How to Grow Your Business | A New Skillshare Class for Creative Business Ventures!

I’m thrilled to introduce my newest Skillshare class – Expand Your Creative Business: A Toolkit for Getting your Business on the Path to Success! This class is perfect for creative business owners that feel their business has plateaued or just isn’t going in the direction they hoped. And if you’re just starting your creative business, this class will give you a great foundation to grow from.

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In this class you’ll be doing all of this cool stuff:

• Developing your brand strategy – your business’s mission statement, vision statement, your “why”, and customer bases
• Honing in on your financial goals – what work/life balance means to you and your vision of success
• Diving deep into your business’s revenue streams – revising, tweaking, and adding to them to create your perfect mix
• Learning from your creative business idols and applying it to your own business

I created this class because it’s exactly what I was looking for a year ago – a comprehensive guide for creating a business I enjoyed working on and monetizing my work to generate an income. By using this method for Tiny Curl, I’ve discovered what success means to me, spent more time doing work I actually enjoy, and doubled my yearly profits.

A LITTLE ABOUT SKILLSHARE
Skillshare is an online video learning community with thousands of video classes on a multitude of topics from watercoloring to accounting. By using this link to sign-up, you’ll get 14 days of free Skillshare to take as many classes as you want, then you pay a monthly or yearly fee to keep your subscription. You can also sign up for a free-only account to access tons of classes that are available for free.

I’ve been using Skillshare for years now and have learned so SO much from it. Most of the classes are 20-60 minutes long and are really easy to watch in a lunch break. I like using Skillshare because I feel like I am consistently learning new things. I also wrote a blog post sharing 10 of my favorite classes to help boost your creative business

A LITTLE BACKGROUND ABOUT MY CREATIVE BIZ
My lil business baby Tiny Curl was born in January 2017. I started my business in a way I wouldn’t recommend to others now, but that made sense for me at the time. I quit my full-time job to start Tiny Curl from square 1. (If you want to read more about quitting my job and starting Tiny Curl, I wrote a blog post about it here.)

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and was making it up as I went along. I thought I knew what I wanted to do – make and sell crocheted dolls – but didn’t know if or how that would ever make enough money for a full-time income. I was caught up in the allure of what I thought owning my own crochet business would be and not in the day-to-day realities of it.

My creative business dreams were very much just that – dreams. At first, I tried to make my business work with what I thought I wanted to do and what I thought a handmade business was. I crocheted most of the time, tried selling my finished crochet products, and shared my work on social media. About 7 months in, I realized:

1. To make crochet products, you need to make the same thing over and over again and FAST.
2. Crocheting takes a long, long time and pricing products to make a decent profit for your labor is nearly impossible.
3. You need to do a ton of marketing to make a product-based business profitable.
4. Crocheters, knitters, and other makers are not the best market for finished crochet products because most would rather make something themselves! And crocheters and makers were the audience I already had.

My way was just not working. I could not fathom how I could make Tiny Curl bring in any sort of income and almost gave up. It took me over a year to figure out a different way for Tiny Curl to work. I used the process I detail in my new Skillshare class to discover the things I actually enjoyed doing (designing, writing, and sharing what I know) and how to monetize those things. I got really clear on what success looks like to me (lots of flexibility and spending the majority of my time doing creative work) and which revenue streams I needed to put to work to get there.

While some of that knowledge comes with time and experience, I could have saved a lot of time if I sat down and did a thorough plan before jumping in headfirst. At the time, I knew nothing about revenue streams, passive income, or the many ways you can make money as a creative business. I just knew what I perceived of other handmade businesses – that those makers were sitting in sunny studios just making things and making money.

If you’re in a similar boat, my Skillshare class could be the perfect antidote for your business. And if you’re just starting your business, using the class to build your business’s foundation would save you a lot of time in the long run.

I’d love to know, is your creative business what you expected it to be? What have you learned that completely changed the game for your biz?

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