5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship

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.

When you run your own business as freelance creative, you might find it difficult to take time off. If you shut off your phone and close your laptop, there’s no one else to take over. And if you charge by the hour, taking a day off means no revenue. But everyone needs to rest. So if you find it hard to take time off, let me make some suggestions to help you free yourself up for a much needed vacation.

Creative entrepreneurs not only face external struggles, we also face the struggle within. The creative process is marked by struggle. We agonize to find that perfect solution. This angst ridden process is baked into creativity and adds an extra layer of difficulty to our form of entrepreneurship. In order to push through all these challenges, it can be helpful to remember the incredible privileges we have in our creative callings.

There’s no question that being a creative entrepreneur is not the easiest path. Going into business for yourself demands considerable effort, diligence, determination, and plain hard work. When you’re just starting out you may need to hustle and grind. But that can’t last forever. Eventually you need to get strategic, and find a more sustainable path.

Does your company’s operating budget adequately anticipate infrequent future expenses? Planning your budget based on our known monthly expenses, doesn't prepared you for when an expensive annual software license comes due. You need to regularly set aside revenue to cover unanticipated future expenses. If not, you might end up facing a budget crunch that can crush your business.

Last time we explored the topic of creative methodologies, and how they can improve your sales and marketing. A proven methodology that focuses on solving specific problems not only boosts your sales game, but it also leads to efficiencies that enable you to increase the margins you retain from your project fees. A well-oiled methodology will make you more profitable, significantly increase client satisfaction, and improve the impact of your work.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for very long you’re probably acquainted with the five motifs that structure 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship: Money, Minutes, Marketing, Management, and Motivation. Well there is a sixth motif that could be added, and conveniently it also starts with the letter “M.” Your creative Methodology can be a powerful addition to your marketing and radically improve your closing rate on sales opportunities. But only if your methodology is truly unique.

Throughout history new technologies have always had beneficial, yet disruptive outcomes. The printing press put many scribes out of work. Photographic typography ended the careers of linotype operators, and digital photography has put tons of pressure on professional photographers. Today, the Internet’s enabling of world wide crowdsourcing, is having similar effects on creative freelancers. How are you supposed to do battle with Upwork, and win?