gm lions!
And particularly those of you that, like me, are running a creative business, such as
- Recording/mixing engineers
- Content creators
- Graphic designers
- Videographers
Many of us that are in creative disciplines are not naturally inclined to plan, because, I get it, it sucks! It's boring! but it's absolutely crucial that we do it. Why? because a lot of smart people said so.
Also, because when we don't have a plan, we often times get sucked into somebody else's plan, people who are intentional. As a very simple example: have you ever gone to a party where somebody made a plan to play a game of Pictionary or some other activity? yeah, you know you got stuck making a terrible drawing of a horse, didn't you? And gravitating into someone else's plan when it comes to business could mean getting a worse end of a deal than if you had made a plan in January 2023 and focused on it as best as possible.
So before we start to build that plan, I want to take a look at 2023 and see what worked and what didn't.
Ask yourself some questions about your business. For simplicity's sake, I'd like to stick to three main areas.
Income
Ok, this is sometimes hard to talk about when you run a creative business because we're artists, right? right. But we're also running a business for profit, so don't be scared to talk about it and make sure you count ever dollar that makes it to the register. Figure out the exact number of dollars you earned throughout the year. What did you hope to earn? and what did you actually earn?
Expenses
A lot of the times we start picking up expenses like software we should be paying for anymore. I know this because I've found email accounts, subscriptions to cool AI websites I don't use anymore and it's sometimes hard to overlook these tiny expenses because they're only $6.00 a month. But every penny we're spending on things I don't need is a penny of profit I won't be making.
Work-life balance
How many hours a week did you work?
Did you spend the year working weekends or staying late at work?
What was your level of enjoyment?
Were you happy running your creative endeavor? or were you mostly stressed out and miserable?
How good was your life outside of work?
How was your relationship with friends, family and loved ones? Is your marriage in a good spot or did you maybe miss out on your favorite hobbies?
Ok, that's pretty good for warm up. So now that you've mapped out what happened in 2023 in these three areas, it's time to make a plan for 2024. And I'd like to propose you ask yourself a few simple questions to get those planning juices flowing.
Question # 1 What do you want from your creative business in 2024?
In terms of money
Ok, so this one is pretty easy because it's measurable. How much money do you want to make, how much money do you want to spend. If you sat down with your accountant and realized that your income was $69,000 for 2023, what figure do you want for the next 12 months?
In terms of recognition
Being in the entertainment industry often comes with participating in(and sometimes winning) contests, or awards, like a Grammy. Is that something that is important for you in 2024? Sometimes earning respect from others can be something that you might want to get from your creative business.
In terms of personal life
Are you having problems in your marriage? or maybe you haven't seen your friends for a while?
Question # 2 What do you need to do to make the above happen?
Again, for simplicity's sake, I'll stick to the three areas I mentioned above.
If you want to increase your income...
Ask yourself how do you get better at sales? Or how do get better conversion rate from your leads? How do you stay top-of-mind with your leads so that you're there when they're ready to buy? Is your pricing right? Maybe you need to do a little benchmark and see how you rank against your competition.
If you want to have a larger following on social media...
If one of your goals is to have a larger following on social media, for example, maybe you need to be more present on both web2 and web3 platforms. You might want to consider working on your consistency for showing up and be willing to fail in front of the camera or try new content ideas.
If you want to have a better relationships...
If your goal is to improve your personal life, maybe you need to be more willing to accept invitations from friends to hang out or to have lunch. Or maybe if your relationship with your significant other wasn't that great last year, you could consider going to couples therapy.
Ok, now that you've done some brainstorming and got an idea of what your goals are, what you need to need to do to get there and what your limitations might be, it's time to develop a list of specific projects that will attempt to reach those goals.
For example, if your service with the highest profit margin is doing live-switching podcasts and live-streaming events, make an investment plan for the equipment you'll need to make that happen and create a marketing campaign around this service, write out a job description and train a switcher operator to work the set, lights, cameras and switcher. Make sure the deliverables for your and acceptance criteria are clear so that you know when your project has been successful or not. Project management concepts are super useful when it comes to planning and staying on track when it comes to budget, schedule and scope. I used the PMI methodology for many years as a career project manager and would highly recommend learning about it.
Let me know what plans YOU have for 2024. I'd also love to talk about project management concepts. I already have a few projects I'm cooking and I'll for sure be sharing in future posts.
