RBBiz Day 7: Tad Hargrave

Creative Business

Sometimes it’s nice to know that you’re on the right path. Tuesday’s interview on “Marketing for Hippies” put into words a lot of things I’ve learned about what feels most comfortable about selling my book (I talked about that a bit in yesterday’s post, too). Things like “slow marketing” and mantras like “if there’s no fit, there’s no failure” put it far more succinctly than I could have done, prior, so that level of validation boosts my confidence in my own business prowess.

IMG_20150317_134408

As far as visuals go, I was rather taken with the idea that “marketing is a filtering process.” This goes back to one of the sessions last week about Skunk Medicine, and how it’s okay to repel your wrong people just as much as you attract your right people.

RBBiz Day 6: Sara Avant Stover

Creative Business

I’ve noticed that sometimes what I take away from the daily Summit interviews is less about the notes I take and sometimes way more of a tangential rabbit trail that leads to the barest related thread of an ‘aha!’ moment. Like today, as Sara Avant Stover talked about cycles and seasons, I wandered my way down to the realization that I’m good for a max of 5 years on any one big project before I really, desperately need something else to focus on. The most recent example being What to Feed Your Raiding Party.

I started work on the book in 2010, released it June, 2012, and have spent the last 3 years focusing most of my side-hustle time slots promoting the cookbook. Every time I try to work on something new, something for the cookbook comes up: another convention, an online order, or just the nagging reminder that I haven’t finished the blasted substitutions supplement that I’ve been fiddling with for the last couple of years.

Not that I mind the work that the book requires to promote–not at all! When I’m at conventions I’m having the time of my life, and not because I’m out partying or anything, because I have the chance to talk to people about the book. I enjoy being a salesperson when it’s something I’m so deeply committed to (something I never thought I’d say!).

But I made a kinda big choice at the end of last year not to schedule any conventions until the next book was done. Now that The Crafty Branch is in the mix, it’s likely I won’t be back on the convention circuit for a while, and I’ve started thinking up other ways to promote the book. But today, as Sara spoke about cycles and recognizing when it’s time to walk away, I realized I need to free myself up to be able to walk away from the Raiding Party world as my main focus and do so without feeling guilty.

That last part being the hard one, of course.

While one of last week’s sessions included the gem “completion is overrated,” I’ve made promises to people about the supplement and what’s next. So to make sure I’m not letting them or myself down, I’ll finish the supplement (need to set a date on this, haven’t yet, but soon!), reformat the original book to include the supplemental info to make a good eBook version of it, put that out there, and feel free to focus elsewhere.

I still want to write more cookbooks–there’s a deep well to draw from, there–but it doesn’t have to be now. I need a change of pace or I’ll start to resent it. And that would be worse for all considered.

Does that mean that The Crafty Branch will only hold my attention for 5 years? Not necessarily. When I stopped writing for eHow, I started writing my book. I also started blogging more. I didn’t stop writing, I just changed focus. And I kept doing other things, too, they just weren’t the Main Thing. The Crafty Branch will be a focus-shift, but in five years I would certainly hope that it’d be well enough established and with a competent staff on board that I could trust to handle the day to day so I can pursue whatever’s next.

~~~

Each interview usually starts with the speaker offering either a Left Brain Chill Pill or a Right Brain Booster. Sara offered the former, with her practice of checking in with her inner child each day, nurturing that part of herself on a regular basis, and thereby feeding her muse. She also urged us to really personify our inner child, so I (of course) drew mine in my notes:

IMG_20150316_135439

I can also report progress on the business plan for The Crafty Branch. Over the weekend I finished my big vision collage as well as puzzled through the potential market size numbers (after spendign quite some time flipping between census.gov records). Still a ways to go, but the potential market numbers were a big hurdle to clear!

RBBiz Day 5: Andreea Ayers

Creative Business

We closed out the first week with DIY Publicity and Product Marketing presented by Andreea Ayers of Launch Grow Joy.

It’s kind of funny, I remember the early years of the Right Brainers in Business Video Summit when the interviews were predominately coaches or other other thought-leader types and we artists and artisans had to really work to apply what they were teaching to what we were doing. But it’s awesome because Jenn listened to our feedback and over time we gained more of a mix, to the point that Jenn had to caution coaches, etc. to stick around through today’s interview, that just because we were talking product placement in stores and magazines didn’t mean there wasn’t something that could work for them as well.

The Summit’s come a long way in the last five years!

I was familiar with the vast majority of what Andreea covered on Friday, but that was okay because it meant I could spend more time interacting in the chat stream! Which is why my biggest takeaway was the heart-word: Connection.

Heart word?

It may not be a real thing, but it’s something I started doing as I filled out the daily playsheet that comes with the booster and premium pass upgrades. There’s a humanoid figure with some symbols to represent different thinking or action points learned during the seminar, and the “What is my heart telling me?” prompt is, of course, next to the heart on the figure. So while I put (usually) more lengthy notes under the prompt, I was also writing a core-concept word across the heart. And since I didn’t a major aha! moment specifically from the interview, I decided to collage quick phone pics of each days heart-word in Diptic and post that as my daily share on Instagram.

Week 1 heart-words

Week 1 heart-words

Integrity from the Lisa Congdon interview, Authenticity from Amethyst Wyldfyre, Community from Corbett Barr, Motivation from Sam Bennett, and, finally, Connection from Andreea Ayers. Both for the connections I make in the chat room during the summit sessions (and the ones in the Facebook group), as well as the connections we need to make with stores and publications to get our work seen and our message shared.

One of the exercises in the original Right Brain Business Plan book, right up there with the Big Vision Collage for your business, is to create a set of values cards. I have my original set from several years ago and they still apply, but I think I’m going to do a new set based off of these heart-words after we finish next week’s summit session lessons.

~ ~ ~

I know these posts are a bit of a departure from my usual posts, so I hope you don’t mind terribly that I’ve been writing about the RBBiz Summit instead of house stories or craft projects. It’s been a great way to keep me engaged in the topics and has really helped clarify what I’m going to do next, so thanks for sticking with me. It’s also confirmed that posting every day isn’t really feasible for me, so after next week I’ll be going back to my 3/2 posts per alternate weeks, because while much thinking has been getting done, not as much doing has! Gotta get back to the doing!

RBBiz Day 4: Sam Bennett

Creative Business

Procrastination is Genius in disguise…

IMG_20150312_133044

Or so The Organized Artist and Day 4 interview subject Sam Bennett claimed early on in Thursday Summit session. I appreciate anyone who joins together organization and artistic pursuits, bucking the stereotype that all artists are disorganized, flaky, and otherwise irresponsible. It’s pretty important, if you want to be a successful artist, that you have some sort of system that keeps things flowing smoothly!

Procrastination is one but one problematic trait of creatives (and others, of course, but we’re focusing on right-brainers at the moment), as is perfectionism. Bennett had a suggestion for dealing with that, as well, at least when it comes to goal setting. She suggests that we set goals in tiers: what I must do, what I’d like to do, and what would be amazing (the ‘drinks are on me’ level). That way, as long as we meet our level 1 goal we can accept the accomplishment and move on to whatever’s next.

I do this when I go to conventions, though I never really thought of it in this light. My must-do number is however many books I need to sell in order to break even for that event (usually around 16-18). My second goal at each convention is to empty a box, so we’re taking one less box of books home that we arrived with (average of 22-28 per box). My third tier goal shifts, depending on previous sales. The most books we’ve sold in a 3-day convention was 54, and that was an outlier of a show for us on several levels, so while it’d be great to beat that one day, it’s not always realistic. Instead, our highest “normal” show is in the 32 range, and any time we start approaching that number I get very, very happy!

Finally, she reminded my of a piece of advice I’ve given often, and even follow myself (most of the time), though I haven’t lately. You can do anything for 15 minutes. Setting aside 15 minutes for the projects that matter most, each day, every day, is a sure-fired way to actually Get It Done (also the title of her book). While I plan to spend way more than 15 minutes on The Crafty Branch’s business plan this weekend (my third-tier goal would be to finish it altogether, but I’d be thrilled with just organizing all the facts I have now and completing the playsheets–see what I did there?), making time for those 15 minutes during the week can be a bit more challenging.

This week has gone by so fast, already–only one more session before we’re halfway through–but there’s still another full week ahead. And you can still sign up for your free pass to the second half by clicking the image below. And if you want to catch up on the earlier sessions whose replays have started to expire, upgrading to the Booster pass gives you forever-access and other downloads, too. You still have time to upgrade to the Premium pass, which comes with hundreds of dollars worth of additional business-building resources, and the first of three coaching calls is Wednesday the 18th.

grab-your-free-tix-url

RBBiz Day 3: Corbett Barr

Creative Business

While Tuesday’s session was way far to the right side of the brain, Wednesday’s interview with the founder of Fizzle.co, Corbett Barr, was a bit more on the logical, left-brained side. Just because this is the Right Brainers in Business Summit doesn’t mean we ignore the left–in the original Right Brian Business Plan book Jennifer Lee maps the different sections presented in the right brain plan to their traditional left-brain counterparts (helping those who need to prepare the traditional plan to present to banks or investors) and the upgraded options for the Summit (Booster and Premium) both included left-brain checklists of actionable items from each section.

I considered yesterday’s talk a sort of palate cleanser.

Top 3 Corbett Barr takeaways

Top 3 Corbett Barr takeaways

The topic for this interview was listed as “Honest Online Business Marketing” and I think transparency is the watchword there. He made the point that people don’t fall in love with brands or corporations, they fall in love with the people and stories behind those brands. So it’s important to open up and share some of yourself, to give your right people a chance to get to know you.

He also introduced us to the concept of the MVP, in this scenario it’s the minimum viable product and is, apparently, a software term? (If so, that explains so very much about software releases.) A practical direction in the vein of work smarter, not harder, it’s the idea that you can put together a product that meets a basic standard of work with which to test the waters and get feedback.

And how do you get that feedback? But having a community that is invested in your product or services. Fostering that community will, in turn, inform where you need to go next. Like finding a need and meeting it, but in a very concrete way.

Now, applying this lesson to The Crafty Branch makes me wonder what an MVP would be in this situation—a pop-up shop, perhaps? Of course, that’s almost as much work as the entire store, so maybe that’s a bit big for a viable MVP, but I”ll keep thinking on it!