guest post: how to stop doing what you hate and grow your business

Today’s guest post is from Cory Huff.  Cory’s sharing his tips for building a business around your strength and getting help with the tasks you don’t enjoy.  Thanks, Cory!

Over the past couple of months I have been meeting with an incredible group of people who make up my business advisers. They’re my mastermind group, and between all of us we represent a wide mix of professional skills. It’s an incredible group of people, and I love meeting with them because they are all so focused on doing things that bring them intense joy.

Imagine building a creative business that reinforced what you’re good at doing.

What would that look like for you? For many of the artist clients that I’ve worked with, it means spending more time performing or in the studio. It means having an accountant and a lawyer for all that boring (and hard) stuff. It means not having a day job, but instead getting paid to do what they’re really passionate about – creating beautiful works of art. It means they don’t have to…sell (ick).

How to Stop Doing What You Hate

Many artists don’t succeed at what they want because they are either too afraid to really go for it (which was my problem – I had to get fired to make it happen for myself), or they think that they have to do something awful to be in business. That awful thing is usually selling.

Here’s the thing. You don’t have to be a used-car salesman to be good at selling your art. You can, in fact, be pretty bad at talking to people and make $100,000 a year. I know artists who do it.

Know Your Strengths.

It’s a funny thing, but many people don’t know what they’re good at. In fact, according to StrengthsFinder2.0, very few people know what they’re good at. Kinda crazy, right?

Here’s what I want you to do. Go out and find a new copy of the Strengths Finder book. If you want it cheap, you can get it as an ebook from Amazon for $11.29. Go through the book and find out what your strengths are. It’ll be enlightening if you haven’t done it before.

Once you know what they are, play to your strengths. For example, one of my strengths is that I am good at making connections and networking, but I’m not very good with repetitive tasks that require a lot of attention to detail. So, I partner with people in my business. In my consulting work I am usually working with a third-party contractor – they take care of the paperwork and the project management, and I just focus on the marketing aspects of the projects. You’ll find areas like that in your own work.

Outsource & Automate

Once you know what you’re not good at, give it to someone else to do. You can hire a web developer to build your site. Turbotax will do your taxes for cheap. Imagekind.com will print your images on-demand whenever someone orders a print.  Freshbooks.com will manage invoices and billing automatically (I get an invoice reminder from my web guy every month like clockwork because he uses this). My wife handles my finances for me because it takes me forever, so I just procrastinate it, but for her it takes very little time (sorry, she’s not taking any more new clients).

Focus on Those Who Like You

Too many artists try to sell their art to anyone who’ll listen.They post their art on every website, forum, and gallery that they can find. This takes up a lot of time, and usually results in little return. Instead, take a look at who you’ve sold your work to before. What were they like? How old were they? What are their hobbies and interests? If you know this, you can identify the communities that those people spend time in.

I see this happening with sites like Etsy. Artists put their stuff on Etsy because that’s where all the other craft artisans put their stuff, but perhaps their work might actually be a better fit over at ArtFire or some other site.

Most importantly, figure out ways to gather those who like you. The single most important thing you can do for your business is build a client list, and contact that list regularly. Email marketing might be the thing that gets you 90% of your business, if you’re doing it right.

After you have your email marketing set up, you should try gathering another community where your customers and buyers can interact with each other. A Facebook fan page is an easy start.

As you learn about what you’re good at, focus on your strengths, outsource or minimize your weaknesses, and build stronger relationships with those who really love your work, you’ll find that your business becomes not only more profitable, but more enjoyable as well.

Cory Huff is an actor, director, storyteller, and social media enthusiast. He helps artists learn how to sell art online at TheAbundantArtist.com.