How to start a creative business – top 10 tips for success
Here are some top tips to give you some help with where to begin once you’ve decided you want to start your creative business.
As an entrepreneur myself, and now a creative business coach too, there are a lot of things I have learnt the hard, long way round, so here are my top 10 pieces of advice for starting out.
Do your market research
Establish your niche
Understand yourself
Invest
Be consistent
Play the long game
Never stop learning
Keep on top of admin
Don’t undervalue yourself or your work
Ask for help
1. Do your market research
Check there’s a market for your services or products. It may sound obvious, but all too often people dive into their creative passions without properly researching the market - whether people want or need what you’re selling, and whether you can make enough income from it to satisfy your financial goals. Market research is one of the very first things you should do. If similar products or services exist out there already that’s actually a good thing, it means people likely need or want what you’re selling. You don’t have to be offering something completely unique or discovering a new previously untapped market, you just have to be offering it in a unique way. And this leads on to tip number 2…
2. Establish your niche
Find out who will buy or book your offerings. Find your niche – your unique spin on an already established industry. Finding your USP doesn’t have to be difficult, it just takes a little thinking about. Read more in my blog post Finding & Establishing Your Niche.
3. Understand yourself
Be clear on how you want to run your business and what your goals are for it. Every single one of us wants to work in a different way, eg in person, online, office hours, flexible hours and so on, with customers face to face, at a distance etc. Being clear on how you want your working week to look and how you want to work is a really vital part of how you set your business up from the start.
4. Invest
Whilst it’s true that you can begin a kitchen-table start-up with little or no funds, it really is very much more time intensive and hard to gain momentum without investing in some key things to give you a head start, eg professional photography of your products or services, a website, or selling platform of some sort, branding and of course stocking your products (or tech for delivering services) and some sort of advertising. It might cost a few hundred pounds or run into thousands depending on your available funds, how much time you have to devote to marketing your business, what your industry niche is, the competition, and speed you want your business to succeed. Taking your time to decide where to invest your funds is really important.
5. Be consistent
Play the long game. There are no quick fixes to success, it just takes consistency of action and approach. Be prepared for things to take time to work. You don’t have to keep on changing things up if you don’t see immediate results. Often just tweaking what you’ve already got can make measurable differences. It can take time to achieve your goals.
6. Play the long game
Setting future goals and planning for the long-term in your business is really important. I like to set 1 month, 3 month, 6 month and yearly goals. Plus, wider 5 year goals. Hear all about goal setting here. Many businesses fail within the first 3 years, be prepared to weather the storms and ups and downs of an entrepreneurial life. Listen to my podcast on how to avoid your new creative business failing.
7. Never stop learning
Never get complacent, there are always new things to learn, new skills and new connections to be made. I try to enrol on at least one course or workshop each year to further my skills and keep up to date with industry changes. This has the added advantage of keeping that creative curiosity alive and stops the boredom setting in. I love finding new things to add to my repertoire and subsequently new ways to offer better experiences for my clients.
8. Keep on top of admin
Creative people often despise the admin side of running a business, keeping on top of invoices, contracts, emails and so-on, but no-one else will do it if you don’t, and if you’re not keeping track of things how will you know when you’ve had success you can build on, or failures that you can avoid in the future? As soon as you have the income to support it you can always outsource the things you hate. Listen to more on my podcast about outsourcing.
9. Don’t undervalue yourself or your work
Pricing, especially at the start can be hard, but try to avoid offering discounts or a very low price for your services at the start. If you don’t value yourself no-one else will. Start at prices that reflect the work and experience you have but allow you room to grow and raise them as you gain experience. Be clear on your costs and what you would like to be paid per hour and price accordingly. Don’t guess!
10. Ask for help
Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it, even just getting friends and family to share your business on social media can be really helpful in the early days. Reach out to other creatives in your industry for their tips an advice. Join Facebook Groups or programmes where you can learn the skills you need for your art, as well as how to run a business. It is likely in the early the days that you will have t be your own marketing manager, social media manager, admin, accountant and more besides. It’s very unlikely you will have had experience of all of these areas, so don’t be afraid to reach out for advice.
Plus you can always buy my book (just £4.99) and join my Facebook Group with it for more daily advice, tips and support.
A digital book for anyone contemplating launching their own creative business. Now updated for 2024.
