Craftsman Creative

[00:00:00] Hey there, everybody. My name is Daren Smith. I'm the founder of Craftsman Creative, and today I've got another episode for you. We're focusing on outcomes today, and many of you are here because there's an outcome that you care about. Otherwise, why? Take the time to listen to a podcast. Read a blog post, subscribe to a newsletter, watch a YouTube video.

It's because we have things we want from that. There are outcomes that matter. So I wanna just dive in today first, talking about the outcomes for you. One of the in really, really important aspects when you start a business or when you're looking at a business that you have that isn't growing the way you want, it doesn't have the outcomes or the results that you're looking for, it helps in these early stages to define.

The outcome, what kind of business are you actually looking to build? Because you might be frustrated because it doesn't live up to some vague set of expectations. It [00:01:00] may be just because you're looking at the other people in your market or industry and thinking, I don't have those results. I didn't sell a hundred thousand dollars in my course.

I didn't make a million dollars last year, so my business sucks. But if you haven't actually defined the outcomes for yourself, Then you're constantly gonna be disappointed and frustrated because they're not living up to these unrealistic expectations. So let's start with you. I like looking at what are called the Four Freedoms.

They're laid out by Dan Sullivan. He's the owner and founder of, um, creative Coach, executive Coach, something like Strategic Coach. There it is. Uh, and. He uses these four freedoms to highlight the outcomes that we all care about, albeit in varying degrees or sequences. So as you're kind of looking at the outcomes that you want for your business, think about freedom of time.

Freedom, financially, financial freedom, location freedom or independence, and then freedom of [00:02:00] relationships. So said differently. We all want to be in control of our time. We want to be able to work as much or as little as we want. Want to choose when we start our and end our day. and we wanna have the freedom to take time off when we want or need to.

It sucks having to ask a boss for permission to go and do something. It's borderline humiliating. I hated it . Like when I was working on the TV show, the last thing I wanted to do was go and ask permission from someone. I didn't really respect that much. If I could take a day off, it was just demoralizing.

So we wanna make sure we have enough money to support the lifestyle and the business that we. For some people, that's a few thousand extra dollars a month to provide some savings or some spending money, or just to feel a little bit more financially secure. But others really want to be making six figures or more a year doing this creative work.

So whatever it is for you, you gotta write that down. How much money do you want? How much time do you want? What kind of freedom? What does that freedom look [00:03:00] like for you? We wanna make enough money to support the lifestyle and business des we desire. We want to be able to work from home, live where we want afford the house and the neighborhood that works best for us and our family situation.

And lastly, we wanna work with awesome people. We want great clients. We want amazing partners, great mentors, generous and supportive investors, and an audience of people that see the value in the things that we create. I mean, that sounds pretty amazing. We could all go for that, but we all need to define our outcome because you need three things to get where you want to go.

You need to know the desired destination. You need to know where you are now, and you need a map for how to get from where you are now to where you want to go. Right? A, you want the directions. , right? That's why people come to Crest and Creative cuz they're looking for directions. That's an outcome that I provide people.

So see how this starts to inform what your business does. If you are creating the [00:04:00] outcomes for yourself first, then you can figure out what's missing and you can start looking at your business a different way. So if any of those three things are missing, where you are now, the desired destination and a map for how to get there, if any of those three are missing, you're.

and it sucks to be stuck. So you gotta take time to define the business that you want to build using these four freedoms and revisit it often. Let it drive and guide you as you work to achieve those outcomes. I tend to look at my business at least once a year, sometimes, uh, specifically around projects.

I revisit once every. All right, so we've got outcomes for you. But then the second piece that we need is outcomes for them. Well, who are them? Well, , when you're working for the outcomes for yourself, if they only include you and not your customer, then your business isn't positioned to help people. It's positioned to benefit you, which, yeah, there's something to be said for that, to build a business that [00:05:00] benefits you.

But if you aren't helping people get what they want, it's a lot harder to get what you want. . So you gotta spend time thinking about the pain that your audience is suffering from. What are the things that keep them up at night or cause them daily frustration? Then how does your business overcome those things?

What will their life look like if they become a customer and put your product or service to work for them? One hint that I can give you in this podcast is all of our pain can be traced back to two main fears. The first one is we don't feel. And the second one is we feel that we aren't. We aren't loved and we aren't enough.

Every pain can be traced back to one of those two main fears. So if you're struggling to identify the core pains or struggles, or frustrations of your audience, start with one or both of those. Two. I'm not loved, shows up in many ways. No one cares. When I post on social media. I don't have enough clients [00:06:00] or customers.

My list isn't growing. I'm not getting picked for events or presentations. No one wants to partner with me. I'm not over. and I'm not enough is a pernicious one that can look like this. I don't know what I'm doing. My products suck. I can't figure out how to do X, y, or z. I don't have enough experience. I can't get the bigger or better clients.

My competitors have more resources than I do. . So if you can identify the pains that your audience has, what happens is you become a trusted, empathetic person who can help them. You. You're able to identify their pains, and that's half the battle. So then you can show them what life is like when those pains are gone.

Lastly, you share how your business is the solution to getting those outcomes, helping them remove the pain and get the pleasure that they're. Right, the, the outcomes that matter to them. So spend some time this week if you haven't already, on identifying at least three pain points for your audience and three outcomes that your [00:07:00] business helps them achieve.

You know, a secret there is to just kind of make them mirrors of each other. So if they don't have enough time, your business gives them more time. If they don't make enough money, you help them make more money, right? That's broad speaking, broad strokes, but that's kind of what it looks like. and then let those answers start informing your marketing and your pitching of your business.

So when you go out and you post on social media or write blog posts or produce podcasts, speak to the things that your audience is struggling with and then help them overcome that through your content. Um, all right, one more idea for you, because we do three. Of these every week on the podcast. So thanks for listening.

And if you're not subscribed, be sure to do that. The last idea for you is that, uh, this is a mindset shift, okay? And it's called repeatable outcomes require systems. So let's just focus on one outcome that I've mentioned in this podcast, becoming oversubscribed. It's arguably one of the most important things you can focus on in your [00:08:00] business until that outcome is realized.

So oversubscribed means that you have more demand than you have supply. It's hard to do with digital products sometimes, which are infinitely available you, you can't really control the supply and demand on YouTube or Spotify or Apple Music or anything like that. But you can always increase the price the more you sell, like if you have a course or you can limit them arbitrarily, but most of us would never do the latter because it would cap the amount of sales you could make in a given timeframe.

What we're looking at with our content is leverage, so we want to sell as many as possible, so digital products, they're hard to become oversubscribed with that. So we're really more speaking about your freelance or contract work, your coaching, your consulting, all that. , you can become oversubscribed by the nature of there only being so many days in a week, so many hours in a day, and therefore only so many clients or customers that you can take on at any given time.

So let's say, for example, you can do ten [00:09:00] one hour coaching calls a week, and that probably incorporates like the extra time it takes to do email follow up and run your business and prep for the calls and take notes and all that kind of stuff. As soon as you have 10 clients. and one more person wants to become a client of yours, but you have no more availability or supply.

You are oversubscribed. Congrats, . Now, how do you get to that state? Well, we need enough interest from our market or our audience, a constant stream of new people, seeing our content, becoming prospects, then leads and then clients. So since that outcome needs to be both constant and repeatable, we need a system.

The thing is, systems will save you because the flip side, or the mistake that many creators make is that when they need new clients or revenue, they go out and they do marketing or sales. Then they shift back to client service or delivery once they're full up. But this ebb [00:10:00] and flow results in a dramatic change in revenue from month to month.

It's stressful, frustrating, demoralizing, and it's just not fun. We've all experienced that type. Solopreneur creative entrepreneur business, right? Where it's really good. One month we have the best month ever. Then the next month, that's one 10th of that and systems are what's gonna even that out. So it's more consistent month to month because you know that you've got 10 clients every single month cuz you're oversubscribed as opposed to having 10 this month and one next month, right?

So what you need to do instead is build a system. You can start with asking yourself what's already working. So ask yourself, where do my best customers come from Already? My answer, as I asked myself this question at the end of last year was podcasts. So my best clients heard me as a guest, so they went from audience to prospect.

They joined my email list after hearing my call to action at the end of that episode [00:11:00] or at that conversation. So they went from prospect to lead, and then they hopped on a call. So they went from a lead to an appointment and then. became a client. So they went from appointment or a coaching call or discovery call to becoming a client or uh, a coaching or a consulting client.

Okay, but how do you turn that into a system? So I started by rebooting this podcast. So the last episode I had done before starting this backup a few weeks ago was June of last year before I left for, uh, Cape Town South Africa to produce a movie. When I came back, I started working on the 10 K Creator Show with Joe Pulitz, which if you haven't heard that, go to 10 k creator show.com and check out the podcast because it's really good.

And then I started, I came out of that and then I was focused on the 10 K Creator or the 10 K challenge. Excuse me. That was the event that I did at the beginning of the year within my Society of Independent Creators community and it, it was like, oh man, I haven't done any [00:12:00] podcasts in a few months, so I rebooted mine.

So that was the start, and now I'm at least showing up every Friday to my existing audience. And already I have people that are on my newsletter going, wow, I loved that episode. You know, I put a link to it in every newsletter I'm posting about it on social media and I'm getting people going. That was really good.

So I'm getting listeners, which if you look at the progression from. Audience to prospect, to lead to client, and this is a conversation for probably another episode, but really quickly, the longer amount of time that they're able to spend with you, the further down that customer journey that they are. So.

You think of your social media content and people don't have to be subscribed to you or following you in order to see your stuff, right? They can click on a YouTube video, they can see a tweet or a LinkedIn post, or a Facebook post or an Instagram post because someone else shared it or it showed up in their timeline thanks to the algorithm, and that doesn't require any.

any action on their part to see it. It just shows up. [00:13:00] So beyond that, then it's like becoming a follower or a subscriber, and then it's consuming, I, I kind of, not sure how I feel about the word consuming, but they're engaging with your content. They're reading your blog posts. They're watching your videos.

They're listening to your podcast just like you are. And that's a very different set of circumstances than coming across a social media post of yours because an algorithm fed it to 'em, right. Podcast it. There's not a lot of discovery there, so they're much further along. And so you can treat that content in a different way.

It's not about getting audience to become prospects. It's a big out. It's about getting your prospects to become leads. So that's why at the end of every podcast they say, Hey, here's a call to action. Go take this free scorecard. Because what happens, you put in your email address, you get a report. and I have your, uh, permission to email you things like that report.

So all of a sudden I can then send you welcome sequences or promotional sequences or my weekly newsletter, and then that's how you become a lead [00:14:00] to an someone who wants to hop on a call, schedule an appointment, become a client. So that's how clients were happening for me. . So the other thing that I started doing was regular outreach, at least once a week to podcast host that I think I'd be a good guest on.

So the first thing I did was reached out to everybody that I was on a podcast with last year and said, Hey, I loved our conversation. I would love to do a round two. Here's an idea or two that I think we could talk about that would be super fun. And here's how my business has grown and changed in the last year.

And I think we'd have a lot to talk about. That's working. You know, that already led to one new conversation with Matt Giro, um, on the how to build this. Sorry, Matt, I forget the name of your podcast off the top of my head. I apologize. I'll put a link in the show notes though. Um, So I've reached out to Ryan over at, um, grow Your Video Business and I need to talk to the people at the ambitious filmmaker and all these other, uh, podcasts that I did last year [00:15:00] because they were really great opportunities to get in front of their audience, turn them into prospects and leads and potentially clients.

Okay. So that's the other part of the system I've done is started reaching. Two podcast hosts I think I'd be a good guest on. I've been invited on two this year, three this year already. So I need to up the amount of conversations I'm having to get to my goal of one a week. So that's just optimizing the system.

So here's my experiment. One guest appearance per week and one podcast of my own per week should generate more leads and more clients, and that will help me get to the point where I'm oversubscribed. So once you've built a system, you can maintain it and optimize it so that it continually provides the outcomes that you want from it.

So for me and you in terms of being oversubscribed, . That means we need more leads that want to become clients than our business has supplied for. So if we can only take on two big clients a month, we need three that are interested in becoming clients. And that way we're always talking about, [00:16:00] okay, yes, I have time.

A month from now, or two weeks from now, or six weeks from now, I'm booked up. A another example of this, if you look at, um, Justin Welsh's newsletter, the Saturday solopreneur, he has a. At the bottom of his email, his newsletter that says, advertise in this newsletter currently booked out six months. Right?

So he's very oversubscribed. He could probably be charging two or three times what he's charging because if you're six months out, that's a little unfortunate, right? There's, there's missed opportunity there. It's kind of the same equivalent of if you're a musician and you have a show at a venue that's only 20 seats, and you could have sold 200.

You missed out on a lot of revenue, so you ideally want to be looking at a venue that has 150 to 199 seats so that you're still oversubscribed, you're sold out cuz that looks good for you and the people that are there and your brand. Those are all really good things to have [00:17:00] happen, to sell out a show, but you don't wanna be so oversubscribed that you're missing out on potential revenue.

So it. , it's feeling it out and going, okay, do I want to have one extra person per month or five extra people that I'm turning down every month? You know, if it's big ticket item stuff and you've got five extra people, your system's working really well, it's probably time to increase your prices. So that's one of the great things that comes from being oversubscribed and having a system that generates that.

Result that outcome constantly. So, look, I'm not there yet, and if you aren't either, consider the system that either already exists or needs to be built in your business to generate that outcome consistently. And then what you do is you find another area of your business that you want an outcome, a constant, consistent, repeatable outcome for you build another system and then another, and another, and another.

and that's the mindset shift for you today is you gotta start thinking in terms of systems. All right, I think that's it for today. So thank you for listening. Here's my call to [00:18:00] action for you if you are not yet. Subscribe to my newsletter. You gotta go do that because every single week I'm putting out awesome principles and frameworks and things like that that you can directly apply to your business and there's links to help you grow.

So I'm sharing links to this podcast, but also other podcasts and other videos and other creators and their resources, and it's a great way to just start your week. With a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of motivation to go, yeah, you know, I'm really ready to take action and do this thing because you're, a lot of us are right in the middle of this spectrum of on one side we have information, which wants to be free and generally is free.

You can find answers to basically anything on the internet. So, information is not where you grow your business. You're not going to get there by just consuming more blog posts and podcasts and YouTube videos. At some point on the other end of the spectrum is implementation, and if you're somewhere in the middle and you haven't [00:19:00] shifted over to implementation yet, that's the next step for you.

Whether it's with me and Craftsman Creative, whether it's another creator that you admire and you want to have a business or the outcomes that they can help you get, that's the next step. So for me and for you right now, it's go get on the newsletter because I'm putting together a new welcome sequence.

I'm putting together more resources in there to, to say, Hey, thanks for joining and. Right. I'm gonna help you right now, and if you're ready to take action, there's things you can do just from the free content from the newsletter, but then there's also ways to work with me to join the community and get group coaching and events and daily posts like this, or become an actual client or customer, right?

So that's the invitation. Head over to craftsman creative.co. Put in your email, I'll send you a welcome sequence about how to do this creative work at the level that you want to, and it's gonna be awesome. So thanks again for listening. Share this episode with a friend. If you found any value in it and reach out, say [00:20:00] hi, just uh, darren@craftsmancreative.co.

That's my email. You can reach out anytime. Say hi. Let me know what you're struggling with and I'll help you out. All right, see you next.