Developing a creative business

Being creative gives you lots of ideas for developing an enterprise. But when you have more ideas than resources to implement them, how do you select your priorities?

You focus a creative enterprise by learning to say 'no' and selecting priorities for development as new opportunities arise. You need to make astute choices: creative choices and business choices.

Taking on too many projects

In the early stages of business, a lack of focus is often driven by a need for cash, leading to ‘doing everything and anything - for anybody’.

“If you can’t state your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position.”

Later, growing enterprises are tempted to diversify into new markets with new products.

At every stage there is the temptation to take on too many projects without doing any of them as well as possible.

As well as causing stresses and strains within the organisation, an enterprise that spreads itself too thinly is in danger of appearing as a ‘jack of all trades’ and consequently being perceived as ‘master of none’.

The intention is to offer more services and products to get more business. But what the customer sees is a generalist for everyone, when what they want is a specialist for their own needs.

Looking at customer perception of your market position, Seth Godin says, “If you can’t state your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position.”

Deciding your business strategy

The strategic way to make choices is to use your Unique Business Formula as a compass. This is made up of two essential components: your competitive advantage and careful selection of customers.

In other words, the guiding principles should be:

Let’s do only what we can excel at in relation to competitors
Let’s develop those things for which there is a suitable market.

One of the ‘Ten things Google has found to be true’ is “it’s best to do one thing really, really well”. Actor Bill Cosby said “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone”. Many successful creative entrepreneurs would agree.

Learning to say 'no'

“It’s best to do one thing really, really well”

Strategic focus is about deciding, positively, what not to do.

Saying 'No' to many options is essential if we are to say 'Yes' to the things that will help us achieve our own particular version of success.

This ruthless prioritisation applies not only to business strategy, but also at the personal level in terms of time management. The answer to the problem of having too long a ‘to-do’ list is to draw up a ‘not-to-do’ list.

As writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: “We always have time enough, if we will but use it aright”. More recently, poet and business coach Mark McGuinness has written an excellent free eBook called ‘Time Management for Creative People’.

Making strategic choices

Even the biggest corporations have to make strategic choices and find a way of selecting the most appropriate projects from a plethora of possibilities.

For creative entrepreneurs, the Feasibility Filter (p90 of 'T-Shirts & Suits' ebook) helps to identify the best options in terms of competitive creativity and market suitability.

Being able to say 'No' is vital if we are to make the right creative and business choices.

Ansoff’s Matrix is a useful tool to help make strategic business choices, including whether to develop new products for existing customers or find new customers for existing products. Market penetration and diversification are also options.

We each need to develop our own rules for how to select the best options for development, taking into account our goals, passion, values, competitors, customers and financial objectives.