5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship

When you get control over your marketing, you’ll no longer be subject to the variable winds and waves of a fickel referral networks. Instead you’ll gain the stability that comes from a steady stream of qualified leads. And when you have plenty of leads you get to decide which clients and projects to take on. Those might include the clients with the best creative opportunities, or the best budgets, or both.

Professional services are not sold in the same way as consumer products. Professionals sell through reputation and trust. And cold, technical digital marketing methods don’t help with that kind of effort—in fact, they’d more likely hurt. So you can ignore 90% of the fast-paced, technology-driven, methods. That said it's still essential that prospective clients find out that you exist, and keep you in mind for projects when the time is right.

The time table from the first steps in forming a marketing program to the time you start enjoying its fruits can take up to eighteen months. Now it is possible to shorten this timeframe through fast decision making, and extra exertion in the preparation involved. But other aspects of a new marketing program can’t be rushed. And so the sooner you start the sooner you’ll get to that harvest!

In the introductory session of my new course, Marketing Mastery for Creative Entrepreneurs, I review the three essential resolutions that are necessary for any successful marketing program. Like a three legged stool, if any one of these resolutions are lacking the other two stop working, and your marketing efforts will fall flat. In fact, as I’ve listened to creative entrepreneurs describe their frustrations with marketing, I can always connect their past failures to missing one or more of these three essential marketing resolutions.   

Welcome to episode 100 of 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship. To mark this milestone. I’d like to let you know about a new digital course I’ll soon be releasing called Marketing Mastery for Creative Entrepreneurs. And at the end of this episode, I’ll have a special offer to all my podcast listeners.

Your total compensation is capped by available time, multiplied by your hourly rate, minus overhead. But what happens when you have available time, but no billable work to fill it? Downtime for the creative entrepreneur can be deadly. Every creative practice will experience gaps in their project calendars. The question is, do you have a plan to make the most of your downtime?

Creatives don’t go into business to make a killing, we still want to be well compensated for the value we deliver to clients. But while making good money from our work is great, that’s not the only reason we’re in this business. We’re drawn to creative entrepreneurship because we love the work, as well as whatever financial rewards it might deliver. But when we combine our love for the creative process with the realities of running a business, that joy can soon turn into sinking grief.

When creative entrepreneurs launch, they don’t imagine massive cash infusions from investors, or of taking their company public. More often than not creatives pursue creative control, and better creative opportunities. For creatives business is more of a lifestyle choice than as a business investment. But do creatives need to be content with mere income replacement, or can creative entrepreneurship deliver higher returns?

Managing time is essential for creative entrepreneurs since our services are so often sold by time and materials. Becoming accurate in estimating is a necessary skill in this business. The only way to improve these skills is to build a data source that helps you keep a birds-eye view on project performance. But once you start building all this valuable data, how exactly do you use it? And how can you use past projects to estimate future ones, especially since no two projects are exactly the same?  

Humans have an interesting relationship to time. While the clock ticks by at a perfectly constant rate, our experience of time is highly variable. Vacations seem to fly by. But if you’re laid up with a bad back, time slows to a crawl. There are similar perception-based time distortions in running your creative practice. And when your profits come from the use of your time, these business time warps can seriously distort your performance, and undermine your profits.