Business Skills

After being in busi­ness for myself for the last 8 months, I can hon­estly say that I don’t ever want to go back to a staff job again, I absolutely love run­ning my busi­ness, doing the work that I do and the flex­i­bil­ity that goes along with it.

I think above all, how­ever, the feel­ing of being able to pro­vide for myself with­out the need for an ongo­ing employer is an absolutely amaz­ing feel­ing and has def­i­nitely imbued me with a great sense of con­fi­dence, worth and con­trol over my own life, since every­thing I do directly affects my via­bil­ity as a business.

Mar­ket­ing, sales, con­trol­ling finances, tweak­ing oper­a­tional processes, strate­gi­cally mov­ing the busi­ness in the direc­tion of the great­est cre­ative ful­fil­ment for myself are all higher level tasks that must be taken care of just as much as doing the actual work to a high level.

There are some peo­ple who hate doing all the busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion, but speak­ing for myself, per­haps because I have tried and failed in the very same endeav­our before, it is uplift­ing and enjoy­able when it pays off.

This is Why Most Artists Fail

Recently I posted on Face­book some­thing which read:

Here’s one of the main rea­sons most artists fail com­mer­cially: They don’t realise they’re essen­tially in a sole trader busi­ness with no skills other than know­ing how to draw or paint. In other words, they are up shit creek with noth­ing but their dick in their hands as a paddle.

I absolutely believe in this state­ment, if you want to steer the ship that is your life, you need to know how to manip­u­late the rud­der, if you leave it to other peo­ple to point you in the right direc­tion you will be liv­ing some­one else’s goals or aspi­ra­tions. You are giv­ing away the con­trol of your des­tiny to peo­ple who can never have your best inter­ests at heart sim­ply because they ARE NOT YOU.

Get Edu­cated

When peo­ple ask me for advice on run­ning their own free­lance busi­ness, usu­ally the minute I men­tion busi­ness skills and espouse the virtues of finan­cial con­trol, billing processes, cus­tomer ser­vice and mar­ket­ing, their eyes usu­ally glaze over. I know what they are think­ing “Uh…isn’t there an alter­na­tive to this busi­ness stuffs?”

Here is the short answer: No.

You either learn how to run you busi­ness prof­itably or you’ll be pack­ing up your busi­ness along with your aspi­ra­tions in less than 6 months. Statistically, that’s what will hap­pen to most peo­ple. You want to be a statistic?

There is absolutely no com­pro­mise on this, if you want to run a busi­ness, you need busi­ness skills. You can pay peo­ple to teach you in sem­i­nars or schools, or you can read books and prac­tice what they preach. I pre­fer the lat­ter but I have also enlisted the help of high cost pro­fes­sion­als before when learn­ing from books was not prac­ti­cal due to time constraints.

Here is a list of a few busi­ness ori­ented books/publications that I have per­son­ally read and encour­age you to read if run­ning your own busi­ness is some­thing you want to even­tu­ally do:

I liken read­ing books to sharp­en­ing the axe.

Story Time!

Oh! Speak­ing of axes, I wanted to recount a para­ble I heard 6 years ago that I still think about today:

One day, a wan­der­ing man strolling through a for­est hears grunt­ing and the dull thump of an ax as it plunged into the trunk of a tree.

Curi­ous, and with a whole bunch of time on his hands, the wan­derer walks over towards the direc­tion of this sound and comes across a bar­rel chested man with a great big red bushy beard obvi­ously try­ing to replen­ish his fire­wood supply.

This big burly gen­tle­man is swing­ing like a mad man but seems to hardly be mak­ing any progress at all and there is a river of per­spi­ra­tion stream­ing from his beet­root red face.

Tak­ing a break, he sits down wip­ing his fore­head, places his axe on the ground and has a drink. The wan­derer notices that the man’s ax was com­pletely blunt!

“Say friend, why don’t you take a moment to sharpen your axe? I’m sure it would make your work eas­ier!” the wan­derer sug­gested, to which the big man replied “Are you kid­ding me!? I have a tree to cut down! I don’t have TIME to sharpen my axe!”

Ha! Don’t be the big burly man, edu­macate your­self, it’s the fastest, surest way not to fail

Keep learn­ing, and I’ll catch you on the flipside!

Daz