My head aches and I’ve just explained to a close friend why I’m not such a good friend right now. My reason? I’m birthing my first bona fide creative business plan.
“What is a creative business plan,” you ask? Good question. "Creative" and "business plan" are not often used in the same sentence. Business plans have to be "serious" and hefty; they are bound and type set. Right?
Well last month, the vision for my life that had lingered “just around the corner” had finally arrived and I needed to attend to it. I didn’t really understand that I was a creative entrepreneur or that it mattered that I embraced that title.
That is until I found the online class by the creative and gentle Jennifer Lee of Artizen coaching. Her Right-Brain Business plan was a perfect fit for me. We both trained with the same coaching company, The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), so I was familiar with the language of her method and I felt a synergy with her visual, creative and coach-y approach to the elements in a traditional business plan.
Between my kids’ bus departure and bus arrival each day, I shut the world out. I planted myself on my couch with glue sticks, magazine clippings, sticky notes and colored pens and began a productive, playful and restriction free approach to imagining the future of this small business that I had built.
A month later I have a come out of my cocoon with a visual plan that creatively communicates all the dreamy stuff -- mission, vision and vales -- and all the gear grinding work of articulating marketing and audience profiles and strategies, a financial projections and an operating plan. I have a neat (and dare I say attractive) list of actions derived from all of that thought work. Now I’m poised for action.
Or am I? Like birthing a real baby, I felt some pain around moving through the real-time threshold from my dining table (which is covered with the detritus of my efforts) and my bed (my second office) to a real desk and to face the big (beautiful and scary) vision in front of me. I realized that I can only move so fast (which isn’t as fast as I imagined I would) while honoring my other important commitments.
I decided to begin with what was right in front of me, so I started moving furniture. Now that I've succeeded in the conquest of my husband’s old office, and everyone is out of the house, I'm ready for action. My creative business plan is my road map into the future, and I'm using my powers of creativity to move forward with intention at any rate of speed!!
Visit my blog (and be a guest blogger) at www.creativitymatterscoaching.com (launching March 1), and register for my ARTIST STATEMENT workshop weekend March 2 and 3rd at The Purple Crayon in Hastings-on-Hudson.
