Authenticity and money-making

An audience member wrote the following to me, and maybe some of you can relate…

“I long for the ability to create without any thoughts of money…to create because I love it… to take real time off when I need it… to try new things and build in more hobby time into my life.

Everything I create is because I love it, but I tend to always have that background question: ‘Will it make me money?’

I want to get to a place where I feel I can try things and fail and be totally fine with it…”

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Watch the video here:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=735802437184284     

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There are 2 things we can create: a hobby, or a business.

Hobbies can be a fully creative and personal endeavor, with no pressure for anyone to buy or even like our work.

Business has the need to sustain itself, ideally to thrive, which requires enough people to buy into our work, so there’s pressure for meeting others’ wants and purchasing requirements.

And yet, there will come a time in your journey of building an audience when you’ll finally have enough true fans, aka people who will buy just about anything you create and sell.

Through my content and courses, this is what I yearn to help you do — create your own true fan audience — because that’s when you will have true creative freedom in your business.

It takes time and sincere effort to build that kind of audience. The actions you’ll need to take consistently include: content creation and distribution, audience research, collaborations… all the things I’ve been writing and speaking about. (See the 7 disciplines of authentic business.) I’d love to see you create your freedom by having a large enough audience who genuinely loves your authentic creativity!

It’s a journey, so let’s not expect overnight success. Maybe you have 2 or 3 clients who already buy much of what you create and sell. Maybe next year you’ll have 10 or 12 such true fan clients. (With diligent content creation/distribution, audience research, collaborations, offer rhythm, etc., you can speed up the process and perhaps get to 20–30 next year, maybe even faster.)

Also, what is “enough” true fans to sustain your business? That will depend on what kind of income you require, as well as how you structure your business model. (For more on that, read this blog post: simple business model for solopreneurs.)

While we are still on the journey toward financial sustainability, how can we relate to money-making in a way that’s not desperate?

For us to really be creative and to serve, Money needs to be an afterthought.

Having enough income has to be expected and stable, providing security that you can build on, to be able to then focus on truly serving and delighting your customers.

It’s like the sailboat metaphor by Scott Barry Kaufman — if you haven’t secured the leaking holes in your sailboat (which is endangering your life) then it’s all you can (and should!) think about. You need to plug up the holes to secure your boat (i.e. get a secure...

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