Certified coach, owner of Clarity To Business and author of the valuable and very hands on book Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Turn Your Passion into a Solid Business, Christy Strauch, was kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions about her book and about entrepreneurship.
She describes how creative people can be successful in business and why it's critical to understand the numbers and to speak their language. She also shared her insights into starting a successful business.
Thanks to Christy Strauch for her very informative answers.
What was the background to writing this book, Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Turn Your Passion into a Solid Business?
Christy Strauch: I had been teaching business plan workshops using another book, but discovered it was too advanced. It assumed a level of understanding about business that the classes didn’t have. (I figured this out from the blank stares I would get in the workshops). So I created a 20-page handout and used it to teach from. Every time I taught the class, people asked more questions and wanted me to cover more concepts, so the handout got bigger and bigger.
Somewhere in the middle of creating this ever-growing handout, I also realized that if I helped people connect to their purpose, the numbers sections would go more easily--so I put the chapter about understanding the purpose of and for your business at the front. Then I added more information about basic financial concepts like cash flow and break-even point. After that came information about how to figure out who your best clients were, and how to talk to them.
And Poof! It became a book.
It wasn’t as easy as I make it sound; probably 200 people read and critiqued the book in its various stages of coming into being. I made legions of changes based on their feedback. But once I saw the picture of the cover on Amazon, it felt like my fairy godmother had waved her magic wand and granted me a precious, important and gratifying wish.
You structured this book into modules as a course in entrepreneurship. Was that your intention?
Christy Strauch: It wasn’t! I never thought about it that way until you pointed it out.
Because of the experience I had in using the other book to teach the workshops, and realizing that it was too advanced for the participants, I began adding basic business information to the new iteration of each handout. Even as the copy editor was proofreading the book, she asked a number of business-related questions that I hadn’t covered, and I added more information for her.
The structure of the book was nothing more complex than my responding to the questions I got from my classes and the other people who test-drove it. I see in retrospect that all the feedback I got from everyone who read it shaped it into an entrepreneurship course. What I most wanted was to give people a simple and fairly painless way to write a business plan for their precious businesses.
We often hear that having a passion is fine as a hobby, but it won't work as a business. Is it possible for people to make a living as entrepreneurs doing what most interests them?
Christy Strauch: On the contrary: I think it’s difficult for entrepreneurs to make a living unless they are doing what deeply interests them. People who make a living doing what most interests them are oftentimes the most successful. For a great example, look at Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, or Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft.
The catch is, if you want to transform a hobby into a business you have to treat it like a business. A hobby is like dating; turning it into a business is like going from dating to marriage. If you turn your hobby into your business you have to show up, just like in marriage, even on the days you don’t feel like it. “Showing up” can include some challenging tasks, such as taking the necessary steps to understand your numbers, understand you customers, and talking your customers regularly.
The question isn’t “can I turn my hobby into a business?” It’s “am I willing to make the commitment required to turn my hobby into a business?”
Many people who want to go into business are immediately intimidated by the idea of numbers. How can this fear of numbers be overcome?
Christy Strauch: You are right about there being a lot of fear about business numbers. It’s ironic. Guess what level of math it takes to do them? Second grade math. We shouldn’t even call it math—it’s more like arithmetic. There is an undeserved mystique surrounding business numbers. If you can do addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, you’ve got all the skills you need.
Math skills aside, the other thing that happens to us as business owners is that we sometimes equate our worth as human beings with our bank account balance. If your bank account is low and that means you’re worthless, it’s much harder to look at your numbers when your business isn’t doing well.
I like to think about “Number” as a separate language that anyone can learn. Right-brained creative types are as good as anyone else at learning languages; this is just like Spanish only easier. And if you are like some of us who occasionally get our self-worth confused with our bank balance, there is help for that. Either way, business numbers are easy to learn. The mystique is undeserved.
Christy Strauch (photo left)
Many right brained creative people have wonderful business ideas, but they often find the world of business outside their type of thinking. How can right brained, creative people excel in business?
Christy Strauch: There is a groundswell of change in thinking about right-brained creative people and business. As Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind says, “The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate.”
To succeed in your own business, bring your right-brained creativity to you work, and learn how to understand what your business numbers are telling you. That is a solid formula for success.
How can a person discover their unknown strengths and weaknesses and leverage them in the right combination to create and take advantage of new opportunities?
Christy Strauch: Pay attention to what kind of work attracts you. The work that you’re attracted to is calling you to utilize these unknown strengths (and weaknesses). The process of figuring out how to do the work you’re drawn to will tell you what you’re good at and what strengths you have that you might not even be aware of.
I am a great example of this, as are most of my coaching clients. I took my own struggles with money and debt and turned them into a coaching business helping other small business owners conquer their own money issues. One of my clients who was the life of the party in her twenties; who went to, and also organized the best and most outrageous parties, is now a meeting planner. She applies her life-of-the-party skills to create memorable meetings for corporations and non-profits.
Look at all the things you do well, and pay attention to the kind of work that attracts you. That will tell you where your skills lie.
Truthfully, though, I’ve figured out a lot of this only in hindsight. I went for the work I loved, and understood only in retrospect how all my skills and experiences made me uniquely suited for this work
A term you use a lot in the book is clarity. What is clarity, and why is it important?
Christy Strauch: This comes from my own experience of having a business where I had no clarity.
There is so much competition now, that to succeed, you have to be clear. You have to know what you stand for, who you help, why they like you, how to talk to them, how much money you make and need to make, how much your expenses are. It used to be enough to open your doors in a decent location, or start up your business and say “I’m the best” or “I’m the cheapest” That doesn’t work anymore. So to compete, you have to know who you are. You have to be clear.
Business plans are an essential part of planning out all aspects of the business. Why do business plans scare people and how can this fear be turned into a positive force?
Christy Strauch: Business owners talk themselves out of doing this scary thing, a business plan, using these excuses (as I did many times myself). “It’s not necessary. I have the plan in my head. I don’t have time to plan (!). Plans are for bigger businesses. I don’t know how to do one. It’ll just sit on my shelf and gather dust.” None of these excuses hold water.
Fear can be a flashing neon sign telling us that this scary thing we don’t want to do might actually be the thing we most need to do next. If you’re afraid of doing a business plan, take that as a sign that you need to do one. Round up another business owner or two who are also scared, and do it together.
Eleanor Roosevelt said “Do one thing every day that scares you.” She was right.
You describe a business as having a language that speaks to a person. What is that language and how can we hear what it is saying?
Businesses speak a language I have named “Number.”
The language of Number isn’t tough to learn. As I talked about in previous questions, learning how to speak Number requires only basic math skills.
Once you get over the idea that you have to have a PhD. in math to comprehend your business numbers, you can begin to understand what your business is telling you.
With a little work (or a simple accounting program), you can figure out who you best customers are (or at least you can see who spends the most money with you). Your business will tell you whether you’re making enough money to support yourself; how much it costs to pay the light bill each month, how much profit you make on every product you sell, how many of each product or service you sell monthly. It can tell you if things are going well, or badly, whether your sales run in cycles, and many other very interesting facts. You can even see how your business stacks up against other ones doing the same work.
To hear what your business is saying to you, you can sit down with your bookkeeper or accountant and talk to them; you can take a class at a local community college, or, my favorite option: buy my book!
Right brained people are naturally creative. That ability should make them naturals for marketing and promotion. How can the creative person tap into this skill and turn marketing and promotions into a dream come true?
Christy Strauch: The best way to turn your creative skills into successful marketing is to look closely at what you enjoy doing and pay attention to that.
If you are an eloquent writer, you will enjoy having a blog, publishing a newsletter, writing articles or posting on Twitter. People who are more visual might enjoy creating videos to post on You Tube. If you like to teach or give speeches, audio podcasting might work well for you as a marketing tool. If you enjoy being connected to a lot of people, Facebook or MySpace are great sites for that.
My new mantra for marketing is this: the marketing you enjoy is the marketing that gets done regularly is the marketing that works. So, look first at what you truly enjoy doing, and build your marketing around that.
How can a business person be accountable to themselves to ensure that every part of the business is looked after?
Christy Strauch: Ask your customers to help you. Send out surveys and see what they say about how you’re doing Take them to lunch or coffee.
Set up these talks with your customers regularly. Put them on your calendar. You can also use survey tools such as www.surveymonkey.com or www.zoomerang.com, which, for small surveys, are free. You can even make your surveys anonymous.
You can also talk to your employees, if you have them, although sometimes employees want to spare you the bad news. Customers will usually tell you the truth.
If you incorporate regular visits with your customers, listen to what they tell you, and make the changes they suggest (unless you absolutely can’t), this will keep you accountable and focused on all parts of your business in a way that a time management plan can’t even touch.
If a creative person wants to start a business, what is the first step that individual should take?
Christy Strauch: You have to ask yourself two questions. First: Are you willing to make the commitment (remember the dating vs. marriage example)?
Second: do the numbers make sense?
This question is a little harder to answer, so I’ll give you an example. A client of mine who wanted to start a cleaning business had to gross $100,000 per year in the business. She planned to charge $50.00 per hour.
So we did the math. In order to make $100,000, she would have had to clean 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year.
Since this isn’t humanly possible, before she launched this business she had to make sure she could get other people to work for her so she could bill the number of hours to hit her goal.
Obviously she faced other challenges such as marketing her business appropriately so people would hire her, but before she did any of the other work, she had to solve the problem that to make the money she needed to make, she had to hire other people, raise her prices, or start a different business.
What is next for Christy Strauch?
Christy Strauch: I am writing a second book, called The I Hate to Market Book.
I noticed that many of my coaching clients are introverts, in that they get energy from being alone as opposed to extroverts who get energy from being with people. Many of them thought that the only way they could market their businesses was to do things like attend large networking events or cold calling. Not only are these activities difficult for introverts, they also don’t take advantage of their natural skill in building deeper relationships with fewer numbers of people, plus other skills like long focus and reflection.
I also noticed that most small business owners don’t market regularly. I put these two observations together and decided that if I could help people understand their own personalities, then present them with thirty-plus ways to do their marketing; that they could choose marketing that they actually liked. Remember the marketing you like, is the marketing that gets done regularly, is the marketing that works.
I have been posting excerpts of the book on my website, and hope to have the entire book in print by the end of 2010.
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My book review of Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Turn Your Passion into a Solid Business by Christy Strauch.
My Blog Business Success Radio interview with Christy Strauch.
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