You have a dream, and you want to manifest it. Your own empire, creative business; maybe as a freelance designer, or a life coach, or maybe you want to open your own bricks-and-mortar language school in your town. Whatever it is, you are passionate about your idea, and you can’t wait to make it happen! There is just one thing: overwhelm. Where do you start? You have so much to do before you actually open your doors to business, but what to do first? This is a post about how to set goals and reach them in the first year of planning and launching.
What have you tried so far? A to-do list in your notebook? A big whiteboard on your wall with a mind map? Or are you not even there yet? Is everything still firmly stored in your head, running circles and creating chaos and a lot of panic?
How to set goals and reach them: the first steps
First things first: what is it that you want? What is your dream destination? Having a crystal clear picture in your head of the end goal, the thing you really, REALLY want, is super helpful. It is not even a picture, is a FEELING. How do you want to feel at the end of this journey? What will your life look like? Dream big, and write or draw in as much detail as possible what this will be like for you. Maybe make a vision board. Vision boards are a powerful tool, and having them up in your office or house to see daily, will have a big impact on manifesting your goals.
Once you have a clear image of where you want to go as a creative business, how will you get there? You picked your destination, know what it will feel like once you get there, and you even created a collage of images that help you remind of the end goal. Now you got to ‘buy the train tickets’ for the magnificent journey you are about to embark on!
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Creating the itinerary: what are your milestones?
You may get there fast, but most new creative entrepreneurs take up to two years or longer before they really pick up the pace and feel they are making a decent income with their business. But to get anywhere, you got to start. The best thing is to break down your journey into bite-sized chunks. In order for you to launch your business, or open the doors to your shop, what needs to happen? Think about the next six months: what are the most important things you need to do, so that you can move onto phase two of your adventure?
Say, you want to open a language school in your city. What are the first things you should do? The following steps are about opening a physical unit, but you can apply similar questions to an online business, of course.
- Understand the market. Who would be your target audience, and what is their biggest issue/deepest desire?
- Understand the competition. How many other language schools are there in your local area? Or, if you are opening an online business, who is your immediate competition here?
- Find out how much it costs to run a school: rent on the space, fees for the teachers, utility bills, taxes, etc. Create a spreadsheet, and put it all in. Or, if you are running an online business, what will be your monthly outgoings here? Investment in software, equipment, team members?
These three tasks should keep you busy for a while, and help you to better grasp what you want to launch as a creative business, and how much money you need to invest as a startup.
Any grants available?
4. Next, you could start investigating funding. Is there funding available for setting up your business? Could you apply for a startup fund? This is optional, but it may be a pleasant surprise to find out if there are grants out there to support you.
5. Researching locations. What are the best locations in your area to open a language school in? Look at where your target audience lives and how easily it is to get there. If your target is young single people, the city centre or neighbourhoods densely populated with young people, is your best bet. It might be pricey, but if there is enough audience out there for you, it’s worth looking at. If, however, your audience is slightly older, or you are targeting school age children (or their parents), you might want to move further into the suburbs.
Once you have a good idea of who you want to target, how big your competition is, and how much money you need (and whether you could get some help with that), you could start looking at the next steps. Of course, if you found out, that the market is saturated, or the rents in your city are sky high, you may need to tweak your idea. If not, we continue to set goals and reach them.
Start looking at branding and marketing
If you feel confident about your market, your idea, and your future location, then in the meantime, you can start making yourself visible online. You might be ready for this after your first six months of the journey. Even though you haven’t officially opened yet, you can start making some noise and build your audience.
The most important step here, is to have your message crystal clear. What is your brand? What sort of business will you be? What’s your vibe? Some things you could be doing in this phase are:
- Work on your branding: values, ‘feel’, story, imagery – and ultimately, colours and logo.
- Know your core values: what is your style and what do you stand for?
- Know your core message: create an elevator pitch that will work like a magnet. What type of message and wording would resonate with the people you want to attract?
- Come up with a great name!
Your message is going to be your magic wand. The wording in your message will be gold, when written well. You will be using it everywhere, and this message will inform ALL of your content.
If you want to know how to write a good marketing message, download my free workbook.
Becoming visible and showing up as a leader
This is the most scary part for most new entrepreneurs: making yourself known. It’s all safe behind the screen of your laptop, but if you want to do business, you got to be out there. Here are the next steps for you to look at in terms of making your business reality, and reaching those milestones.
- Decide on which online platform your main audience hangs out. Don’t be on all of them, you won’t have time and you’ll loose the plot. My guess is, with a language school, as we were taking this as an example, is that Instagram will be great to share short videos and other content, and Facebook will be very useful to promote/mention yourself in various local groups. For B2B businesses your best bet may be LinkedIn. Have a think!
- Start speaking to a logo designer and a web designer (if you are unable to do these things yourself)
- Become consistent in posting relevant content. If you know who you want to attract, and you have your branding and messaging nailed, content should come easy. Every bit of content should support your main goal: serving your audience and drawing them closer.
- Go to networking events. Yes, not everything can be done from the safety of your home office; showing up at actual networking events will do wonders for your visibility. Make yourself known locally. The more people know about you, the more word-of-mouth referrals you will get.
The first year as a creative business
Give yourself time. Time to learn, to make mistakes, and time to figure stuff out. Don’t expect a fulltime income and a stream of clients as soon as you you open your doors. People don’t know you. You may have a great website, but you need to tell people about it, or get great at SEO to drive traffic. Sign up for networking events and business breakfasts, learn from others. Get a mentor, join a mastermind group. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and it will be a fabulous journey of self-development, if you are up for the ride.
Make sure you have a plan.
Make sure you have a clear vision of where you want to go, and what you want to do.
Without clarity, it will be chaos.
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