Before you start a creative business…

Welcome to the first part of my series about (calm) creative business building. My aim is to summarize all of my best learnings and insights about running a creative business, in logical order, as a kind of roadmap to follow when starting your own creative business.

I will especially have artists and writers in mind (since that's where a lot of my own experience lies), but most of what I say will be just as applicable for musicians, performers, film makers, creative freelancers such as photographers and illustrators, and craftspeople of different kinds. Anyone who wants to build a business around one or more creative skills, either by selling the products or services they offer, or teaching their skills to others.

Disclaimer: I'm not a business expert. I'm just a fellow small business person who's been making a living on my creative skills for over a decade, read an embarrassing amount of business and marketing books, and learned the hard way what works and doesn't work. Use this as inspiration, not objective fact. 😊

Let's start from the very beginning, when this business of yours is still on the embryonic stage.

Maybe you're still in school. Or your creative practice is your hobby, or something you do therapeutically. It lights you up, feels deeply meaningful, and you often think to yourself: "I could do this all day, every day..." Maybe you've gotten compliments for your work, with the addition of "you should do this for a living". Maybe you've even sold some of your work already. But the step to actually start a business around it both excites and terrifies you.

Spoiler alert: those two words kind of summarize the whole experience of running a creative business. Terror and excitement in one, big, glorious roller coaster ride. It's not for everyone, but if you're reading this, I'm assuming there's at least some part of you that craves that in your life. I've always thrived on the dizzying freedom, empowering independence, and limitless possibilities of entrepreneurship. And even though I sometimes lament choosing this way of life, and fantasize about regular paychecks and benefits, I would choose it over a more stable, predictable career any day.

You don't have to be a risk taker to start a business, though. You don't have to be an extroverted, high-energy, type-A person. You don't have to be the best at what you do. But you do have to be comfortable with insecurity, unpredictability, and relying on yourself to figure things out and get things done.

As long as you have those qualities, I believe you can overcome any hardship that running a business will bring.

Still, there are some things worth thinking about before taking the plunge and starting a creative business.

The first one is...

Should this creative passion of yours even be a business?

This perspective is so often missing from the general discussion around entrepreneurship today, which is all about "follow your passion", and "make a living doing what you love." I certainly was steeped in that advice in my twenties, when I entered the job market. I read books like Gary Vaynerchuk's "Crush It!" and Chris Guillebeau's "$100 Start-Up". I listened to all of the online marketing and entrepreneurship podcasts. The overall message was: "If you're good at something, and love doing it, you should start a business around it."

And so I did. I loved writing, and so I started blogs, wrote for magazines, and freelanced as a copywriter. It worked well for me. I was confident enough in my abilities, and had a process for producing text that I could rely on. I learned how to write even when I didn't feel like it, and deliver under pressure. I did the same with web design - a skill I had acquired on my own, out of necessity. But when I tried running an art business, and monetizing my love for painting, it did not go as smoothly. Art was something I discovered while recovering from burnout, a therapeutic practice that gave me a break from the hustle mindset that permeated everything else I had been doing up to that point. I loved painting because it didn't make demands on me. It felt like a sanctuary. And even though my logic at the time was "I love doing this, I want to do it full-time", the reality of that turned out to be quite different.

Just a few months into committing to selling art full-time, I fell out of love with painting. What had once been a joyful and nourishing creative practice, now felt transactional, robotic, soulless. And I no longer had that calm refuge to escape to when the demands of running a business overwhelmed me.

I've heard similar stories from so many creatives. Turning their creative craft into a business was thrilling at first, but the more the business grew, the less they enjoyed the actual creative process.

And there's a psychological explanation for this, one I learned way back in my game designer days. We humans can be motivated to do things two different ways: extrinsically or intrinsically. An extrinsic motivator is some kind of external reward or punishment, such as money or threat of physical pain. This is the "carrots and sticks" approach to motivation.

Then there's intrinsic motivation, which is where the activity in itself is the reward. We are intrinsically motivated to do things like painting, surfing, cooking, playing games, or playing the piano simply because they feel good. They put us in a state of flow. They activate all our senses. They make us feel alive and in touch with a deeper part of ourselves and the world.

Extrinsic motivation works well for routine work - tasks that don't require much deep thinking, problem solving or emotional labor. Tasks that we weren't enjoying that much anyways. But extrinsic motivation is catastrophic for creative work, which is otherwise intrinsically motivated.

As Daniel Pink writes his 2009 book "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us":

"Rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes."

In a famous study, a group of pre-schoolers who loved drawing were divided into three groups. The first group received an expected reward for their drawings, (they were told beforehand they could win a price). The second group received an unexpected reward, (the same price, but awarded as a surprise after the drawing session.) And the third group received no reward for their drawing.

Two weeks after the experiment, the researchers once again set out paper and markers and secretly observed which of the kids used them. Those in the "no reward" and "unexpected reward" groups drew as much as before, but the "expected reward" group seemed much less interested in drawing.

Similar results have since been replicated in many other studies, with both children and adults. In one study from the 1960's, researchers asked students at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago about their attitude towards their work, and what motivated their art practice. Twenty years later, these results were followed up by another researcher who checked in on these art students to see how their careers were progressing.

The artists who we more intrinsically motivated, and less concerned with external goals and validation, had been more successful both several years after graduation and nearly twenty years later. One could almost say that the less these artists cared about "success", the likelier they were to achieve it.

This is a huge dilemma for the professional creative. We want to do what we love, what we're really good at. But we also need a roof over our heads, and food on the table.

When we start a business around a creative passion, we're putting extrinsic motivation on top of something we've previously enjoyed intrinsically. We are turning play into work. And we need to carefully guard our creative process and find a middle ground between what we enjoy doing and what people want to buy from us. (I will talk more about this in the next part in the series.)

Another thing to consider is the unique challenge of monetizing creative work.

Starting a creative business is different from other types of businesses.

For a number of reasons:

1. Creativity-on-demand is more complicated than doing some other skill on demand. A plumber doesn't need to feel inspired to do their work. They don't need a "personal brand and style". Their process is more predictable and repeatable. If their workload becomes too great, they can hire more plumbers in their business. A novelist or artist or musician or actor can't predict, compartmentalize, or outsource their creative output in the same way.
2. The creative process is highly individual, and more sensitive towards the inner state of the creative. They can't churn work out, 8 hours a day, like a factory worker. Yes: a creative can have routines and processes that make creative work more systematic, more productive. But only up to a point. We're not machines. If the quality of our output is to be good (and worth paying for), we need space for rest, reflection, incubation, experimentation and failure.
3. Creative work is not valued and paid for the same way other goods and services are. The price for it might be much higher, or much lower, than what the actual work is worth. (And who can even say exactly what a piece of art is worth? It's highly subjective.) Creative work can be harder to sell, because it's not a necessity for life but a "nice to have". For that reason, it's also more sensitive to the ups and downs in the economy.
4. Depending on your craft, there might be any number of gatekeepers standing between you and your audience. And there might be middlemen who all want their share of the money. Less so today than 20, 30 years ago, but still.

All of these factors combined mean that, even though you are highly skilled at what you do, and work very hard, you might not be fully in control of your income. That's the hard reality we need to navigate as creatives. If we want the autonomy and financial benefits that comes with running a business, there are much better options than selling our creativity.

But we're not in this for the money, are we? That's what separates us from the traditional entrepreneur. The traditional entrepreneur starts by looking at the audience. They ask themselves: "What's a problem I can solve? What does the market need?" They go where the opportunities are. They run their business for profit first, and passion second.

The creative starts with themselves: "What do I love doing? What can I offer the world?" They need to find an audience for their work, not the other way around. They make art for passion first, profit second.

This is why I feel it's so important to go into a creative business with eyes open, and realistic expectations.

All businesses take time to establish and become profitable. There are no (ethical, sustainable) ways to quick growth. The best businesses are built slowly and deliberately, over time. They take years to turn a profit.

It might take you three years just to find your voice as an artist, develop your confidence, build a body of work, and get your name and work out into enough places for the snowball to really start rolling. It might take you three years of experimentation before settling into the work routines and marketing methods that work for you.

This will take time. That time might be full of fun, meaningful work, and exciting projects and breakthroughs. But it will also be tough, often for reasons out of your control. So I recommend asking yourself a few questions.

Questions to ask yourself before starting a creative business:

• Is this something you can do even under pressure, when you don't necessarily feel inspired? Could you do it on a deadline, in public, in collaboration with others, or whatever this business would entail?
• Will you feel comfortable selling and advocating for your own work? Even on the times when you don't necessarily feel confident or pleased with your work?
• Is there a market for what you do/make? Are your ideal customers/clients/audience out there, do they have money to spend, and are there enough of them for this business to be sustainable?
• How much control do you have over the amount of opportunities, and income streams needed for this business to work? Can you earn a living on these skills in more ways than one?
• Can you give yourself the time necessary to get this business off the ground? Do you have money saved up? Can you keep your day job, or maybe get a new one that's less demanding of your time and energy? Can you get help and support from a loved one?
• And finally: Can you see yourself doing this for the next five to ten years, and still enjoy it? Will you love doing this even when it feels more like work than play? Could you weather the anxieties, stresses, and demands of it?

You don't need to know the answers to these questions right now. Some of them, you can’t really find out until you get started. But perhaps by considering them beforehand, you'll save yourself at least some inconvenient realizations down the road.

Starting a business doesn't have to be an either/or situation, of course. It doesn't have to feel like jumping from a bridge and building the parachute on the way down. The best way to start is slowly and casually, with low stakes.

Think of your business idea as a scientific hypothesis that you'll try out in the real world, and gather feedback on. The more data you collect, the more comfortable you'll be in committing to it.

I used to follow the motto of "If you see someone else doing something successfully, that means it's doable for you too". A classic self-help platitude. There are some major flaws to this kind of thinking though. For starters, we can never know all of the factors that have made someone successful. We can guess at some of them, by reading their biographies, listening to interviews with them, or maybe even taking their courses. But we can never see the full picture: Their background, their genetics and personality, their connections, and the blind luck that got them to where they are now. They will likely not even know these things themselves.

Then there's the survivorship bias of those who have "made it" and are now teaching their tactics to others. Tactics that might have worked well ten years ago but won't work as well today. The world is changing rapidly. The 1990's was likely a great time to be a freelance writer, with plenty of magazines and news outlets to work for. Today, many of those publications have gone out of business, pay rates have shrunk dramatically, and the competition is fiercer than ever. 2015 was likely a lovely time to start an art business. The economy was thriving, and social media platforms were a highly effective form of marketing. Today, the situation looks very different.

Just become some people insist that “anyone can have their success if they just do the work and follow their plan”, it’s by no means a guarantee for everyone.

There are still a multitude of ways for you to reach success as a creative, of course. But you can only really know if something will work for you by trying it - by gathering your own proof. By learning and adapting as you go. You'll need to find your tactics, your approach to success, not someone else's.

There's no need to get this right from the start. You won't, anyways. None of us do. All businesses are built from trial and error. The benefit of starting slow and casual is that you can dip your toe in, and try out your idea, without the pressure. And you can remain mindful of how you feel about your work, and protect that passion that made you want to start this business in the first place.

In the next part in the series, we will talk about what type of business you could start as a creative: the various business models and income streams available to you, and how to figure out which ones might suit you as a person. And how to make sure you build a business you'll love running long-term, and that won't burn you out.