When you think about running your business as an artist, do you ever worry that it will overtake your time in the same way a survival job can? Do you hesitate to take action because you imagine it will take away your joy while trying to create your work? Do you wonder how you will be able to manage it without dreading the work it could force you into?

There is one major difference between a business and a job that, once you understand, can help you avoid falling into a joyless rut once and for all. A business is a series of projects designed to yield an exchange of value-for-value. It offers a product or service to those who want or need it for an exchange of value in the form of money. Each project needs to be broken down into bite size pieces in order to be carried out and executed successfully.

A job, on the other hand, is a bite-sized portion of a business project that requires consistent, repetitive action to be taken over a period of time. If the job is done as needed, the project can be carried out successfully. Each job within a business is designed to help execute a small part of the bigger whole.

The reason your business could ever start to feel like a job is when you run into a problem that you may not know the answer to. This can cause a feeling of chaos, as well as not being sure what action to take. So the most common approach is to start taking the same action you had been taking, hoping it will lead you to better results. However, taking the same action in hopes of seeing different results is the beginning of the end of your joy! Because this type of action leads to keeping yourself and your business in the exact same place- the exact definition of a job. It is this pivotal moment that your business has an opportunity to grow, which is exactly what it is meant to do, and it’s a matter of stepping back enough to assess what it really needs and how to bring that to it so it can expand.

The place where almost every small business owner struggles the most with- 90%, to be exact- is discovering their most ideal client. This holds true for every art business as well- even those where you don’t sell product but instead your services as an artist, like actors, graphic designers, and choreographers. Knowing how to discover your true ideal client is the key to building a business that has found that sweet spot of consistent and predictable revenue from clients who love and resonate with what you have to offer.

This is exactly why we as artists are cut out to run the most successful businesses with our work. Like any creative project, you often have to walk away to consider why what you’re doing is not working, search for answers, and come back to it when you’re ready to try something new. There is always an answer that will work well for you, and you often find it through a variety of resources. This is part of the artistic act of creation. This is also the exact approach the most successful business owners take in order to allow their businesses to thrive. The moment you look at what is not working is the exact moment you enable the space for growth to continue.

I have spent the last nine months working side by side my mentor, Ryan Levesque, author of the book ASK. and creator of the ASK Methodology, which has become the most refined method of discovering your true ideal client on a special training for you to use this method to uncover your true ideal client, and that training is coming up this week! I can’t wait to share it with you, so be sure to mark your calendar for Wednesday, July 5th and listen to Artists In Business Podcast Episode 122 for details on how to access that training.