A guest post by Tara Gentile, creator of the digital coaching program, The Art of Action. Stay tuned after the post for a special offer!
We all wish we had more time for building & growing our businesses. Whether you’re a mom, a moonlighter, or a full-time entrepreneur, there’s always something else on the “to do” list begging for the extra 5 minutes you just don’t have.
But what we really need – instead of more time – is a reality check. Take a look at the way you spend your time and ask yourself if the activities you spend the most time on are really giving you the return on investment you need. If not, it’s time to create a new plan.
Below, I’ve got 7 things I see creative business owners commonly wasting time on. You might be in for a few surprises!
1. Ingesting more information.
Sure, we all need to keep learning. When you stop learning, you’re dead, right?! But I question how much of the information you’re ingesting you’re actually digesting enough to learn?
Sitting in front of the computer screen, listening to podcasts, checking in on your phone, etc… there’s a place for that. But if you don’t have time to implement what you’re learning, you have no business wasting time ingesting the information. You’re not learning, you’re substituting information consumption for real action.
Instead of spending time consuming information, spend some time putting your existing knowledge into action. Don’t worry about having everything perfect and certainly don’t worry about knowing what you’re doing! Just give it a try, experiment, and learn from doing.
2. Promoting your products.
The word “promote” makes my toes curl. When I hear someone say, “I spend 2 hours per day promoting my products!” or “How else can I promote my work?” I get a little sick.
“Promoting your products” has become synonymous with broadcasting a poorly constructed sales pitch to an audience who is not interested and not listening. Promoting your products isn’t marketing and it’s not effective.
Instead, focus on reaching your ideal customers by creating products they really love and can’t find elsewhere. Focus on creating a brand so strong it begs to be made fun of! Focus on attracting new clients by sharing interesting content and having fun. Focus on getting others to do the promoting by crafting something that begs to be shared.
3. Making your customers your friends.
We spend lots of time trying to get people to talk to us, like us, care about us. It can seem like the prevailing web 2.0 business advice is to make your customers your friends.
Ask yourself this: how much money do your friends spend on your products?
Not much. We trade with our friends, we give them presents, we ask them to wear our goods for exposure. But, in general, they don’t spend much to actually buy our stuff.
The same is true of your digital friends. Sure, they’ll turn up & buy a gift here or there. But your friends aren’t generally your ideal customers.
Stop trying to make friends and start trying to cultivate a real merchant-patron relationship. Instead of chatting, inform. Instead of giggling, enchant. Instead of politely reminding, make an offer.
You can be friendly with your customers without making them your friends.
4. Being a jack of all trades.
Is your business built around a conglomeration of loosely related services or products? Do you feel like you do a lot of things “sort of” well? Are you wishing you didn’t have to do X, Y, or Z so that you could really concentrate on A?
If so, you’re a jack of all trades.
I used to believe that being a “master of none” was part of what made me unique & marketable. Wrong.
It made me confused & confusing, undervalued & overworked.
Zeroing in your greatest strength, most extraordinary skill, and singular passion makes you unforgettable. Certainly, you’ll lose some customers. But you’ll raise your prices, attract even better customers, and have a more powerful message.
You can focus on a single skill and still use it in a variety of ways. Just make sure your focus is always front & center.
5. Trying to please everyone.
Whether you’re blogging, tweeting, product designing, or networking, it’s easy to start to think of all the “what ifs.” What if she doesn’t understand what I mean? What if I piss her off? What if I lose her interest?
So we slow down, watch our language (and not just for the curse words!), and make measured decisions.
The truth is that these type of actions waste precious time! We think too much about what people might say and forget about who we’re really trying to reach.
When you speak directly to those you want to recruit for your tribe, the conversation happens fast & furious. The right words pour out of you. The design comes along at lightning speed.
When you forget about your “wrong people,” you liberate yourself.
6. Going for quantity over quality.
This one is kind of a no-brainer. But we all need reminders about it, too!
I still catch myself attempting quantity over quality and have to pull back the reins.
Plain & simple, businesses built on quantity are almost always unsustainable. Businesses built on quality persist & thrive.
Instead of asking yourself how you can produce more, more, more (and therefore waste time!), ask yourself how you can make your work better.
7. Trying to do everything yourself.
Twenty first century entrepreneurs are blessed with a “can do,” DIY spirit. Especially crafty entrepreneurs like yourself!
Why pay someone to do something you can do yourself?
I’ll tell you why: someone else can do it faster, better, and for less money.
For less money? You bet. Consider what you pay yourself an hour. Now think of how much time you spend on tasks that aren’t billable or that result in more goods out the door. Now, imagine if you paid a specialist the same or less to handle some of those tasks.
Your unpaid work hours are suddenly freed up to make more paid work.
Now consider further that a specialist can do all those jobs you despise in a lot less time! That means you can even pay a premium for their skill & experience and still come out on top.
When I decided to hand over the bulk of my unpaid work to an assistant, my profit skyrocketed. Suddenly, the small expense of paying my assistant became an investment in a much larger profit.
And I don’t have to worry about finding more time in the day to reach my goals!
How about you?
Okay, that’s my 7 things you’re wasting your business time on. What else would you add? What is wasting your precious time now that you’d like to eliminate? What solution do you need for a time suck problem I haven’t listed?
Share your response in the comments below.
P.S. Want more professional pants kicking this week? Join me for a FREE live preview of my digital coaching program, The Art of Action, tomorrow. Register here for all the details.
Tara Gentile empowers passion-driven entrepreneurs to find the profit in producing the work of their true spirit. Read her musings on business, social media, & philosophy at taragentile.com. She is the creator of The Art of Action, a digital coaching program designed to poke & prod your big ideas into big results.
One of things I catch myself doing, or see a lot of others doing is:
OVER THINKING THINGS
Sometimes we have (or think that we have) this brilliant idea for a product or a new collection. We do research and more research. Finding the best way to do it, talking to other people to see what they think about it, but not really making it a reality. Then months pass by, then years pass by. Totally a waste of time. Sometimes, what needs to be done is to do a small batch of samples, get it done, then take off with it. The worst that could happen is that you do not like what the end product is, nobody else likes it enough to buy it, and you lose the money you spent on materials. At least, it is out of your system, it is done, and you can move on.
Another thing is,
MAKING PRODUCTS THAT IS NOT YOUR STRENGTH
As you can see at almost every craft shows, there are so many jewelers. Everyone makes jewelry (or string) jewelry. While truly, they were awesome potters, and print makers. Do you know how hard it is to get juried in as a jeweler? Every shows (retail and wholesale shows) are over saturated with jewelry. So if you cannot make jewelry that has a different look than any jewelry out there, please go back and do what you do BEST. If you have seen it before, do not do it, unless you can make it BETTER. That goes for “reusable sandwich bags” makers also.
BUILDING A BUSINESS THAT IS NOT SUSTAINABLE
A lot of artists and crafters are stuck in this “it is ok to be poor” mentality. When your business is not making enough money to sustain your life, or sustain it self, then really it is just a waste of time and energy. Eventually, you will have to find some other job to pay off debt that your business created, and therefore, why create this whole for yourself. Figure out a good business plan, and make sure you keep up with it. There is not a single successful business out there without a good business plan. A sustainable one, that is.
Oh, yeah, Devienna ~ “Overthinking’!!!
~ Ties in with #1 too much Research and #7 do it all Myself: especially for me, it’s about trying to reinvent the wheel because I’m doubting ‘everything’ – both my strengths and other peoples’ wisdom –
Thank you, Megan and Tara, for a concise, precise checklist/article that doesn’t beat anybody up, but calls out Resistance in its many disguises!
Bright Blessings ~ Karen J
Karen, yes, I have been guilty of all of these myself (except the last one, maybe). I tried to make home products (coasters), while I am a jeweler at heart. Oh well, i spent $170 on materials, and it is out of my system. And I moved on 😉
Thank you Tara and Megan for the great post!
Thanks for the great article, Tara and Megan!
Spot on and great food for thought. I’ve always struggled with trying to please everyone and in a business, that is a recipe for disaster.
Abi @pro_community
Seriously digesting this today. (And this is my second read. I know I will come back and read these words again, because I am wasting my time with MANY if not all of them. D’oh. Except 6. That’s not my scene. But I have my own version of it, I think, that I do waste time on, which is putting too many different photos in my etsy and not enough versions of the same ones… )
OK, you’re really inspiring me here.
(Plus, the overthinking one? Oh my yes. OUCH.)
I agree with a lot of this. I think a lot of people take in advice on blogs like CMBA but don’t take the time to implement it. Getting informed is good, but no good if you don’t use the information.
Re: promoting your products. It’s actually a good use of time if you are marketing. Marketing is not posting to Twitter and Etsy forums “hey new stuff in my shop!! SALE SALE SALE!!” that shit drives me crazy. Promoting your products means writing well crafted PR pitches, writing good blog content, working on your SEO, running ads. You know — that difficult boring stuff that real marketers do that actually works.
Re: making friends with customers. Depends on what exactly you are doing. If a customer emails you, posts to your FB wall, Tweets at you, calls you, of course you should give them your attention. I don’t think you need to stalk them on social media or any of that. But making them feel appreciated when they interact with you is a great way to make your business seem like there is a human being running it.
Re: not doing it all yourself. Heck yeah! That expectation DIY culture perpetuates is completely unreasonable and unsustainable.
Great post!
Methinks that each of these things is not completely a BadThing to do, but when you get sucked into any one of them, and let that one stop you from doing ‘other GoodThings’, that they become Time Wasters.
“Moderation in all things, including Moderation” ~ Petronius
If anything, I think #4 will be my downfall. Especially since I work a full-time job in addition to running my business, so I really don’t have time to do it all!
And my issue with #6 is similar to what Alexis mentions above. When I first started making jewelry (well, technically it was the 2nd time I started making jewelry, but after about a 10-year break, so it felt like I was starting from square-one) I was making so many different styles that it was impractical to photograph them all and put them on Etsy, and maintaining and inventory list was a nightmare! But now that I’ve figured out what sells and have focused on specific styles of jewelry, I’m hoping it will be easier to maintain my Etsy shop, or perhaps start selling directly through my own website. Plus my inventory spreadsheet is MUCH simpler, and I spend way less time maintaining it!
Also, since I had no idea whether my little part-time business would work out, I started out using inexpensive materials. Those have been selling pretty well, but I would love to start adding products that use higher-end materials to my inventory and see how those do. Making more of a profit on each item = more free time for me and more money that I can either invest in my own business or use to buy products from other small businesses! 🙂
Great article–thanks for posting!
I want to add one little thing–Forgetting to be a Business!
Many of my clients are terrified to get their business feet wet and spend plenty of creative time building products and no energy building an infrastructure. Your business is no longer a hobby so start standing behind your biz. This means taking full responsibility for your success AND failures, and taking charge of your future with thoughtful budgeting, goal making, and learning everything you can about your industry.
Here’s to your success! (<–you deserve it!)
Andrea, brand and bloom
I had to chime in to this conversation. I am guilty of information digestion overload. There is such great information out there that I just love to read it all!!
How I combat this:
As I already know it is a problem, I say to myself, “not now”. Yeah, read this stuff in the in between moments or the evenings or on a break. DO NOT waste time that is dedicated precious work time. Set the clock. 4 hour block of time. Go. I walk over my daughter’s toys on the floor and past the dishes and start working, from my list.
No emails, twitter, blogs. You have to do it to yourself or nothing gets accomplished. Or else you berate yourself for not getting down to the meat. That sucks.
Commenting on blogs is also time consuming but I love contributing to other people’s work that I connect with. Go girls.
I must admit I’ve been guilty of all of these but the one I really struggle with is…
1. Ingesting more information.
Hell that’s why I’m reading this post! I absolutely love research. My favorite “real” job ever was as a research project manager for a dotcom before the bubble broke. However I don’t really thing my purpose is research so, how do I tie my thirst for information into a viable business asset as an environmental artist. I’ll hire someone to help me with that!
In your MICA/Etsy Worshop about Web Marketing you spoke about blogs and you mentioned the “mommy blogs.” They are big on blogs hops or linky parties. How do you feel about using them to get subscribers to your blog?
Doing a lot more research then doing something with the information I researched. I sometimes spend twice as much time on research and it should be the other way around. At least…
It might be the same motivation problem as it is with “ingesting information”, but we are conscious that we are loosing time reading blogs all day long. On the other hand, research is part of creative work, but not the actual work. So if we don’t notice the ratio between the time we spend researching and the time we spend creating, we might have another time waster.
I am so guilty of all of these and one more that is a bit of a blend. I decide to try to make and/or market what ever fancy I’m into at the moment. I lose focus on my product or try to vorp it to fit my new fancy. I’m getting better, but I still catch myself wanting to make yoga/vampire soap that looks like a bike-riding bacon hand-knit. LOL
What works for me is to set weekly, monthly and then (maybe) annual goals. Break those down into a few daily tasks and build up from there. If I get more done, great. If I get stuff done quickly, than maybe I have spare time to indulge in #1, 3 and 7. If not, or if I find myself hiding in #1, 3, or 7 – that’s an indicator of trying to do too much and I refocus.
Thank you for the wonderful post! I think I’ll print it for my wall. =)
This is an amazing article and its so true, I felt bad right off the bat.
I need to stop ingesting more information and act on what I already know not to mention a few of the others on the list that I’m guilty of.
Thanks for the article, bookmarked it and will keep referring back to it over the next couple of days as a reminder not to fall back into my old ways and habits
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