
at that similar career stage. Selling your creative
work can be emotional. It can feel like your
whole heart and soul went into it and now it's
walking away from you. Having a price list
to refer to can make the selling process
way less emotional. It also is professional. It helps you go from
hobbyist to business owner. Just to recap this lesson, you're going to create
your list of offerings. You're also going to create
a price for each offering. That is your task here. Remember, this is
not set in stone, you can make a schedule
and you can check in every couple of
months on this pricing. I highly suggest you at
least do it once a year. If your materials
cost has changed, if your process has changed, you want to make sure that's
reflected in the price. Thank you so much for getting focused on what you're
offering your clients. I would love to see some of these offerings in the
project section below, so please leave them for me. Next lesson, we're
actually going to dive into our money.
I'll see you there.
7. Find Your Current Numbers: Here's the part I know
you've been waiting for. Let's talk about money. As creatives we are
often balancing multiple jobs and projects to make our money work at
the end of the month. The goal is to have
your financial business paying for itself and
paying you as well. It is totally possible. By tracking your monthly money
and knowing your numbers, this allows you to make
informed business decisions. Imagine that you
will be the boss instead of your business
running you every month. What we're going to do in
this lesson is we're going to create a financial snapshot. This is all about
where we are now. The next lesson we're going
to do where we're headed to but right now we're focusing on our current financial situation. There is a template in
the Business Plan PDF, and you can also follow along
with paper and pen as well. We need a monthly
snapshot of what you earn and spend on your
business currently. I think we should look at
last month as it is the freshest and I'm
hoping this will create a habit because
if you did last month, you should probably
do this month, and the following and following. The first thing we
need to know is how much money from our
business flowed in. In other words, it's
our monthly income. Go back to bank
statements, PayPal, or however you
receive money into your business and
you want to write down all of these sales. If you've only had a
few sales last month, then you can actually spend the time and write
down who bought the actual item and create a nice little record
of your clients. If you had a lot of sales
last month, way to go, and what you can do
is actually make categories like we
did in our offerings, for example, Original Art. You want to add
together all your original art sales and then total that amount under the
category, Original Art. You might want to do this
in this spreadsheet. I do have a template
that I created, but it's totally
personal preference. Next, we're going to
look at our expenses. This is money that flows
out of our business. We really want this number
to be true and realistic, and this takes a bit of time. We want to make sure that
we're really detailed on what expenses have
left our business. You want to go through credit card statements, bank accounts, PayPal, especially
any cash you spent, we tend to forget about that. List out every dollar you spend on your
business last month. Don't forget materials
and networking events, supplies, your workspace,
rent, employees. All these types of
things need to be written down to the penny. Pay extra attention to
online subscriptions. They will get you. You sign up and you forget, and then we don't remember that we have a lot of money
flowing out of our business. Now you're going
to take the amount of income and you're going to minus it from your expenses. Is this N number
positive or negative? Our goal is that we're
living in the green. We want that number
positive or at zero, but we don't want
to be negative. We want to make sure
that we know what is happening in our financial world so that we can make
better decisions. You need to know that, that N number is actually
what we are paying ourselves. So if your goal is to
leave your current job, that N number needs to equal what you're getting paid
in your regular job. Also, if you're full-time, this might be a sign if you
can grow your business. Depending on that number, you might want to hire someone, get more supplies in, but now you can make
these types of decisions. If you're in the early
days of your business and you are actually lending
your business money, make sure you track these loan amounts because
you really want to know when your business starts
to run itself and maybe pay you back,
imagine that. This is a lot of work, but this is going to make the biggest difference
in your business, to get a true snapshot of what you have coming in and
what you have coming up. A couple of tips. If you look at your financial
snapshot and realize that you need to make more income to cover
your expenses, there's a couple of
tips I have for you. One, sell more. Doesn't that sound easy? Of course, if you have
more sales you'll have more income to cover
those expenses. Two, increase your prices. If you sell the same
amount but for more money, this helps your bottom line. Number 3, which I don't think a lot of
people talk about, and it's my favorite,
trim your expenses. If your income stays the same, but you spend less money, you have more money
in the green to keep, and you want to make
sure that you really think through how the money is moving in and out
of your account. I like this approach
because in the art world my sales can be often
very unpredictable, so I keep my
business super lean. I don't want to increase
my prices because I'm just not sure how that's going to land in the market, and I want to make sure
month over month that my expenses are as
tight as possible. So look at your expenses. Is there anything you can cut? Is there any way you
can become more lean? Those are easy things to
do instead of trying to sell more all the time or
increasing your prices. We're going to use this
financial snapshot, all this hard work
into our next lesson. This is going to help us so much to reach our goals of where we want to be financially.
See you there.
8. Find Your Future Numbers: [MUSIC] Now we know where
we are financially. Let's spend a little
time looking at where we want to be financially,
the fun part. There is a template in the
creative business plan PDF and you can also
journal along with me. From the work we
did last lesson, we now know what we spend
monthly on our business. Amazing. We want to
write down this number. There is a spot on your
template to actually put this number and it's under
monthly business expenses, or you just write it
on a piece of paper. The next number we need to
know is how much do we spend? We are typically solo printers. It's our lives that we're trying to pay for
and keep going, so what do you spend? We're going to call this
number owner's pay. Just like you did for finding
your business expenses, you need to find out
your personal expenses. This is the hard truth, but it's worth doing. You want to look at bank
statements, credit card, PayPal, any cash,
remember the cash. We want to get this number
as realistic as possible so that we truly know what we're
working towards and why. This is our life
we're trying to pay for with our creative business. Amazing. Once we know that
number of truly what we spend, we actually want to
go back to our goals. If your goal is to have your business pay
your full income, then we want that number, the owners pay
number to be written down and put right
into the template. For me, I've tracked my personal expenses
for over three years, and I spend, no matter
what I do, 3,200 a month. Some as more, some I
budget and spend less, but it always averages
out to 3,200 a month. I also though, teach and
run classes like this, I run Thrive, so I
typically have a day job. My artwork business, my
creative business is actually, my goal is for it to pay for itself plus I want a
little bonus money. My goal is $200, pay for itself and $200. On my sheet, what I'm
going to write down is my business expenses which
I've sorted and $200. You want to go back to your
visualization that we did, back to your why and make
sure that you're setting a financial goal
for the year that really fits into your lifestyle. If this business could
pay for itself like me, and that could be a great goal. It could be a side
hustle income, a certain amount, so
adjust the owners, pay accordingly so
that we can figure out expense number.
You have two numbers. We have our monthly
business expense plus our owners pay and
you've adjusted that number for your goals. That now is our total
monthly expenses. Amazing. How cool is that? That number is what your
business needs to earn you every month to
reach your goals. Let's plan how we're
going to get there and we need the
numbers to guide us. Instead on this hamster wheel
of having to sell more, now we know why, we know
what it's going for. What you want to
do is you want to pull out your offerings lists from the previous
lesson and your prices, and you're just going to
play with the numbers. How much of each offering
do you need to sell at your price point every
month to hit your goal, to pay all your expenses. Depending on your goals, those numbers are going
to be very different. You want to keep ingesting these math to find
out how many do I need to sell to get that number of income
to match your expenses. You want it either to be blown out of the
water and be more, or you want it to
even itself out. But when it's a negative, you want to keep going back
and playing with the numbers. The other thing to
remember is that you have to create this work. If you have these high numbers
of what you have to sell, make sure that you
look back and think, what's this year
bringing for me? What do I have going on? Because you have to make
sure that you can produce. But this is going to
be so helpful for you. Now you have deadlines
for yourself, you have a production schedule, and you want to make sure
that it's realistic. The other thing you
want to think about is if you get projects, if you're service-based
and you have projects, do your best, guess on what every month that
project would be in. Note, that this does
not need to be perfect. This is a tool, it's for you to play with, adjust and tweak over the year. Do your best, have
fun with it and get some real solid financial
goals for yourself. To recap, you're
going to write down your business expense number that we did in the last lesson. You're going to find
your owners pay. You're going to
assess your goals, so you're going to adjust that
number to fit your goals. You're going to write
down that number. You're going to add them
together and now you have your total monthly expenses that your business
needs to earn. Then the job of playing
with the numbers. You want to get your income to be that number to even out, so that you know that
you are covered. You know that you're paying for your business and
yourself properly. Thank you for doing
this important work. Wow, it's so amazing. We're going to move
on to the next lesson where we're making a marketing plan so we actually get those sales
happening. See you there.
9. Create Your Marketing Plan: [MUSIC] Marketing is one of the most important
parts of your business. You can have an
incredible product, but if no one knows
it exists or you don't know how to talk about
it, it's not going to sell. People just won't even
know how to buy it. Inversely, there are a lot
of not-so-great products that do super well just because of
marketing and branding. Of course, your work is amazing. Let's talk about
how to get it to market and for it
to be successful. There is a template in the
creative business plan PDF that will guide you through, but you can also follow along
and journal or on paper. The key to marketing is being consistent and sticking with
your message over time. People are bombarded these
days with images coming at them all the time and
every second of their lives. They need to see
your creative work often and with consistent
voice and message. Let's make a plan that you
can stick to over the year. We're going again work
in a monthly schedule. I do this because I want to
create a system for you, a rhythm that you could do month over month
because marketing, it's key to do that,
to keep showing up. First what you want to
do is you want to go back to our last lesson. We worked out our
monthly financial goals, what we want to sell to get
to our financial goals. We are going to come up
with three marketing goals based on the income you need to cover your monthly expenses. We have mapped out
exactly the amount of each offering
in another lesson. Create three goals
based on this. Look at your financial numbers. Make sure your goals have
measurable numbers within them. For example, you're going to
sell three ceramic vases a month or get two wholesale
sale accounts this month. At the end of the month, you can review your goals, measure your marketing success based on the numbers
attached to your goals. It's very important. Every month you can tweak as needed and set up new goals
for the following month. You don't have to
stick with this. It's a trial and error here. We're trying things
out. Next step. For each goal, decide
your marketing channel. Your channel is what
you're going to use to reach your customer. For example, Instagram
is a marketing channel, a paid advertisement is
a marketing channel. Flyer at a coffee shop. This is the vehicle and what your message is getting
to your person. You may try one channel one
month and decide this wasn't your best approach
based on the data you collected and you
didn't reach your goal. You can change and
try a new one. The simplest way to think about picking a channel is to look at your offering and brainstorm the best way to
reach your customer. Think about past sales. How did people hear
about you in the past? If you've never sold your work, this is where you
use your best guess and collect the data. Next month, tweak it,
see if it worked. As sales happen, as your
business get going, you want to use that
information to create better and better
marketing routines. Now we have our
three goals. We have our channel for each goal. Now we need to think
about the frequency. It's the frequency of
the marketing effort. If you decide you're going to
sell two drawings a month, you're going to use
Instagram as your channel, how often are you
posting on Instagram? You need to know
this because you're actually creating a
little monthly schedule for yourself and how it actually is going to
happen in real life. The next step is the
most important one, you are writing
your action steps. This is where you're
going to road-map, how you reach your
marketing goals. If you need pictures
for Instagram, you need to get those
pictures taken, how are you going to
get them up there and how you're going
to get them organized. You need to know if
that's happening weekly, daily, or monthly. Take the guesswork out
for your future self. Get the steps written
down in full. Now's the time where
you have a clear brain to sit down and do that. You're welcome to
plan out many months. You can plan out the whole year, but I do think planning by the month is good
because you can measure the results and decide if you want to stick
through that channel, or do you want to try a new one. We don't want to switch
around too much. Remember, consistency
is our best game here. I rely a lot on Instagram and
my newsletter as an artist. I use later.com for scheduling
my Instagram posts. It's less in the moment
I get to actually have a real plan and I use
Squarespace to do my website, but also my newsletter. Those are some resources if you need them for how
to schedule things. By planning your
marketing each month, you are working on reaching those financial goals
that we mapped out. You want to set your
goals, pick your channel, decide your frequency, and then map out your action steps. Consistency is key. We're creating a
rhythm that we're going to stick to every month. Thank you so much for getting your marketing plan
in order with me. The next lesson, we
are putting all of this together into an action
plan. I'll see you there.
10. Create Your Action Plan: [MUSIC] It always
seems like there's just so much we want to do in our creative work and
our creative businesses, the to-do lists
never seems to end. Well, the easiest way for this
all to seem manageable is to get your action steps
mapped out quarter by quarter. Take all the overwhelm, and let's make it into
little chunks of to-dos. In the creative
business plan PDF, there's a template and of course you can follow
along on your own. We want to divide the year into quarters, three month chunks. You may start this plan
mid-year or mid-quarter, and that's completely fine. The best is to start where you are and just to get started. What you're going do is
on a piece of paper, you're going to divide the
paper into these quarters. Quarter 1 is January
to March, quarter 2, April to June, quarter 3, July to September, and quarter
4 is October to December. Now, we want to set goals for each quarter, each
three-month chunk. It's a lot easier than writing a big to-do list for
that week or that month. Let's look at it in
a three-month chunk. Go back to your goal-setting
list in Lesson 3, that felt like a long time ago. You have a list of goals. Each quarter, you're going to
pick three business goals, and three creative goals to accomplish during
those three months. Make sure you think
about what time of year this is all
happening in, so example, like Christmas and
what quarter that different holidays fit in
that might be milestones. This also could be
milestones in your own life, so if you have a
fun trip planned or not something so
fun like a surgery, you don't want to overload
yourself in the beginning. Build in kindness for yourself. You don't have to have
three goals of each either. The thing that I've left
for you to help you at the bottom of the page is
creating a parking lot. I love a parking lot because
I have so many ideas, so many things I should
do and where I put them all is in my parking lot, instead of a massive to-do
list where I paralyze myself. I have my goals,
my true goals of what I want done in my
main part of my page, and then I put ideas that I have throughout
the year in my parking lot. If one-quarter I accomplish all of my most important goals, I'm allowed to pull something
from the parking lot. This discipline
allows me to stay focused on my path and do the things that are
actually important to my business and not just something that I
get distracted by. In your plan, make sure
you factor in time. Time is our greatest resource, it's also our most limited, so make sure that you
think about your year, the responsibilities you have, and again, not to
overload yourself. Our creative work and our
business is supposed to add joy and excitement, not to burn ourselves out. The key is it takes
many years to build a sustainable
business in general. As a creative business, it's really the long
game, but I promise you, you will get there
faster if you're willing to make
plans like these, they're literally a recipe
for success to move forward. What you're going
to do to recap, you're going to divide your
page into your quarters, and then you're going
to go back to Lesson 3, you're going to get your list of goals and you're going to map out what makes sense
for the year ahead, for your own responsibilities, but also what's happening
around in the world. Now we know what we are
doing through these goals. The next lesson we're actually
going to talk about what we're not doing, so
I'll see you there.
11. Create Your 'Not Doing' List: [MUSIC] You have done
all this important work, but now it's your job to stay on your path to stick to it. It is so easy in the
creative world to be distracted by opportunities. I have done my fair
share of doing free work in hopes of exposure
and things like that. Now we have a creative
business plan. We have a path. It is packed full of our
dreams and our goals, and our real job is to stay
focused and stick to it. You've done all this work,
let's bring it home. To really stay on our path, there are probably
some bad habits that you need to cut out. We're going to make some
promises to ourselves. Some truth here is
going to come out. What are you not doing
this year to make room for all your goals and
your big dreams to come true? They need room to thrive. There's a template in your
creative business plan. You could also journal along. We're just going to complete
some sentences together. You can answer these ones
or you might need to write these out a few
times to remember. This year I will
not be dot-dot-dot. This year I will say no to, this year I will let go of, this year I promise I will
not get distracted by. As you get writing, you are welcome to add more
sentences, more statements. You need to write yourself
some love notes here, do it. But this list is what you're
going to refer to over the year when you
just want to say yes to that distraction. You could put this up somewhere. You want to make sure
that you are focused. Have this handy. You are putting in writing
a commitment to yourself. You have worked this hard, so it's time to do
the final step. I am thanking you. Your future self is thanking you and thank you so much
for making a plan with me.
12. Final Thoughts!: You did it. You are already achieving your goals
by doing this process. You are truly ahead of the game. You now have a roadmap to make your creative business and
work dreams a reality. Stay true to your vision and
the why behind your work. You have done all
this work to get it on paper, stick with it. Keep working the plan, adjusting your monthly
and quarterly goals are going to keep you on track. Remember, this is
a living document. This is what you're going
to use throughout the year. You want to have it out, you want to adjust those numbers, especially the marketing plan, making sure every month you're looking at your action steps. I highly recommend creating a business plan at
least once a year. It is amazing to see how much you can
accomplish in a year, you have it all written down. My old business plans
are treasures to me, they show me the story
of my art business, but also my life and what I went through and
how things changed. In the project section, please let me know that
you've completed your plan, I would love to
give you a congrats because you really deserve that. You are also welcome to share one of your offerings of
your creative business. I would like to know
more about what you do. Community is key in doing this work and keeping the momentum going
throughout the year, so encourage others,
comment below. Thank you so much
for joining me. We need more creativity
in this world, we need more
entrepreneurship and we need more creatives like
you following their dreams. What you're doing is important. I hope this plan will make your creative business
dreams a reality.