How to Become the Creative Director of Your Small Business
So often when starting a creative service-based business, you start to feel disconnected with the reason you even started your business in the first place. Even when you’re absolutely crushing it in your business, landing clients left and right, and are super busy, that often comes with more things outside of client deliverables.
Taking on the CEO role means you have to deal with more things that may feel out of alignment with the thing you really love doing. What we’ve learned from being in that position is that feeling that connection to what you’re creating is the most important thing for a service provider to protect.
In this blog post, we’ll be sharing how to become the creative director of your small business, so you can still deliver on your services while building a high caliber business!
You Don’t Have to Abandon What You Love
Finding freedom with your service-based business doesn’t mean that you have to completely step away from the things you love doing. That’s something that’s often taught in the service-based business community– that the goal is to grow it to a point where you don’t really have to do anything.
For us, this just didn’t make sense. We wanted to stay rooted in what we love doing, which was the whole reason we started our business in the first place. Being creative makes us happy, and that’s how we want to spend our time. If that resonates with you, just know you don’t have to remove yourself from your craft.
Find & Stay In Your Zone of Genius
In order to move into your creative director role, you need to find (or get back to) and stay in your zone of genius, which is the thing that you’re really good at and that you love doing. For most people, getting back to their zone of genius means going back to where they first started. For some it’s constantly evolving, and that’s okay, too. Once you’re able to find yours and stick to it, you’ll likely feel immediately more connected to your business. We sure did!
Not Everything is an Emergency
You don’t have to stop, drop, and roll for every little thing a client asks of you. When you prioritize staying in your zone of genius, that means setting priorities and dictating what’s urgent and important. Oftentimes, especially when working with clients, the solution is simply communication, not immediate solutions. They just need you to hear them!
Systems & Automation are Your Best Friend
Having a clear system and process for everything is a major key to our success. We don’t wake up every day wondering what we’re going to do or what we should be working on. We’ve taken the time to build out the efficient project management system, set up automations and workflows that will take care of 85% of our client-related admin tasks, and delegated the things we’d rather not do by building a powerful team.
That’s exactly what we help our overwhelmed and underpaid service-providers accomplish inside the Incubator. Many of them come to us with a way-too-full work week, no time to put their lives into their business, and no apparent money to show for it. If you’d like to get your project management system in place, so you can get back into your zone of genius while creating a High-Touch Signature Service™, then we’d love to have you apply for The Incubator!
