In this episode, let's talk about the three things you

need to do to avoid the artist boom and bust cycle in your

business. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money

mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast!.

As someone who has benefited from a gratitude practice many

times in my life, I can tell you from lots of experience working

with clients that sometimes you it actually you

up. Going into your business and operating it from

a position of I'm so grateful that I have work

can be one of the worst things that happens to you,

because when you become so enamored with the fact

that you have work, you set yourself up for what I

call the artist boom and bust cycle. Now, this is

a business model that will burn you out, prevent

you from ever saving for retirement, keep you

constantly stressed and freaked out that you're going to go

broke. And it's something that happens to a lot of people.

So I want you to picture an artist. And they've spent the

last three months creating a whole bunch of paintings. They're

beautiful, spend a lot of time, they do a lot of detail. Their

work is phenomenal. But in the last three months, they haven't been

selling anything. So as you can imagine, they're a

human that live in a human meat suit, that

needs shelter and water and food

and occasionally to go out and have fun with friends and might

make the occasional impulsive purchase because they probably have

adhd as well. Now, unless they are independently

wealthy, all that costs money. And if they're not bringing money

in, it means it's eating away at their savings.

So the artist now has a lot of inventory, but they don't have a lot

of money. So they go to market. They perhaps do a partnership with a

gallery, and they start selling their pieces now because they're focused on

selling. They have money coming in. It's really cool. They start being so grateful

that people are interested in their work, and they get so

invested in selling their pieces that what are they not doing?

They're not producing more art.

So they're so grateful. They're ecstatic that people

are coming into the gallery, they're viewing their work, they're putting bids

in pieces, are going out the door, money is coming into their bank

account, but what happens? At a certain point, they run

out of inventory, and so they have a full bank account,

but they have nothing more to sell. So all that

gratitude, all that excitement about, oh, my God, people actually want to buy what I

make kind of fucked them up. Because they got so invested in it that

they stopped creating art. So what do they have to do now?

They have to go back into their studio. They have to start cranking out

art like crazy. All the while they're living off the savings

that they just made, and that money starts

dwindling. And then again, they have to take all the inventory that they've

created and they have to go and put it up in a gallery and start

selling it. And this cycle can continue

forever. And as

you can imagine, it doesn't create a sustainable life.

It's feast or famine. And if

you're creative, which, I mean, most of us with ADHD have some element

of creativity, even if we're not in the art space,

it's really hard to be creative. When you're

so stressed about surviving, when there's that

massive money stress hanging over your head that you might not be able to afford

rent next month, how are you supposed to come up with something creative

that people actually want to buy? It creates way too much pressure. There's an

author that people have either very strong opinions for or against.

Elizabeth Gilbert. She wrote eat, pray, love. One of her books that I

absolutely love is actually about her creative process. And the book is big

magic. And in this book, she actually talks about

how she waited tables until her third

bestseller because she never wanted to put the

pressure on her creative work to pay the

bills because she knew that nothing would be more stifling to

her creativity than having that pressure. Let's look at it

from a pretty basic point of view. When you really enjoy being creative

in your business, that's where you have the most juice, the most

energy. That's where you attract people like crazy. When

you're having fun, when you're invested, but when it

starts feeling like really tough work,

that's when things just become so much harder. That's when you

stop having fun. That's when you feel like you're having to

struggle for each new client, for each post

that you put on social media, it takes so much more work, so

much more energy, and it becomes exhausting. And

sure, if you want to run your business like that, you

absolutely can. But I think there's a better way.

So to be able to break out of the artist boom and bust cycle,

we need to look at three different areas of how you are

managing your business. And some of these are logistical. Here's what

you need to focus on in your day to day. And some of them are

energetic, some of them are the inner work that you have to do as an

individual to be able to run this business and have it be successful

in a sustainable, fun way.

The number one place that might seem like a backwards way to

start is you have to work on your money story. Your

relationship with money will either support your success

or completely you up. On the more mild

side of this, when you have a shitty relationship with money, you're not

charging enough, so you're underselling your services.

You're probably attracting clients who aren't your sole clients,

who maybe don't respect your time as much as people who would

be paying more would. And in the worst case scenario, you

are so drastically undercharging that you are living at the poverty level.

You're barely able to feed yourself and your family.

And when I start working with clients and we talk through what their pricing is

and how much they think they can get away with charging,

there are a few things that come up. Now. There's a huge

conversation around your belief in your personal worth

and what you deserve to make

and what your work is worth paying for.

And to this, I would argue, there's no price that can be put on

you. You cannot attach worth to yourself.

You are priceless. There's no one

like you. There's no one who does work the

way you do work. And quite frankly, your

clients, when they come to buy your service, to buy whatever it

is that you're providing, they don't give a fuck. They

genuinely do not care. What they care about is what your service

is going to provide them. On the other side, at the basic level, let's talk

about a service that people can actually pay for, right? It's

bug killing. If you have termites in your house, chances

are you've hired a company to come and terminate

the termites. Now it's important to do this

because termites can cause extensive damage to the

structure of your home. And if there's extensive damage to the structure of your

home, guess what? You're going to have to move out because it's not safe to

live in. And what happens when a house is not safe

to live in? The resale value plummets,

because whoever is going to move into that house next has

to either do extensive renovations and

reinforcing, or they have to just tear it down and

rebuild. Different value than moving into a house that is

fully functional and move in ready. You're going to

pay to have someone come and kill the bugs.

Now, the same service, I want you to think of like the kids

that will take a magnifying glass and burn ants on the sidewalk.

Not saying I agree with them. Essentially, they're doing the same thing,

but with different impact. The ants aren't harming anyone.

The ants are just going about their day. They're enjoying the sunshine all

of a sudden, like, wow, this spot is kind of warm. A little warmer than

it was over there. Wow, it's really, really hot. This is my

impersonation of an ant. I don't know if they're that articulate, but there

you go. Now, you wouldn't go down the street and ask little Johnny

if he was willing to come over and use a magnifying glass on your

termite. That's not going to be the scale. So when you think about your service,

I want you to think about what is the greater impact it has. Are you

the equivalent of seven year old Johnny who's kind of a dick with a magnifying

glass? Or are you actually protecting the

integrity of someone's house? Are you saving them money? Are you saving them

time? Are you saving them heartache? Maybe this house was built by their great great

grandfather. It's been the family for a really long time. And it

would be a failure on a massive level to their whole family

if they were the one to let it disintegrate. Now,

chances are, when you think about the terminator, the guy who's going to come around

and kill the termites, you're not looking at him and being like,

what's your inherent value as a person?

What's your hour worth? What do you

deserve? You're not asking the guy to sit down

and tell you about all the good deeds he does and what organizations he volunteers

for and how many kids he has and what his hobbies were growing

up and genuinely like. Is he a funny person? Is he a kind

person? Is he the kind of person that returns his shopping

cart at the grocery store? Because we know those people are worth more. No,

you're not asking that. You're asking how soon will the bugs be gone, and also

how much damage is already done. How much are you saving me

from? Your worth has nothing to do with

the price of your services. And I know it

feels like it does. I know it feels like you have to

justify every dollar you charge your clients. If it

feels that way, you have some serious money work to

do. Now, this is one of the things that I do in all of my

programs, to varying degrees. Because if you

don't feel comfortable charging a certain amount

for your work, then guess what? You're never going to be successful. There's

nothing. There's no tactics, there's no strategy that is going

to fix your business if you inherently don't believe

that you deserve to make enough money to live. Now, the other side of

this that can happen is when you think about

raising your rates, you start feeling an immense amount

of shame on behalf of your clientele.

Because if you have a lot of experience of not being able to afford the

things that you want and feeling a lot of shame around not

being able to afford it, then guess what? You're going to project onto your ideal

clients. You're going to project that awful, shameful bad

feeling that bubbles up in your stomach every time you look at a

price tag and think, oh, my God, I can't even afford this.

I don't have enough money. I don't have enough resources to be able to get

the thing that I really want. People think about this as if it's not a

big deal when we can't afford something. It's actually a moment that

can be incredibly traumatizing to the human spirit. Because when you're in a

position financially, when you can't afford the things that you want and you look

at a price tag and it's too much, and it makes you have to think

about how few resources you have, what it actually

activates for you is your survival mode. Because

money and our access to money is survival in the here and

now. If you don't have enough money for shelter, you don't have shelter. If

you don't have enough money for food, you don't have food. And if you're

a person who is living in the world, who wants things, which we all

do, and you're bumping against these things that you want, and you're thinking,

okay, well, I'd like to buy this, and you're seeing the price tag and it's

beyond what you can afford. You're constantly being

reminded that you barely have enough to live. You're

constantly being reminded that you can't live life the way you

want because you're not powerful enough to

have the resources to do what you want. That is crushing to the human

spirit. And also, it's not true for everyone. If you're

running a business and you are selling something

that you're spending time producing or

providing, you do not owe anyone affordability.

Just because you've had that experience of looking at a price tag and

feeling that shame, just that sinking, hot feeling in your stomach

of, oh, no, I can't have this, doesn't mean other people feel that.

People when they see that they can't afford something, for some of

them, it becomes a vision board item.

I can't tell you how many times I've gotten off a sales call with someone

and the call ended with them saying, oh, my God,

this is so inspiring. I know. I want to work with

you. I absolutely want to work with you one on one. It's outside of

my budget right now, but this is my goal now. The fact that

I can't work with you, that has lit a fire under my ass. I want

to work with you in the next six months, and I'm going to make it

happen. Just because you feel shame around not being able to

afford something and just because you have some trauma tied in

there doesn't mean that it happens for everyone else.

If you've done the work and you've done the proper market research, and you know

that there are buyers for what you do, there's always

going to be a price range. There's always going to be the most affordable and

also the most high end. The only thing that's keeping you

from being high end is your pricing and your attitude

towards it. And sure, it'll be so sad for someone if they really

want to work with you or they really want to buy your thing if they

can't afford to get it right now. But that's not your problem.

That is not your responsibility. Your

responsibility, first and foremost, is to fill your own damn

cup. And if you can't fill your own damn cup

first, why are you making your stuff so

affordable to everyone else? We have this

belief, especially in industries where we're helping other people, to

actually offer, like, a spirit level transformation to people, that

we also have to be poor. It happens in the creative industries as

well. To be a true creative, to be a true artist, you have to

starve. There's only honor in creating if you're also

starving. I think we get this poverty mindset

and this sense of it's honorable to be poor

when you're helping other people from religious

systems. If you were to look at the church throughout the middle

ages in Europe, one of the requirements to be part of the church is you

had to give up all of your earthly belongings if you wanted to be a

priest, if you wanted to be a nun, if you wanted to be a monk,

I'm sorry, you can't keep your family castle and all the

horses and the art collection and all the silver and gold

and be a priest at the same time. Or at least technically, you weren't

supposed to. People did it. But we've been taught this model that you have to

give up all of your earthly goods in order to do really good work.

I mean, sure, if you want to make that noble, you can. But let's also

look at the business of the church. It's a multi billion dollar

company, essentially, okay? You're not going to be a priest or a nun or

a monk in the catholic church, especially back then, and go starving.

I mean, unless you were on a fast or something, which is something people did

by choice. But it's not like the church is going to be like, oh, sorry,

we just don't have any money to feed you right now. No,

it's one of the reasons why people joined the church.

They believed in the whole God thing, too. But that's an aside. It's a

model. It's essentially a model to make sure that your needs are being met. And

there's nothing wrong with that. But you looking at that and saying,

okay, well, there's something noble about not having anything, about being broke,

being poor and helping people.

Unless you belong to a greater organization that's covering

your basic needs of your meat suit, it's not noble, it's just

stupid. At its heart, it's caring more about what other people

think of you than about taking care of yourself.

I know this sounds kind of pessimistic, but there's

no one out there who's spending as much time worrying about you taking care of

yourself than you. No one is going to make sure that you have food

on the table like you will. No one is going to make sure that you

have enough money for retirement. That's your job. If you choose to

prioritize other people thinking you're noble and thinking you're this good

person and all this stuff over having those things,

that is on you. And if there's deeper money work to

be done here, that is also on you. But the beautiful thing is

you just heard this bit of this podcast, I just called you out on some

bullshit and now you're aware of the problem, which means you can go fix the

problem. Congratulations. And I know there are many coaches

and consultants out there who genuinely want to help people who cannot

afford to work with them at their current rate. You might think that you're

being elitist by only working with people who can pay a higher amount.

At its core, you don't have a greedy problem, you don't

have an elitist problem. You have a business model problem.

Especially when I work with coaches and they want to be able to work with

people who can't afford like $1,000 a month or more

on coaching. One of the things that we prioritize, first and foremost is their one

on one business. Right. Your fastest path to cash is always going to be

one on one clients who are paying out of their own pocket to work with

you one on one. Once you have enough money coming in

monthly from one on one clients, that's when you can start

rolling out a group that is at a lower ticket, that's more

affordable to people who can't afford to work with you one on one. Now, the

reason we don't go there first is because if you're just starting out, you don't

have the audience for it yet. Okay? Unless you're independently

wealthy and you can manage to just kind of hang out and

promote your list and post to TikTok and post to

Instagram and to LinkedIn all the time and build that

audience, you need to be making money along the way.

But if you don't have enough followers, if you don't have enough people on your

email list, you're never going to be able to fill up a group. It's just

not going to happen. And I know some of you are probably thinking about that

business grew that you saw online. That's like, well, what about creating a digital course?

What about creating a PDF that I could sell on Instagram? Your

fastest path to cash is always going to be one on one

clients. Jumping to a digital course, jumping to a

PDF that you're going to sell, sounds sexy, but

the failure rate is extraordinary. There's no

proof of concept when you jump into that. One of the best things that you

can do to save time and money and frustration

is to start off by building your one on one client list. Take the

common lessons that you're working on with all of those clients. Turn

that into a group program. Now, you want to run this group

multiple times so you can test it, make sure there's actually a market

for it. Understand frontwards, backwards and inside and

out, what kinds of questions come up throughout the group.

If there's anything you need to add to the curriculum, if there's anything you need

to take away from it, and then, and only then, after you've done the one

on one work and the group work, can you turn it into a successful

course. And even then, you're going to have to change some things. You're going to

have to tweak it. You're going to have to fine tune it along the way.

You're going to have to also work on a different marketing plan because the marketing

for a digital course is very different than it is for one on one coaching.

The sales process is also different. There are a lot of things that you're going

to have to figure out, but I'd rather you make money along the

way than put all your eggs in a basket that is very

highly likely to disintegrate and fall apart. You can

absolutely offer affordable things in your business, but

do it after you're already paying the bills. Do it after you've

already created sustainable money coming in. So your money mindset

is one of the most important things that you need to work on if

you want to avoid that artist boom and bust cycle.

The second one is a priority shift. And I know for those of us with

ADHD, prioritizing things is one of the hardest

things that we have to figure out every single day. So I'm going to make

this so easy for you. Your mind is going

to say, oh my God, I'm so grateful for these clients. I'm going to prioritize

them above everything else. Your clients who are already signed

up with you, who are already paying you are absolutely important. Of

course you're going to prioritize them, but they do not hold the number

one spot. You know what does?

Visibility marketing. One of

the reasons why the artist is constantly going broke is because they run

out of inventory to sell. If you're a coach and you fill up

your practice with ten clients and you're working on those ten clients

and you kind of ignore your marketing, what happens when those clients start

finishing? If you haven't been marketing the whole time, you start

panicking. There's no pipeline. There's no list of people who are

waiting to work with you. So you're kind of starting from scratch in your

marketing and you're probably going to dip down into like four or

five clients before you start backfilling them, which means you're

going to dip below your cost of living and it's going to stop

being fun. It's going to start being scary. Your number

one priority every damn day is to be visible because

people can't hire you if they don't know that you exist. And

remember that you cannot have consistent cash flow

or a consistent business without consistent

marketing. One of the saddest parts about

recessions is that a lot of companies go out of business. And

I know you're probably thinking, well, duh, it's a recession. Of course they're going out

of business, not necessarily it's how they

react to the recession that actually puts them out of business. A lot of

companies, when hard economic times fall on us, which

happens fairly regularly because that's how the world works, they panic and they think, okay,

cool, where can we cut money? Where can we cut expenditure within our budget?

Oh, cool, marketing. We're going to cut marketing. It seems

like kind of a fluffy thing. I mean, of course they know that marketing works.

They wouldn't be spending money on it before if it didn't. But it's really hard

to say, okay, well, this ad campaign or this marketing

strategy is delivering x amount of dollars to us. There's

no clear delineation between the two. And so

executives in their panic mode will think, okay, anything that's not

delivering a clear return on investment gets cut.

Well, what happens? They cut the marketing and then the sales team starts

struggling because they don't have as many leads. They don't have as many people coming

in and buying their stuff. So then they have to start working harder and harder

and harder and then they start not making quota. And then because they're not

making quota, there's not as much cash coming into the business. The business starts having

to lay other people off. Maybe in the product side or

in the customer service side, the clients you have start getting unhappy

because the quality of the products have gone down. Maybe the support has

gone down. Getting through to someone to re up your plan

or whatever it is you're buying starts getting harder and before

you know it, you are flirting with bankruptcy.

Like I said before, gratitude can fuck you up. Yes, be

grateful for the people who are working with you, who've hired you, who are buying

your stuff, and also, they are not going to

quit. They are not going to ask for their money back. If you

prioritize visibility, it's the difference between the

mindset of a business owner and an employee. If you

are constantly prioritizing serving the client

as your number one and neglecting the greater needs of

your business, you are not operating like a business owner. You are

operating like an employee, which to your credit,

you've only been trained to be an employee up until now. If you've worked any

other job, that has been the training. Here's how you plug in and do the

thing. No strategist thinking, you don't have to plan the greater

path, but business owners have to do that. Your number

one priority is always going to be visibility and never

forget it. And of course, a close second is your paying clients.

Now, the third thing that will help you overcome the

artist boom and bust business model. Ooh, what am I going to say

next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel, squirrel.

Now, the third thing that will help you overcome the

artist's boom and bust business model, that ugly cycle that

will keep you constantly stressed out and freaking out about money, is

that you need to scale, fail, and bail

fast. And I know I made sure that that rhymed.

I was really excited about the scale and fail

because everyone knows about failing fast. And of course, scaling is important. But

then I went through my brain hole of all the other things that rhyme with

those things, and I figured out that bail fits in perfectly with this model.

I'm inappropriately proud of this. Okay. Anyway, so,

scaling fast, you need to set up your business

in a way that you will be able to step away from the day to

day running as fast as possible.

You are a human. You exist in this meat suit. Meat suits

are not consistent. Sometimes they get sick. Sometimes they get injured. Sometimes

they get burnt out and tired and need a rest. Sometimes

beings in other meat suits have demands on you, like

children and spouses and family members. They need you

to show up for shit. And that means you can't necessarily be in your business

that day. So as soon as humanly possible, as

you're growing this business, set it up so you're not the one

who has to do every damn thing every single day. If you do

that, you are literally setting your business up for failure because your business

is solely dependent on your

meat suit needing to show up and do the things every damn day. And that's

just for people who don't have executive dysfunction. If you

have adhd, like we talk about here a lot, your executive

dysfunction can absolutely get in the way of you doing things every

single day. Even if you're not sick, even if your kids aren't

home with the flu or need you to come and pick them up from basketball

practice. We all know that feeling of sitting at our

desk with our eyes completely disassociated,

thinking, I know what I need to do. Why can't I do it? Damn it,

I'm going to fail. And just running

ourselves ragged and exhausting ourselves by not even doing the thing.

Set your business up so that can happen in the background so that other people

can do that when you can't. You need to scale as fast

as possible. Now, along with that, you're going to fail.

One of the biggest red flags that I see with

people who book a sales call with me, who talk about joining my programs or

signing up to work with me one on one, is this immense

fear that they have around failure. They're so terrified to fail. Those are

the clients that I've started turning away. Because if you're so afraid to

fail, you're never going to try anything. And if you never try anything, you're never

going to succeed. Failure is the only thing that is guaranteed

when you start a business. I failed a gazillion times. I fail every

single day in a million different ways, and

I have the choice of saying, oh, wow, I failed.

Oh, well, I better just quit now, because failure sucks, and I don't

want to do this anymore. If I'm going to fail, it's absolutely a choice I

can make, or I could stick with my mindset and say, cool. That's one way

not to do know kind of like how Edison, what did he do? He invented

the light bulb, which, I mean, I have light bulbs all around me. I'm very

grateful for this man, for inventing light bulbs. They make a lot possible for me

and for you. But to get there, he failed a

gazillion times, and his whole mindset was, I didn't fail. I found

a thousand different ways to not make a working light bulb. You

are on this massive adventure to find a gazillion different

ways to not be successful. It is a wild ride, and

it's one that you can either make fun, make part of the process,

or you can have it be a big, scary forest that you don't want to

step foot in. Totally up to you. But I can tell you what you'll be

doing a year from now if you're not willing to fail and it's working for

someone else. And, of course, bailing. No one wants to

bail on a project. No one wants to bail on a business. No one wants

to bail on an idea that you were convinced was going to work.

But sometimes you have to. Sometimes we have to look

at the definition of insanity, which is trying the same thing over and over

and over again, expecting different results, especially in business.

If you're trying to create a service and you have tried all the different ways

to make work, and it's just not working, it's probably a sign that you need

to bail. Now, of course, a lot of people bail too soon. This is

one of the benefits of having a coach in your corner who can help you

poke holes in all the stories you're telling yourself about why it's

failing, who can help you really look at the data and see? Is there

something wrong with your marketing? Is there something wrong with your sales process? Is there

something wrong with the value proposition of what you're putting

together? But one of the best qualities you

can have as a business owner is knowing when to walk away,

knowing when to quit. When I was in

college, I lived in a basement apartment in this house, and the

family that lived upstairs was so nice. And the mom was from Indonesia, and

she was really into feng shui. And she'd always lend me books on feng shui.

And she would tell me, like, if you want a boyfriend, you're going to have

to clear out half of your closet, because in feng shui, if you want

someone to come into your life, you need to have space for them in your

life. Now, I had a lot of clothes that wasn't going to happen. I wasn't

leaving half of my closet empty. But I want you to think about feng

shui in your life, okay? If your life is full of

something that's just not working, is there going to be room for

a more profitable opportunity to come in? Probably

not. If you are working and grinding 60

hours a week on a business that isn't working, no one else can

really understand that it's not working to that degree. So there may be

people out there who are like, oh, my God, I would love to partner with

this person, but they're too busy. They would never be able to be

available for money making

opportunities. You need to have space for those opportunities to come

in. And sometimes that means you have to quit stuff that doesn't

work. And I know

as someone with ADHD who starts a lot of things

and doesn't finish them and then holds a lot of

guilt and shame around all the things that are left half done,

like the 27 knitting projects that I'm still in the middle of that I probably

will never finish, but I will continue to pack up every time

I move and take it to my new place and then unpack them

and put them in just the right spot in my apartment so that when I

do feel like finishing them, because I am still convinced, even though I know

better, that there's going to be, like, this magic moment where the motivation just kind

of pops up and I'm like, yes, that scarf that I

gave up on seven years ago, now is the time

I'm going to finish this. I know we can have a little bit of shame

around quitting things, because in our minds, we have this

story that we're not finishers, and we get so latched on to

this idea. Like, I got to finish this. I got to see it through. Because

we don't want that story to be true. I know it can feel really icky

for us to quit shit. Because every time we quit something,

that voice just gets stronger and stronger. There's more evidence that we can't

see things through, that we're not finishers. But that's the beauty of having

ADHD, is our minds move so quickly. And

sure, sometimes it means that you start a sweater and then you buy all the

equipment for it and you don't finish it. And sure,

that's unfortunate, but it's not the end of the world. Now, it

might put you in the position where you own more yarn than your car is

worth, kind of like where I am. But it doesn't diminish you as a

person. It doesn't diminish your worth, doesn't diminish how

much you deserve, and it's not proof that a business

isn't going to be ultimately successful for you. So remember, scale

fail and bail as fast as you can. Squirrel. Squirrel. If you're ready to

stop being a weenie and actually run a business that makes money, then go

ahead and book a generate income strategy call with me by going

to

weeniecast.com/strategycall.

On this call, we will talk about your goals, your dreams,

and your frustrations in getting there. And if it's a fit

for both of us, then we can talk about different ways to work together.

My hair is so staticy when I was a kid, so I have, like, fine

hair, but I have a lot of it. And when I was a kid in

our minivan, I used to walk in. All of a sudden, my hair would just

be static, like, sticking into the roof. And I'd start screaming bloody murder

and crying. Like, my hair is electrocuted and, like, freaking out.

And my mom had to keep a squirt bottle in the the

car, and she just turned around, like, squirt my head,

and I feel like crying. My

hair is electrocuted. Anyway.