Hi Benek, it’s so good to hear from you. Thank you for reading and sharing your experience. Your way of doing things and creativity is truly unique. Nobody can replicate that in totality, for sure.
It’s a real struggle you are going through and it was something I took quite a while to figure out for myself. This story was based on the trigger that made me take the leap. Before the leap, my thoughts were exactly what you are worried about: reputation, quality of work, timelines, processes, nobody can replace me, it’s faster if I do it myself, I hate sales, I love to do the creative work, who cares about my business other than myself…etc.
Problem is, when I thought more about the “HOW”, the more I did not take the leap. There’s too much involved. Until my firstborn forced me to it. In other words, if not for anything that triggered this, I would have carried on with the same thing I’ve been doing.
That’s fine if you love it. In my case problem is, the longer I stay on this route, the more I feel comfortable with it. If I were to pluck myself out of this later, the harder it would be.
Through some self-discovery, I truly want to grow. And if you are looking to grow as well, sales and outsourcing are inevitable, at least for now. Maybe some automation can help. But you are not a salesman and even if you do sales, you are not a salesman. You are still the same creative person as much as you want yourself to be.
Sales come from building and leveraging relationships. And you don’t have to do this all by yourself. You can work with someone else who’s more into people while you deal with the conceptualizing and creative part of the work.
Then, when it comes to the repeatable technical tasks like project management, folders, file names, the saving of files, packaging to print-ready materials, less creative work, you may outsource that — these are the things that take a shorter time to train. These are also things many people are willing to be hired to do at a fee that is not considered too high.
There are things you may like and don’t like about growing. Start outsourcing things you don’t like to do first and don’t need you to do them.
In my case I do think that I should do the sales at the beginning, once my business grows big enough (my own metric), then I will find a sales and marketing team to support that. Once that’s handed off, I will have some time to do my own creative work, writing and other things I love doing while my business is running.
You may wish to do that so that you won’t have to handle people for your whole life and still do what you love doing.
Truly appreciate your thoughts and time for reading Benek. You’ve inspired me to churn out a story on this. In that story, I will put more meat into the “how” and credit you for it.
Meanwhile, all the best!
Speaking of partnership, I will send people your way if they need creative work like yours :)
