I recently went to a CollabMiami meetup where I interviewed the founder about one of his passions: how to shift from creative freelancer to business owner.
The reality is, we creatives sometimes have an issue putting on our business owner hat. It was definitely a shift I had to live through and one I help many of my coaching clients through.
Sometimes it feels like the creative and the business owner are at odds with eachother. And often times, this hinders our financial progress. Here are four tips to help you make the shift from creative freelancer to business owner based on the interview I conducted.
Having skill and running a business are not the same thing.
The first step in shifting from creative freelancer to business owner is to realize that having a skill and running a business are not the same thing. Not even close.
As a creative freelancer, you likely just want to stick to your skill and do it all day long. However, to run a business, you must wear multiple hats. These hats include – but are certainly not limited to – sales, marketing, basic accounting, and managing.
In other words, you can’t get paid for your skill unless you learn how to sell it. And you can’t run a business unless you learn how to manage the money coming into it.
Now, this doesn’t mean you need to go an MBA or anything. All this stuff can be learned over time. What it does mean is you need to be open to learning it.
Get over yourself.
Another point made during the interview was that to move from creative freelance to business owner, the creative often times needs to get over themselves.
That means you can’t get sentimental if someone doesn’t like your work. You can’t sit in a corner and get consumed by your work either. At some point, you need to buck up, put yourself out there and roll with the punches.
Focus on what your clients want, not what you want.
Furthermore, when running a business your focus shifts from what you want to do to what you can do for your client.
It’s only in providing value to other people that the money even starts to roll in anyway. That means you need to literally take yourself out of this and start looking at your work through the lends of how it provides value to other people.
Commit to the work.
Running a business is not easy. That’s why tons of people are content sticking to a soul sucking day job rather than take the risk to go out on their own. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
That being said, in order to shift from creative freelancer to business owner, you need to commit to it.
I talk to people who say they have a business all the time. Most of them are either full of it, don’t want to put in the work it takes to actually run a business, or are too afraid to commit to their business.
Do yourself a favor and don’t be any of those things. If you’re able to do that, you’ll be able to make the shift from creative freelancer to business owner.
