My 2022: A Year of Growing Up As A Creative Business Owner
2022 did not turn out as I intended. I had hopes, visions, ideas and plans for this year, but the year had its own mind and I stand here at the end looking back, smiling. There was so much I didn’t know, and I didn’t know that I didn’t know them. They were still whispers, threads that would pull me in directions I didn’t expect.
This year might not have turned out as I hoped. But I see now that it gave me what I needed to grow and mature, not what I thought I wanted. And it turned out so good in the end.
Longing to simplify and strengthen
I entered 2022 with a deep longing for calm and stability in my creative life. I had just finished a year of quitting my job and taking my creative business full-time. I was tired of big change and the heightened emotional state that comes with it. I wanted to simplify. I craved a year of steadily growing and strengthening the foundation I had built in my business. So I made my word of the year nurture.
It started out quite well. I spent time at the start of the year looking at the fundamental puzzle pieces of my creative work and business, identified what could be strengthened and how. I pondered what it might look like for me to simplify things. I tried to grasp an elusive shift and change I felt in my work, being drawn to going deeper into creativity and moving away from the lifestyle side of my brand. I made a lot of different vision boards and visualisations to try to figure things out for myself.
But there was tension within this longing to make my business steady and stable. I had started my business in 2020 out of a creative hobby, being a blogger driven by my own passion, joy, creativity and inspiration. This is how I had run things in 2021 - a lot of my marketing and work revolved around my project of taking my business leap and my own inspiration for that project.
One part of me wanted a creative business that didn’t rely as heavily on my inspiration. I wanted more predictability and better processes. But another part of me was still holding onto my past way of doing things, the passion driven, messily creative way. I wrote in my journal: I need to mourn that “winging it” didn’t work for me.
So I was in this in-between state, halfway letting go and halfway clinging on. I wrote a blog post about how my vision was changing and heading away from talking about slow living as a concept. And it was in this limbo state that I entered spring.
My existential creative business crisis
At the end of 2021, I started my group coaching community Companions In Creativity. That first launch went well, and in spring I needed to keep growing and marketing it alongside my 1-1 coaching. I didn’t anticipate this being tricky. I’d been doing creative coaching for a while and thought clients would keep booking somewhat consistently. I thought a membership model would be quite easy to market evergreen month to month, that people would join a pretty steady trickle. These assumptions turned out to be wrong.
Winter had been quiet, and wanting to strengthen and nurture my business, I tried to be more intentional in my marketing in spring. I created and launched a course, The Creatives Compass, which was part of Companions In Creativity. This worked pretty well and led to a group of people joining. But my 1-1 clients had dried up, and for the first time since going full-time with my business, my quarterly income dipped.
As spring went on, I tried to balance marketing both Companions In Creativity and my 1-1 creative coaching. I flipped back and forth between them, and ended up feeling like I was constantly marketing in a half-hearted way that didn’t quite work. Things picked up a little, but not as much as I wanted. I worried more and more about the business, money and the future.
Meanwhile, the elusive shifts in my vision and brand that I had tried to grasp in winter were showing up big. I felt lost in my content, I lacked inspiration, things felt off and I wavered back and forth.
Worried, stressed and lost, I crashed into summer. The end of spring was my lowest point yet as a business owner and I knew something had to change.
I wrote a blog post about hitting the messy middle, and I decided to spend the summer untangling the mess of my business and my shifting why, brand and content.
The rebirth
In the midst of my crisis, I laid a tarot spread. It’s not something I’m accustomed to doing, but I was trying to tap into my intuition and inner compass. So I sat down and did it. The cards I drew were okay, but nothing spectacular. Until I came to the final card, the one to represent my future. A skeleton stared back at me. It was Death. A chill went down my spine.
In tarot, death doesn’t symbolise literal death. The death card is about endings and beginnings, birth and rebirth, change and transformation. And it couldn’t have been more spot on.
Coming into spring, I had been in that limbo state halfway between wanting a strong, simple and stable business, and still holding onto my old ways of winging it and relying heavily on my own inspiration. Coming out of spring, I was fully ready to let go of the past and strengthen my creative business from the inside out.
I did a lot things this summer.
I made a presentation for my fiancé with all the numbers, strategies and results from my business thus far, and strategies and projections going forward. No more hiding and wishful thinking, but hard numbers. This made me realise things about my business that I hadn’t before, like the fact that I hadn’t sold a single spot in Companions In Creativity outside of marketing campaigns. And that small marketing pushes doesn’t work very well while still taking up time and energy, so it’s better for me to focus on fewer but bigger ones.
I dug deep into my why and purpose of my business and finally grasped the shift that had been eluding me. After being led by a slow and creative life as my why for a big part of my blogging years, my why is now about building creative lives that are good on the inside.
I read a phenomenal book called How To Love Your Business by Nicole Lewis-Keeber, which helped me confirm that while creativity, joy, authenticity, fulfilment and freedom were business values of mine, so were financial stability and simplicity. It also helped me see how I had internalised the ups and downs of the business, and that I needed a better, healthier relationship with it.
From all this clarity, I picked back up the work I had started in winter of strengthening and simplifying my creative business. I remade my whole website with updated branding and design aligned with both my business goals and my uncovered why. I created the free workbook The Project Journal to support email signups and help creatives in my best way.
I rethought my whole content ecosystem. I considered how I used each medium - email letters, blog, Youtube, Instagram - and how I could use them more efficiently and more in alignment with my refreshed purpose. I took a new approach to my email letters. I decided to move away from regular Youtube videos and start my podcast Inside Creativity instead, which was a big step to simplifying my creative work.
And finally, I applied for a part-time job as a content writer for a young tech company. When I had looked at my metrics and made projections, I had seen what was realistic and how long it would take to grow my business the way I wanted to. After a winter of craving more calm and stability and a spring of stress and worry, I realised that I wasn’t willing to keep going like this for years. The instability and worry about money wasn’t good on the inside for me. After setting a deadline to look for jobs at the end of the year if things didn’t pick up significantly, the idea of a part-time job became more and more attractive. Then I stumbled over the perfect job, applied and got it.
And so I entered a new phase in my creative journey.
Growing up as a business owner
At the start of autumn, I shifted my balance to running my creative business half of the week and working in a marketing team as a copywriter and content writer the other half. At the same time, I was rolling out my new strategy - launching my new website, starting my podcast, refining my content focus. I created and launched my new 1-1 coaching package The Dream Project and at the end of autumn, I closed the doors for new members of Companions In Creativity. This was a decision I made after analysing my numbers - I wanted two big marketing campaigns per year and little in-between, and a model of opening the doors twice a year suited that very well. So I did my first proper marketing campaign since starting Companions In Creativity, and I’m happy to say it worked so well that I exceeded my goals. And though I’ve worked less hours, I’m closing out the year with my best quarter yet, income wise.
This autumn has felt incredibly focused, clear and aligned. Yes, it has been a bit intense, because there was a lot to get done. But I have enjoyed it. Spring and autumn were like night and day, and I credit my crisis, following summer untangling and new writing job for that change.
Working within a marketing team has crosspollinated with my business. In my job, I can use everything I’ve learned from my creative work, and in return, my job has given me helpful systems and mindsets. It inspired me to start scheduling my Instagram posts, and I love it. Mostly, it has given me a healthy distance to my business and business results, embracing a more practical and less emotional, obsessive way of working. It has given me the calm I’ve been looking for, and I’m building that better relationship with my business that I started exploring in summer.
I truly feel like I’m growing up as a business owner. With that, I don’t mean that the changes I’m making are ones everyone running a business should make. This is MY way of growing up. I’ve been on a path to step more and more into my role as a business owner ever since I started it. And I’m sure I have some more growing up to do. But this year feels like the year I made a big and important shift. I’ve stopped resisting certain parts of being a business owner, I’ve embraced it, and I’ve come to enjoy those parts too.
Cultivating a life of writing
Alongside my business intentions for 2022, I set a goal to cultivate a life of writing. When I set it, I thought about wanting to get going on a new draft of my novel. I thought about writing for magazines and maybe adding an income stream from freelance writing. Most of all, I had recognised how important writing is for me and I wanted to make sure writing was a core part alongside my creative coaching work.
I began planning the changes I wanted to make in my novel in spring. I looked at my scenes, reorganised things, decided which scenes I needed to rewrite, lightly edit or swap completely for new scenes. In summer, I began editing. It has been a slow process with an hour here and there, but now I have about 15000 words edited and I feel like I’ve found my feet with this draft. I’m happy with that.
What I didn’t expect at the start of the year was that I would end it with a writing job. A real job with writer in the title. I’m still pretty baffled and over the moon about that. Tell that to Elin of 2016, who was so scared of calling herself a writer on Instagram. I didn’t know this was an option for me, and I can wholeheartedly say that it’s the best job I’ve ever had. It’s creative, it’s fun and it’s the perfect complement to running my own business.
A year of nurturing
I wanted a calm year. One of quietly plodding along, growing slowly and steadily, not making any big life changes. That’s not the year I got.
The word of the year I chose was nurture. I imagined it to be like gardening - pulling weeds, fertilising and planting some new flowers. What I’ve done this year has most certainly been about nurturing my business and myself as its owner. It’s just that the changes my garden needed were more radical than I had thought. Rather than weeding and sowing, it has been more like uprooting and replanting bushes that were at the wrong end of the garden, handling draughts and storms, adding a new watering system and building a deck in one corner.
Ending out the year, I feel much, much clearer about what I want my business to be, how I actually like to run it, what it needs from me and what I need as a business owner. Despite my best intentions, it has been another pivotal year in my creative journey. Will the next one be calmer? I think so. But I’ve learned to be open to whatever it has in store for me.
If you are looking to reflect on your 2022, check out my planning guide Four Seasons of Creative Work. It begins with end of the year reflections and it’s what I’ve used in my own review of 2022.
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