Every artist knows that feeling of ennui that comes when they realize art has to be marketable in order to offer a self-sustaining career. You can write the strangest and most inventive books ever (and you may even be recognized for them one day), but without being able to convince people to read them, odds are a living as an independent author will be hardy to come by.
This is, of course, why much creativity and art can seem a little artificial. Most people express that common pop music often feels laboratory-grown as if it were engineered on a manufacturing line as opposed to the creative inspiration of an individual or band.
That said, it’s important to never draw a hard and fast line between commercial skills and creative skills. Artists might not naturally believe business is something that inspires or interests them, but you’d be surprised just how often those two capabilities can overlap. We say this because if you’re creative thinking about running their own solo enterprise, we’re certain that you may have more potential than you have given yourself credit for.
In fact, if you’re a creative individual with certain artistic capabilities, you may be quite capable of the following tasks:
Innovative Thinking Is Essential
To run a business, you need to identify a market you can serve. In the best cases, this market will be underserved, ready and waiting for you to arrive. As a creative individual, you no doubt have some insight about how to message that brand, the narrative you could use to gain exposure, and moreover, see the missing gaps in your competitor’s market analysis.
For example, let’s consider a graphic design service run by a single creative entrepreneur. Thanks to their own experience serving clients in the past, they know what clients are looking for, how to moderate creativity and accessibility in their work, and perhaps how to serve certain markets that may not seem identified with sharp graphic design, like charities and local businesses.
This ability to think innovatively and use your creative experience in a particular discipline will go a long way.
Delivering Your Creativity
Creativity is by its very nature limitless, but it must be delivered in a direct manner with essential parameters if it’s to be understood. For example, the greatest writers will rarely just write a book about their convictions or the philosophical themes they find interesting that year, instead they’ll use narrative framing devices to better explore and uncover those ideas and themes.
We can use this kind of process to seek the best parameters for delivering our creativity, so that our business format is easy to understand, accessible, and attractive to clients. For example, sewing and embroidery digitizing software can help you better showcase essential designs to clients, keep an approach archive of your work, plan out future projects, and manage your creative intent that much more capably. As you can see, sometimes it’s not just what you hope to achieve with your business, but the funnels you use to deliver that novelty that counts most of all.
Marketing & Brand Storytelling
From a certain vantage point, all creativity is concerned with storytelling. Even a painting is said to speak a thousand words, so if you’re not necessarily a writer, you may still have something worthwhile to offer.
Brand storytelling is an authentic marketing approach that helps you not only sell the idea of your brand and the products or services it offers but includes a potential audience in the brand you’re trying to build to begin with. This can inspire them to keep up with your news, to look at your new service launches, and to root for your success.Of course, there’s no reason for over-mythologizing your brand, in fact taking a more simple approach can be ideal. You might use a website page to describe your story, upload photographs of your first prototype products, or delineate your experience in a creative industry before running your own enterprise.
Seek to inform your audience of your goals for the brand, why you felt it necessary, and the lessons you’ve learned. The more you can humanize yourself, the better your audience can empathize with you. If there’s anything creatives are naturally skilled at, it’s understanding empathy. So don’t be afraid to implement that into your advertising approach, it could make a real difference.
Business Isn’t A Hard Science
It’s incredibly easy to think that running a business involves a pre-arranged format that has no flexibility to work with at all. But that’s not true at all. Sure, there are essential hard and fast principles that probably shouldn’t be subverted – like good bookkeeping, managing your taxes, curating a good balance sheet, working with suppliers capably, and appealing to investors where necessary.
Yet some areas of business are open for debate, and may even be compared to art. How you present yourself as the main confidence figure of your business is the first step, and learning to public speak, dress well for your business, and to conduct yourself well at networking events is its own form of artistry.
Working with outsourced help for a particular project is also a form of artistry because collaboration has never been a hard science. Speaking to clients, spreading goodwill, and going the extra mile are also skills that come from a creative and visionary set of priorities. So, even if you don’t think you have much business experience, you’re likely to have some practiced skills worth using.
Great Time Management
It’s easy to see artists as laid-back, only ever working when inspiration strikes. We might think of a French novelist spending time out in bars late at night, waking up somewhere in the mid-afternoon, and somehow still penning the most beautiful novel you’ve ever set eyes on.
But the truth is that anyone who has made a dedicated focus of their art will know the time-keeping management involved. As such, it’s important not to dismiss yourself from the conventions of a 9-5 office job life, with business planning hours either side of that.Great time management is about more than just sticking to a schedule, but understanding your essential priorities, being reachable at certain hours, putting in personal effort, and being able to dismiss superfluous activities.
Creatives know time management, and they can often work for long periods and still retain their focus. Ask any actor, or stage hand, or film shoot runner, and they’ll all tell you of long days spent on-site for the benefit of a larger goal.
Adaptability
If there’s anything creative professionals have to be, it’s adaptable, and not precious about changing their direction. For example, a novelist will no doubt have to learn how to cut down the extraneous scenes in their story in the interest of readability, which is why they’re often assisted and constrained by editors looking to make the work more digestible.
If you’ve experienced this before, then congratulations! You no doubt have the perfect experience for the rigors of business life, where sometimes issues that aren’t working out need to be properly addressed and moved on from. Learning this skillset can help you avoid burnout, disappointment, or a sense of entitlement after working on a project for a while. This will help you achieve success where it is, not where you hope it could be, or think it should always remain.
With this advice, you’re sure to see that creative skills are business skills aren’t so far apart after all. So why not invest your own time, with confidence, knowing that success could be around your corner?
