One of my projects last year was to launch a book club with my friend Amber. Each month, we picked a book that we both loved and then developed resources to help other takes action on the themes of the book. It was a project we were both excited about, as it really hit our passions and strengths as both readers and teachers.
For me in particular, it was a perfect alignment of my strengths, because not only do I constantly seek out new inputs (most often in the form of books) but I’m always asking myself how I can turn those into actionable ideas and insights.
But after only a few months, we ended up closing the club.
Why? Well because despite our enthusiasm for the project and it’s obvious appeal to our strengths, we realized we had gotten one big piece wrong: the economics.
Ironically, it was the book we were supposed to read next, The Passion Economy, that lead us to that conclusion.
If you saw my list of the best books I read in 2020, you’ll know that The Passion Economy was a big one for me. In fact, when I originally shared snippets of the book on my Instagram stories, I had more than a few people DMing me to ask if I’d written it!
What I love about The Passion Economy is that it acknowledged that it takes more than passion to run a successful business, you have to get a lot of elements right, including the economics.
In rereading The Passion Economy for the book club, we realized we had gotten those all wrong. We had priced the book club as a volume business – assuming we would have lots of people join, but it ended up being a bespoke business where we were doing a lot of small group coaching for very little money.
In hindsight, we should have seen it coming. While we both have solid audiences that support our work, neither Amber or I have the size audience that supports the volume business model we envisioned for the book club. And we had shied away from a more bespoke pricing structure because I didn’t want it to directly compete or cause confusion with my online mentorship program, Artists & Profit Makers.
So in the end, we realized it wasn’t working, and closed the club. (Yes, we could have pivoted, but that pivot would have created something too similar to Artists & Profit Makers, which just didn’t make sense for me.)
Now, I want to be clear about something. I don’t for one second regret creating the book club. You know me, I never view anything as a failure – it’s always a learning opportunity. And I learned a lot about the kinds of offers that do and don’t work for my audience, as well as what excites me in my own business.
And of course, those kinds of “learning opportunities” always give me great insight as a teacher and business coach. Beyond that, I wanted to share this story with you partly because some of you might be wondering what happened to the book club, but also because I want to highlight that it takes a lot of pieces falling into place to make a creative business work. You can’t just follow your passions or take a strengths test and suddenly find all the answers.
Figuring out was does and doesn’t work in your creative business is a bit of a never-ending dance – one I call Alignment.
Alignment is the process of building a business that pulls together all those elements that lead to success. It’s honoring your personality (your strengths and weaknesses), finding a domain (what your work or your business is about) that feels right to you, identifying a model (what you sell) that supports the work you want to do, discovering a market for your work, and getting the economics right.
Part of the Alignment process is trial and error – or as I like to call it, try it and see. But the other part of the Alignment process is reflection. It’s sitting down and looking at all the pieces of your creative business – the art you want to make, what you’ll sell, who you’ll sell to, and how you’ll get paid – and figuring out where things are and aren’t working.
And that’s why I created The Alignment Retreat! This two-day virtual workshop is a chance step back, reflect, and calibrate your business in a way that works for you.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about The Alignment Retreat is that it meets you where you are. For some, Alignment is a series fo small calibrations to really get your creative business dialed in. For others, it’s big changes, like recognizing that something you created really isn’t economically viable, and figuring out better ways to bring in revenue.
At the end of the day, The Alignment Retreat isn’t just about figuring out ways to make more money from your art (though that is certainly one of the goals) but it’s about building a business that makes you creatively fulfilled and happy.
Yes, I said happy. Because I don’t believe in just growing a business that doesn’t work for you. And sometimes that means taking a step back, identifying what is and isn’t working, and yes, sometimes cutting whole projects that you were previously really excited about.
Because at the end of the day, it’s ok to acknowledge that it takes more than our strengths and passions to build a successful business. All the pieces have to fall into Alignment. But when they do, that’s when you start to build the kind of business that truly supports your art and life.
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I’m running a live version of The Alignment Retreat on February 3rd and 4th and it’s available exclusively for members of my online mentorship program, Artists & Profit Makers! If the retreat sounds like something you need in your life, head to artistsandprofitmakers.com to join today! There’s no commitment and you can cancel at anytime, so why not join for a month, take part in the retreat, and see what else A&PM has to offer!
