 Well hello, do you dream of becoming a successful artist, maybe giving up that day job and spending all your time in your beautiful, dreamy, light, bright, amazing artists creative space? Well in today's video I'm going to share precisely how a section of that video is exactly why you're never going to make a full time living as an artist and luckily I'm also going to share exactly what you want to do about that. Welcome or welcome back to my channel, my name is Sophie and I help artists just like you to set up market and grow a highly successful business doing what you love and if you'd like more tips and tricks on how to build that successful business then you're in the right place. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and hit that bell to get notified every time I post a new video. Well hello, yes let's talk about what they don't tell you about becoming successful as an artist. How many of you have that day dream of just creating, making all day long and then sitting back, checking in with the bank account and going oh look at all that lovely money that's rolling in? Wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately no matter where you are on your art journey right now you're never going to make it unless you address the business side of things as well and that's really where exactly you want to start. So check out this video here where I talk about how to create a business plan and I also give you a free checklist. Who doesn't love a free checklist? This is a business plan checklist. Check that video out. The description below the video will give you a link to where you can grab that checklist and I'll also put it below this video as well. That makes sense doesn't it right? That makes sense. In that plan you're going to be making a few decisions on the following things. How much money do you want to turn over? What products and services are you going to be creating? What's their price point? Low? High? How's that going to work out? And then of course working out how many you're going to need to sell in order to hit that target and then having a clear strategy in place as to how you're exactly going to be doing that. And this is going to take time and that's okay. That's really part of building the dream, building a business and creating that successful lifestyle as an artist. So the actual daily life of an artist is unlikely and rarely eight hours of doing whatever that is for you, whether that's creating, making, designing, delivering. It's unlikely. There's a few exceptions out there. There's exceptions to every role of course. But for majority of artists it's unlikely to be the eight hours of doing the lovely bit that you really enjoy. The reality is you need to find a balance between your creativity and running a business. Now how you go about doing that of course is going to differ for everybody watching this video. Let me know in the comments below how much time you invest in an average week on the business side of things. Is it not two hours a week? Two to five hours, five to ten hours, ten hours plus. I'd love to hear where you are on that journey, how much time you invest and whether you've created that perfect balance between the two yet or whether that's something that you're working on right now. So here's a few ways that you can structure your week so you can get the very best out of it. Number one, get up super early and use the first two or three hours of your day. So for example, rise at five, five to seven or five to eight before anyone else has got up. It's a really powerful time to get that creative stuff done. And then what you can do is use the rest of the day or a good section of the day to run the business stuff. Number two, maybe you're the night owl. So stay up in the evenings or at night and do the creative stuff when everyone's gone to bed. Or maybe you just like that peace and quiet in the evening. I know that a lot of people like to work late at night. I'm definitely not one of them. But if that works for you, then do that and use a chunk of the day to run the business stuff. The third way that you can do this is split your week into mornings and afternoons. So that all the mornings you perhaps do the creative stuff and all the afternoons you do the business stuff or the other way around. So if you're someone that likes to work atypical nine to five, eight to six, eight to four, a daytime routine, then doing something like this could really work well for you. So you either take the mornings you might say, well, I want to get up and do the creative stuff first. So then you do the mornings that you're being creative or you're delivering your creativity and then the afternoon you switch into the business stuff or vice versa. But either which way you've got a routine going and there's a balance that starts to form with that. And the fourth and last way of course is to divide the week. Now this is personally how I got into running a business at the very beginning when I left my job. I went part-time and I had two and a half days in the week where I worked in my job and two and a half days in the week where I began starting with my art business. But you could do the same. So you could use two and a half days to do creative things and two and a half days to do the business things. This works really well if you're more of a service-based business. So for example, you're teaching, you run workshops, you work one-on-ones people then you know you can do that in a couple of days a week and you can run the business side of things on the other days of the week. So of course there are mainly many many ways that you can divide the week up but I've tried all of these ones so I know how they feel. I'm no longer the 5am club but I do really like getting up and being around when nobody else is around and getting the most important thing done which is of course the creativity. So for me doing something like that works really really well and as I say I know a lot of people like to work in the evening so you need to find the right rhythm for you. But whatever you do you need to create a balance between doing the business, running the business and creating the work. No balance, no business. Now normally I say no business plan, no business. So there's another one, no business plan, no business. No balance, no business. No balance, no business plan, no business. Am I making some sort of sense somehow? I feel like there's a bit of an acronym coming along or a rhyme or something like that. So anyway, if you'd like to get started today check out below this video, I'll link to the most useful videos that you can watch next which likely if you've not done already would be around business planning and then don't forget we've also got lots of freebies, we've got that checklist, you can get going with that, see what you need to put in your business plan and then I do have a paid for course, build your artist business plan, very affordable, walks you through everything that you need to do, gives you a fantastic template, take the template, listen to the lessons, fill it out. Easy, business plan done. And not only that, we also have the Art Business Academy monthly membership specifically for female artists looking to create a living from their art. So joining that membership means that you get ongoing support, whether that's from the group coaching, the live Q&As or of course a large backlog of art business how-to videos in lots of different areas of your business. I think we have something like nine core topics and videos sitting within that. And then of course there's also PDF, cheat sheets, templates, planners, all the sort of things that you need to support you along with growth, not to mention the Art Business Success Path which is our step-by-step path that you follow to go from zero to dream art business. So if that's something that you would like to do and you're watching this video because you realise you need to create that balance and you want some accountability while you're doing it, then the Art Business Academy could be for you. At point of shooting it's just 32 Australian dollars per month, that's about 18 British pounds and I can't quite remember what that equates to in US dollars but you can work it out. It's a very small fee for a really large amount of support. So if you're interested in that, don't forget to check the links below this video to find out more. Thank you so much for watching this one and I'll see you on the next video.