The Weekly Glow Up: May 17, 2023

May 17

Welcome back to the Weekly Glow Up, where I share tips and resources that you should know about as a creative who wants to make money from their art.

Here’s what I’ve got this week:

1. 🤑 Money Talk: How Should You Factor TIME Into Your Pricing?

I’m not a huge fan of charging hourly, as I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters.

When you charge hourly, you end up punishing yourself when you inevitably get better, faster, or more efficient at your job.

So where does time fit into your pricing strategy?

I find it best to look at the big picture and start with your income & business goals, then work backwards—rather than starting with individual products and hoping it all adds up.

Ask yourself a few questions:

How much money do you NEED to make in a year just to keep your business afloat and break even on the costs of running it (add in personal costs in a year too if your biz is your full-time job)?
How much additional money do you want to make in a year as your profit?
How many hours do you want to work on your biz in a year?
What percentage of that time do you want to spend on actual revenue-generating tasks (like your actual client services, or creating a product) vs. marketing and “business stuff”?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can calculate your “effective hourly rate.”

If you take the profit you make off of one sale of one of your products or services and divide it by the number of hours it takes you to create that product or service, it should match or be higher than that hourly rate if you want to hit your income goals.

There’s a bit more nuance to all of this, like how to handle passive/digital products and when it’s okay to pursue something that doesn’t hit your effective hourly rate…

That’s why I’m doing a whole workshop around pricing next week 🤓

In this month’s Artist Happy Hour, we’ll be walking through an exercise that is the basis for my new "Roadmap to Profit" pricing toolkit.

You’ll learn how to price your products and services to make sure they make a profit and hit your business income goals.

Save your spot for the live virtual happy hour on 5/25 7pm ET on zoom!

2. 🤑 More Money Talk: Guide to Pricing for Creative Businesses

I’m on a real pricing kick this month.

Besides the Artist Happy Hour on pricing next week and my new pricing toolkit, I also put together a post to serve as a beginner's guide to pricing for creative business owners.

If you’re just starting your biz and have no idea where to start with pricing…

Or you’ve been running your biz for a little while but aren’t seeing the profit margins you want…

Give this a read and see how you can implement a better pricing strategy to hit your goals.

3. 🍵 Client Tea: Leverage What You’re ALREADY Doing to Work Smarter, Not Harder

One of the most satisfying strategies for maximizing your time as a creative business owner is to take something you’re ALREADY doing, and use it for more than one purpose.

Here’s an example:

I had a coaching call with a letterer a little while ago who offered a Patreon subscription.

Monthly subscribers would get a hand lettered wallpaper for their phone or computer.

Every month, she’d send a prompt out to her subscribers asking for a phrase within a certain theme (i.e. the best “anti-valentine”). She’d pick her favorite, and use it for the wallpaper.

(Which is also a brilliant idea btw—getting your audience to generate ideas for you, giving you built-in confidence that your artwork/product/service will resonate with them 💪)

She also was interested in starting to sell some products wholesale in local shops, like greeting cards and prints.

One way she could make this a little easier would be to combine the effort she puts into monthly Patreon giveaways and design for her wholesale products.

For instance, the prompt she gives her Patreons next month could be around phrases of encouragement. She could then use the winning phrase and design a wallpaper that doubles as the design for a greeting card or print.

Boom—monthly Patreon subscription fulfilled, and another greeting card added to her wholesale catalog, without having to do EXTRA work.

For those of you doing design services, this strategy might look more like taking sketches or options that were rejected for a design project and using them for a new product, for art licensing, for a different client, a template sold on a site like Creative Market, etc.

A good practice when you’re adding MORE to your business is to ask yourself if there’s any overlap.

Identify the places where you can kill multiple birds with one stone to set yourself up for easier business growth 🙌

4. 📙 Good Readin’: How to Delegate

Delegating or outsourcing work is probably one of the hardest things to do as a business owner.

You feel like it’s easier or faster for you to just do it yourself. You can’t trust that this new person is going to understand your way of doing it.

But while there might be a little bit of upfront investment, outsourcing certain tasks can save you tons of time and make you a lot more money in the long run—because it frees you up to work on things that are more profitable.

This post by Rich Webster breaks down baby steps to delegating as a business owner—something to bookmark if you’ve been noodling on the idea of outsourcing pieces of your biz lately.