I have never been a numbers-and-words person. I don’t read books, unless they are adorned with pretty pictures and graphics. So whenever I hear the word “business plan”, I cringed. All I could imagine was drowning myself in endless words and counting numbers….
Not having business plan is not a bad thing, especially when you’re someone like me who can’t stick to the rules and like to make changes every now and then. However, I need to know where my focus should go first. So I knew it was time for me to start having a plan. But I honestly didn’t know where I should start.
When I saw the Right Brain Business Plan workshop ads on Canberra Creative’s facebook page, I knew it was not going to be the same old boring business workshop.
Right Brain Business Plan is a book by Jennifer Lee. The book is focusing on helping people with a stronger right brain (a.k.a the creatives) to start their business plan. “How is it different from creating a business plan for left-brain person?” you ask me. Well, it’s not different. But if you’re a left brainer, you have no idea how excruciatingly painful it is for us right-brainers to read books with so many words and numbers about how to create a plan that’s also going to have lots of words and numbers. So, this book intends to help us create our business plan without wanting to kill ourselves.
There were about 8 other creative ladies in my workshop class, and it was really interesting and uplifting to hear about the ideas behind their businesses. Each of us gets to share our businesses goals, action steps, plans, and have others giving us inputs and advises. It was amazing to know that there are so many different creative businesses out there. Some of us might have similar vision. For example, there are two people in my group who wants to have a stationery business (I am one of them, of course). But when we had to create our business vision collage, turns out we have totally different visions.
All these times I’ve talked about how much I’ve always wanted to have my own stationery business. After writing down my visions and goals, I realised that having a stationery business might be my long-term goal. Stationery business needs a huge set-up cost. I’ve always been stuck with printing. Maybe I’m the kind of person who’s afraid to take risk when it comes to money. But I just can’t see myself spending thousands of dollars on printing, and end up having lots of unsold products.
Graphic design services, on the other hand, has a low set up cost, with higher profit. Because what I’ll be selling here is my service and skills, not products. Also, graphic design services does not have to be all logos and layouts. Custom party and wedding stationeries are very fun to design!
So I’ve decided that I’m going to focus on my career as a graphic designer first. When it’s getting more stable, then I will start creating more stationery. That doesn’t mean I’m going to completely stop creating stationery for now, but it just means that my career focus has changed.
This is what I love about going to business workshops. I went home feeling focused, inspired and excited to plan what I should do next!
If you’re interested in going for a right brain business workshop, Jennifer Lee has facilitators all over USA and many other countries. So find out if there’s one near you here!
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