#10: How to Start a Creative Business

Do you want to turn your creative side hustle into a full time job? If you're interested in becoming a creative entrepreneur, starting and growing a thriving and scalable creative business, you're in the right place. On this episode of the Creative Equation podcast, Brandan Ritchey talks about how he started his creative business, Brandan Ritchey Creative. We discuss mistakes and pitfalls along the way, along with tips and strategies to help your creative business grow and thrive.  

Transcript

Welcome to the creative equation podcast, a podcast for entrepreneurs, business owners, and creative individuals who want to leverage creativity in order to increase sales and customer engagement. You'll get a healthy dose of graphic design, tips and tricks as well as sales and marketing strategies. To help you and your business continue increasing profits.

 I'm your host, Brandan Ritchey, and I'm pleased to welcome you to the creative equation.

Welcome back to the creative equation. You're joining a conversation about your marketing, your messaging in practical ways to grow and improve your brand. Throw the heavy listening. Thanks for joining us today. Hey, I'm very, very excited about today's show because today we're talking all about how to start.

And grow a creative business. And by creative, we mean graphic design, photography, videography, painting, drawing, any creative outlet that you once did as a hobby. But now you're wanting to pivot and turn it into a full-time income. You're wanting to turn it into a brand, a business, a company. We're going to talk about some of my experience doing.

Some of the pitfalls, some of the successes, some of the strategies that I was able to implement in order to create a successful and profitable graphic design and marketing company. Um, but first of all, let's, let's go back to the why, why do you want to start a creative business, more money, more freedom, a bigger house, a better car.

Those are all extrinsic motivators, right? Making more money, anything that is basically, uh, on the outside of yourself. That is motivating you to do this. That's an extrinsic motivator, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm a big capitalist. I believe if you add value to more people and you help more people, you should get paid more money, but there's also some intrinsic motivators.

And some of those might be, uh, because you love what you do because you're passionate about it because you want to help more people because you want to. Fill a gap in the marketplace. So those are all reasons that you might want to start a creative business. And I think before we get into this any further, I think when you talk about some pros and some cons, so obviously big pro with starting a creative business and starting any business is.

There is more freedom. There's more autonomy. You don't have to answer to anybody else, but you are your own boss. You get to build a team and a team culture. That is what you want it to be from an income perspective. There's no cap, right? They say the sky is the limit and that's the facts. If you want to make a hundred K a year, you can do it.

If you want to make a hundred fifty, two hundred, two hundred fifty three hundred K a year, you can do it. You can make a million dollars a year. If you put your mind to it, you put the hard work in. And so there's no cap, you know, if you're working a nine to five, you're working for a, a company or an organization, even if it's a great organization and you find value in the mission, you find value in the work.

You have a cap at some point. And so when. Decide to start a business and you decide to become an entrepreneur and take that risk. Then there is a great reward. Here's the trade off of that. So, yes, there's more autonomy. Yes. There's more opportunity to make more money. The trade-off is it's all on your shoulders.

So when you start a business, when you start a creative business, if you are lazy or if you will sleep in, or if you don't go out and make things happen for your business is not going to magically happen. So you have to actually put the work in it's on your shoulders. If you want to pay rent and, you know, be able to afford your groceries and your power bill and everything else, you got go out there hustle, be scrappy and make it happen.

So there's obviously trade-offs between having a stable nine to five job, a stable income and taking the risk of starting a business, but having set off. I want to tell you this, that there is nothing that I would rather do than what I'm currently doing. And it was very, to me, very worth the risk to start this creative business.

And there's nothing that I can imagine myself doing aside from what I'm doing right now. So there are pros and cons there's trade offs. Uh, number one, you've got to have your why you've got to figure out why am I doing this? And why is the why so important? Why am, why am I stressing out here at the beginning of the show?

Because. When things get tough when things get challenging, when you make mistakes, when you have tough clients. And let me tell you those times are going to come. Those clients are going to come when times get tough. Your why is going to be the thing that propels you and moves you forward and continues putting your foot.

On the gas pedal instead of giving up. So make sure that you have a clear, why, why are you doing it? Is it for the money? Is it because you're passionate about it is because you want to innovate the industry. Is it because you want to help more people help more entrepreneurs help more businesses, whatever your, why is figure that out, write it down and clean to your why?

Super important. Okay. There's two ways to do. There's two ways to start really any business. But today, specifically, we're talking about starting a creative business. So number one is you can do it gradually. So you currently are working for so-and-so nonprofit or so-and-so church or so-and-so corporation, and you have a desire to have your own creative business.

Again, whether that be photography, graphic, design, videography, painting, whatever. So you do it gradually. You get. And then another client and then another client, and you slowly doing it as a side hustle, doing it as a part-time gig slowly start to build clientele, build experience, build a portfolio. You do that for six months, a year, a year and a half, two years.

And then the goal would be eventually for that part-time gig for your part-time creative gig, to be able to replace your full-time income. So that's one way to do it the other way to do it with. To start a business, cold Turkey. You don't have any clients, you don't have any portfolio pieces. You don't have any experience, but you know that you have the skillset, you know, that you want to do it.

And so you quit your job and you just start a business. Now that's a little bit more risky. I'm not going to say. Either of these is right or wrong. I will say that the way that I did it was the first way where by the way, I was working for WinShape camps, which is a multi-million dollar Christian summer camp, uh, started by Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, uh, also working for connect ministries and connect camps and other big multimillion dollar, summer camp and working in the camping industry, doing marketing, doing graphic design, doing product development, product testing.

And while I was doing all of that work, I was on the side. Designing locus. Cause I enjoy doing it. I was on the side designing websites cause I enjoy doing it. And eventually being able to, you know, after years of kind of building up clientele, building momentum, building a name for myself, I was able to, uh, kind of slowly transition into, uh, starting this creative business full time.

Now that wasn't as risky as it would have been. If I did it. Now, I'm not saying again, that doing a culture key is the wrong way, or if you're going to regret doing it that way. But I will say that if you want to have a little bit more protection and a little bit more security, then keeping your current job, keeping your day job and kind of doing your creative gig as a gig, as a side gig for a year, year and a half, two years, until it can replace your full-time income that, uh, Probably the safest least risky way to go.

Now I will say this. Not every person has what it takes to be an entrepreneur and not every person has what it takes to be a business owner. I believe anybody can learn graphic design because that is a skillset. I believe anybody can learn photography or videography because that's. Um, yes, you might have a more natural creative tendencies than somebody else.

You might have more natural skillsets or giftings than someone else, but like anything like an instrument, a musical instrument, like a sport, like riding a bike, you can learn how to do these different creative things. However, being an entrepreneur, there's so much more than. Uh, gifting that goes into that so much more than a skillset that goes into that.

We start getting into personality type. We start getting into character traits. Here are some character traits that. I think if I didn't have, I wouldn't have made it. Number one, if you're going to start a creative business, you have to be incredibly hardworking. You have to be able to put your nose to the grindstone, put your foot on the gas pedal.

You have to have a tenacity and. Hey, let's do it attitude because there's going to be times where you have to be scrappy. Listen, when we started, we were doing cold calls. We were doing cold emails. We were knocking on people's doors. Uh, not in desperation. I think I always, I'm a pretty positive person. Uh, just so you guys know I'm a type two on the Enneagram.

Uh, I'm a natural optimist. And so I kind of always felt optimistic, but I also knew. We have to make things happen because if we don't get out there and go get in, go make things happen. Things aren't just going to fall in our lap. So we were cold calling cold emailing, knocking on doors, being scrappy, working late, waking up early.

And so you have to have this tenacity and this kind of natural. To make things happen. And again, that goes back to your why, why are you actually doing it? The other thing I'll say is if you're somebody who stays up late, is he responsible with your time you sleep in you snooze past your alarm clock and you don't have a.

Of discipline. It's going to be very hard. If you're not disciplined in your personal life, it's gonna be very hard to start a business or to start a creative business, because it's going to require you to be disciplined. We're gonna have to do a budget. You're gonna have to come up with processes and procedures and figure out how to get proposals and quotes and create spreadsheets and all this stuff.

And all of that can be learned and you can adjust your life, uh, to fit those things that you need to start in to run your business. You are going to need to either develop discipline, uh, or to naturally be a disciplined person. The next thing I'll say is you gotta be resilient. You're going to get knocked down in any business situation, whether it's a creative business or not.

If you're not resilient, if you are not, if you don't have perseverance and you're not willing to, uh, pick yourself back up, when you get knocked down, you're not gonna make it because the fact is you're going to have difficult clients. We'll talk more about that in a little bit, but you're going to have people that aren't your fans.

You're going to have people who. Don't support you. You're gonna have people that write you nasty emails, or they don't respond to your cold calls in a very professional or appropriate way. And when that happens, then you have to have some resilience, some tough skin so that you can pick yourself back up and you can keep moving.

Um, and then the last thing, the other character trait that I think is so important is patience because you can't build a successful. Growing thriving, healthy brand in a day or a week or a month. The fact is it's going to take time and it's going to take doing a lot of different things to create the momentum that you need to have this growing successful creative brand.

So here is. A pro tip. You need to create an intentional flywheel. A flywheel for your business is a strategy that builds momentum over time, helping you to reach your goals. So if your goal is X amount of sales, you have to work backwards and think, okay, well, what four things do I need to do to get those sales?

And then you do a push and then you do another push on the flywheel. Then you do another push on the flywheel and your flywheel is super hard to push because it's heavy. The first time, the second time, the third time, the fourth time. But then every time you do these pushes, every time you do these 3, 4, 5, 6 different things that are going to help you get more sales, then eventually your firewall is going to pick up speed.

And then it's going to pick up a lot of momentum. And then eventually your flywheel has picked up so much momentum that it's unstoppable. So your flywheel might have different pushes, like do outbound marketing, like cold calls, cold emails. Your flywheel might say things like. Uh, always ask for Google reviews.

After a service has completed, always do this many blog posts, always do this many social media posts, so it could have different pushes. You can decide what your pushes are for your specific flywheel. But the idea is that after you do this push and that push and that push in that. Time and time again, and you're being patient.

Eventually, you're going to pick up some incredible momentum for your brand. So an example of a flywheel is something that we teach is the creative equation. That's what this whole podcast is really about, which is a three part formula to generate sales for entrepreneurial. Churches nonprofits and businesses.

So what is the creative equation? Well, we start with push one, which is proper exposure, do whatever you can to make sure that people know that you exist. So that's having a logo. That's having a website, that's doing inbound marketing, which is like a free PDF resource on your website doing outbound marketing, which is like cold calls, cold emails, do whatever you got to do.

Pass out flyers, knock on doors, do whatever you gotta do to make sure that people know that you exist. That's number one. That's. Push to his proper experience once they know that you exist and you have that exposure, give your customers great experience. That means that there's no friction on your website.

There's no buttons that don't work the text on the flyer. Isn't too small, your logo, isn't communicating the wrong things, but instead it's communicating the right things. They're having a great experience interacting with your brand. You've removed friction at every turn and then what's going to happen.

Push three proper expectation. Now you exceeded their expectations. You blew them out of the water. You were clear on expectations for price, for your process, for your product. And because you exceeded those expectations from your customer, you've added surprise value. Guess what they become part of your tribe of raving fans and what Arabia fans do they tell people about you?

They share on social media, they share in person. They tell their parents, their family members. They tell people at their school, they tell people about their church. They're literally telling everybody that they know about you because you were an entrepreneur. You were a business, you were a church, you were a nonprofit.

Hey, you were a creative business that exceeded their expectations. They had a great experience working with you. So now guess what? Their friends at church, their friends at school, their parents are family. They're going to then come to you. And asked for work and then guess what, that's more exposure for you.

And then you're going to give them a great experience. And then you're going to exceed their expectations. Then guess what? That's going to lead to more exposure. So you see how this is a flywheel that picks up momentum little by little. And at first, when you start your creative business, I'm warning you.

I'm telling you right now, it's going to be slow and you're going to be pushing every day, pushing every day. Pushing every day, every cold call is a push. Every Google of you that you get is a push. Every blog post that you write is a push. Every piece of art that you create is a push. Every satisfied customer that you have is a push and it's going to be slow.

But after six months of doing that consistently a year, a year and a half, your flywheel is going to pick up immense momentum. The other mistake that entrepreneurs, but especially creative entrepreneurs make is they don't charge enough for their surfaces. For some reason, a product based company selling premium shirts or hats or leather bags.

For some reason, it's easier to. Offer fair pricing. But for service-based industry, for creatives that are doing photography, videography graphic design, you name it. I don't know, it's hard to value ourselves enough to charge high enough prices, but here's the facts. You're an expert you've done this time and time again, you have industry knowledge.

They're not just paying you for your time. They're paying you for your expertise. They're paying you for what you know about the industry. They're paying you for all the hundreds or thousands of logos that you've designed in the past. All the hundreds or thousands of photos that you've taken in the past.

So make sure that you are pricing yourself. Not only fairly for your customer, but fairly for yourself because it's a big temptation to undercut ourselves as creatives to under price ourselves. And yes, you don't want to be, you know, if you're just starting out, you don't want to have premium pricing and a poor product, but if you are good at what you do and people are indicating that they're willing to pay premium prices and charge premium prices.

So. There is a balance between starting out in the industry, getting experience, getting a portfolio, picking up momentum and charging too much. 'cause you don't want to charge too much if you're an amateur, but if you know what you're doing and you're very good at what you do, you also don't want to undersell yourself.

So a good way to kind of gauge where you should be on the price spectrum. Number one, do some research. What are your competitors doing? How good are they? Is there photography, how good is their videography? How good are their graphic design services? What are they charging? So do a little bit of industry research to kind of get some perspective.

You can even ask people, even if there are people that aren't qualified customers for you, you can say, Hey, if you ever were interested in graphic design, what would you charge for? Or, sorry, what would you buy a logo for? What price point or if you were to get a wedding video main, what do you think is kind of like a fair price and just kind of see what other people say, do some surveys, but you want to make sure that you're pricing yourself high enough to where you are being compensated fairly, because the biggest mistake that creative entrepreneurs make.

Pricing themselves too low. Remember, it's not just about your time, but your client or your customer is also purchasing from you, your experience, your industry knowledge and. Everything else. So it's one thing to start a creative business. It's another thing to get your creative business to a place where it's scalable.

So a couple of things come to mind right away. When I think of a scalable business, just in general, number one, it should be able to be recreated. So if you don't have any systems in place, any processes, if there's no method to your madness, listen, I know creative people because. And I know that creatives are typically a little bit on organized, a little bit scatterbrained, but you've got to be able to create some processes and to create some procedures that can be replicated because when you hire somebody on your team, One day, they need to be able to know how the invoicing works.

They need to be able to know how the lead generation works, how the website works. So if you're operating your business on the seat of your pants and making it up as you go, probably not the best strategy for a profitable and scalable business, but if you're willing to sit down, do some brainstorming, talk to other people who have done it before you and put some really good processes in place.

Then you're going to find that your business is much more likely to be able to be scalable. Um, some processes that kind of come to my mind would be like project management. So there's project management software like base camp or a sauna or monday.com or something like that. Where basically you can put in your projects, you can put in timelines, you can put in assignments for this person is assigned for this video, shoot, this person's assigned for this photo, shoot, whatever, but doing.

Uh, using some sort of project management software can be a really great process or procedure to implement. Another one. Is your invoicing, are you invoicing, uh, in an unprofessional way or are you doing it in a professional way? We use QuickBooks self-employed QuickBooks is great because it can connect directly to your bank account.

It can track all of your outgoing. Uh, and you can mark those and claim those as business expenses. It tracks all of your income that you can then mark as income, you can attach receipts. Everything's documented really well. So it makes doing taxes in April super easy and effective because QuickBooks is owned by Intuit, which also owns TurboTax.

So if you're using TurboTax for your taxes anyways, that could be a really great strategy. But you need to have some sort of way to not only send invoices, but also track your income, track your expenses, uh, just so that you can document all of that information. And then aside from now, what are the other.

Uh, pushes on your flywheel. What are the other things that you're doing on a weekly or a daily or a monthly basis to continue moving the needle? Are you posting a certain amount of blog posts? Are you setting up policies and procedures that anytime that you finish a project, you're going to ask for a Google review.

Anytime that you finish a project, you're going to ask for referrals. Are you going to follow up with leads? How often are you going to follow up with leads? So sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and try to map out some of this. What are the different things that you're going to do on a regular basis that are going to help your company?

Not only to get the sale for today, but also to get the sale for two months from now. To get the sale from a year from now. And so you can set up these different policies and these different procedures, and it's going to make it a lot easier to scale your company. Speaking of scaling, if you are wanting to have a creative business that is able to scale, you really need two things.

Number one, proper pricing. We talked about that, but number two, predictable. So, what do we mean by predictable revenue? Well, the fact is if you are a designer who is relying on a 200 or $300 business card design one after another, after another, after another, and that's all that you do, then it's going to be kind of scary to scale.

So if you're wanting to hire an employee, for instance, Get that many business card designs this month or next month or the next month, there's nothing guaranteed, right? Some months are to get more photo shoots. And other months, some months you're gonna have more video products than other months. So how can you create recurring revenue so that, you know, for a fact, you're going to have this much money that you can set aside to either contract, work out to somebody or to add a new team member to your team.

And here is kind of the most clear path to do something like. Monthly subscriptions. What if you had a monthly subscription package that you could offer to churches that it's $4,000 a month or $5,000 a month, but you'll do as many video products as they want, or if you're a graphic design company.

$6,000 a month. And it's an all you can eat graphic design bar, we'll do social media posts, print designs, logo designs, you name it, maybe it's something in the website, design industry. Maybe it's something in photo or video or writing or copywriting or whatever, but it's some sort of recurring monthly subscription.

Well then, you know, and especially if you a contract, which we're going to talk about in a second, but then you know that, Hey, next month I know I'm going to have at least five. Profit. So I'm going to be able to hire a new employee or I'm going to be able to outsource X amount of projects. So that's a really great way to scale your company.

Again. You want to have really good pricing, make sure you're not underpricing yourself, but number two, you need predictable revenue so that you can continue to scale your business. Okay. I just mentioned country. And I haven't always had the current thoughts about contracts that I currently have. I used to say contracts.

Weren't that important? If it's just a logo design, uh, you don't need a contract. If it's something simple, you don't need a contract. If it's a simple photo shoot for a family, you don't need a contract. I have since then, Change my philosophy on contracts, in my opinion on contracts. And the reason is because of difficult clients, I've had clients where I've designed a website for them, and they have essentially come back and said, you know what?

We actually don't really like the website. Could you, can you try this or that, or, you know, make this change or that change. So for those of you who know kind of some, some distinctives of our company, we essentially offer unlimited revisions on anything, whether it's a logo or website or anything. And so we say, oh, sure, no problem.

You know, implement those website changes, say, okay, here's your new website? What do you think about it? We're happy to make any other changes. And then. Actually man, you know what? I think we're going to go a different direction. We're going to hire somebody else. If you don't mind, just kind of sending our money back and giving us a refund, that'd be great.

Well, here's the thing. You already put all that work into the website. You spent weeks and weeks and weeks designing this website or designing this logo or working on this video for a client. And all of a sudden, after you've done all that work, they want a refund. And so I didn't always do contracts. Now I do for every single job that we do not to be a state.

And by the way, I used to not do it because I didn't want to put extra friction between me and a sale. I figured, you know, what, if a contract is going to make somebody freak out, or if it's going to take them longer to pay or anything like that, I'll just eliminate it. We'll just take the contract part out of the equation.

Since then, since we've had so many difficult clients, I've totally changed my mentality on contracts. We do them for every project now, and I would recommend doing them because if you can spell out what the refund policy is on your contract, there's no discussion. If you can spell out the terms of the service.

There's no discussion. And you can include things in your contract like so-and-so company. My company is not liable for copyright infringement. We're not liable for your website going down. We're not liable for any kind of issues that this new logo may cause in your brand, or we're not liable for, you know, this photo being taken.

You know, in a certain location, whatever. So any kind of legal thing that could happen, all of a sudden you're off the hook because you had a contract. And honestly, that is just part of being an entrepreneur, especially a creative entrepreneur, because sometimes you try something and it doesn't work.

Sometimes you try something and your clients get frustrated, or sometimes you try something and it works great, but you have to. Just take a stab at it. Just try, just start and then course correct. Along the way you have to change the way that you do things sometimes. And so that's just part of it. That's part of being a business owner in any industry is just going for it.

And then when things go south, then mix it up, try something different and then figure out what works for you and what process is going to help propel your business and propel your brand forward. Um, one pro tip that I would have is always. Always have a posture of learning. If I get to a place as a business owner where I feel like I figured it out, then I am hindering my growth.

Everybody has an opportunity to learn. It doesn't matter if you've been in an industry for 30 years, 50 years, 60 years. Everybody has the opportunity to grow and to continue learning new things and developing. And so my recommendation would be always have a posture of learning, read books, listen to podcasts, talk to other people in real life who have done it before, who have done it before you.

So that you can learn from them so that you can learn from their mistakes. You can learn from their wins and their successes and how they did it and have those kinds of conversations, because that is what's going to help better you as an entrepreneur and especially as a creative entrepreneur. And lastly, big tip here, give yourself grace.

You can't be too hard on yourself, starting anything, especially a business is going to take time. And so, you know, part of this is just taking those good tasks when they come and making them. And taking the bad times when they come and making the most of it. And so there's never going to be a perfect year or a perfect month for your new business, but you just have to take things as they come and just continue to learn in future episodes.

We're going to talk more about creating thriving, profitable, sustainable creative businesses. However, this episode of the creative equation is coming to a close. And I just wanted to say thank you, the listener for taking the time to listen to this episode of the creative equation and for spending a little bit of time with me today, remember, we're on a mission to help as many creatives and as many entrepreneurs as possible.

And we'd love it. If you continue following along on this journey with us, if you found any of today's content helpful, we'd be incredibly grateful. If you would share this podcast episode with others who may benefit from it. Thanks for tuning in. Remember you can't use that. The more you use, the more you have stay creative and we'll catch you next time.