How To Diagnose The Problems In Your Creative Business
Part 2 in a series on leading your creative business. Part 1 here.
You ever have one of those moments where you hear this amazing quote that someone rattles off on a podcast or a social media post, it resonates so deeply that you immediately add it to your notes or screenshot it?
I have between three and five (I’ve lost track) different notes — in Apple Notes, Evernote, The Archive, and Notion, at least — that contain all of the different quotes I’ve captured over the years.
Recently, I was listening to a podcast where Jim Collins was the guest.
He’s always got plenty of quotable/tweetable/shareable sound bites, but this one quote on leadership hit me:
Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done.
He attributed the quote to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
You ever have one of those moments where you hear this amazing quote, then you go and search for it only to find that person never actually said the thing someone said that they said…?
Yeah. Frustrating.
Turns out, Eisenhower never actually said those exact words.
Close, but different.
So, for the purposes of this post, we’ll use Jim Collin’s paraphrasing of the quote.
Here’s what I’m getting at:
In order to lead, YOU must know what must be done.
After nearly a decade of working as a freelancer in music and film, I was no better off than when I started.
More specifically, in the first year on my own, I think I made around $40,000.
Not bad for someone still finishing up a degree in sound recording, but nothing to aspire to…
11 years later, I had a failing video production company that I’d tried to keep afloat using various forms of debt. (Don’t do that.)
After calling it quits with my business partner, I had no income for a few weeks and ended up helping a friend with a construction project in order to provide for my family that Christmas.
The grand total for my income that year? $36,000.
Not only was I no better off than a decade before, I was objectively worse off, after 10 years of working as a professional.
Why am I telling you all of this?
Because I failed to understand — or even be aware of — this principle.
That it’s the job of a leader to understand what must be done.
There were too many things to list here that I could have — should have — done to create a successful business.
But I failed to do them.
Because at the time I didn’t know what they were.
I was stuck in what Mike Michalowicz calls the Survival Trap.
It’s where you fix the problem right in front of you rather than the one that will actually move your business forward.
In order to move your business forward, you need to understand three things:
1. Where You Are Right Now
Would you ever go on a backpacking trip without first finding the trailhead?
Better yet, would you ever embark on such a trip without taking stock of what equipment you did or didn’t have?
No! You’d put together a packing list, assemble everything you already own, then you’d go out and acquire everything you needed to make the journey safely.
With your business, you need the same level of clarity about your current situation.
- are you making enough money to support your lifestyle?
- do you have enough leads coming in to support your business?
- are you aware of the levers that make your business grow?
More on that in a minute.
Let’s look at the second thing you need to know:
2. Where You’re Going
For the last two years, I have had the privilege of being a senior producer on the tv show Relative Race for BYUTV.
The gist of the show is that four teams of two race around the country competing in challenges and searching for family.
One or both team members on each team are looking for family that they’ve never met — a parent, sibling, grandparent — due to them being adopted or raised in foster care.
One of the elements of the show is that the teams must turn in their smart phones at the beginning of the race, and rely solely on paper maps and the goodness of strangers to reach their intended destinations each day.
There’s a stark difference between those that succeed and those that fail.
Those that do well in the race understand one important principle — in order to navigate a map properly, you not only know where you are, but where you are going.
(Go to the 23:00 mark here.)
Yeah, I had the green team.
It was one of the most painful experiences to watch them struggle and not be allowed to help them navigate.
But so often, that’s how we run our businesses.
We don’t know the destination.
We just know that “we need to get to Arr-Kansas!”
(Seriously, go watch that clip.)
Without a clear picture of where you’re headed and why you want to get there in the first place you’re headed for a world of hurt on the journey.
3. What Obstacle Is Preventing You From Getting There?
Say you’ve got those first two figured out.
You have a good grasp on the problem your business helps people with, and the people you are seeking to serve.
Why, then, are things not working the way you’d hoped?
What is the blind spot, the thing you’re not seeing?
I recently came across an amazing resource that helps business owners dial in on their “vital need”, the thing that they need to address in their business, the “weakest link” that when strengthened allows the whole business to run better.
If you have found yourself caught in your own survival trap, you’ll want to check out that link, as it will immediately give you the clarity of what you need to work on now…
Of what must be done in your business.
The thing about creatives is that we intimately understand how to do the work.
We know how to write the songs, write the books, create the art, take the photo.
And we assume that’s enough.
That everything else will just “work out” somehow.
When we face reality, though, it can get painful, because we never saw it coming.
We didn’t know that there were all these other things we needed to be thinking about.
And so we get caught in the survival trap, which causes us to think “I just need to get better at my craft.”
“I should post more on social media.”
“Maybe I need to look at brand deals.”
“I’ve got to start live streaming for tips — for anything.”
“Anything is better than nothing, right?”
And soon we are so lost and stuck and confused that we’re pronouncing it Arr-Kansas!
Sheesh.
If you’re going to get through this and create a thriving, profitable, resilient business for yourself, one that allows you to do what you love for the rest of your life, then you have to understand that you are the leader.
You’re in command.
No one is coming to save you.
That can be frightening or empowering.
If you go back to the last post you’ll remember that the decision of what it means is entirely up to you.
In the next post, we’ll look at what how to address the problems that are holding your business back from being everything you always dreamed it could be.
A business that gives you the freedom to do the work you love, when where and how you want to do it.
Until then.
If you want to learn more about the journey of building a business that supports the work you love, get the free email series below.
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