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Building a Business
First in a series of three articles
What do you want your lifewriting business to accomplish in the next year? I encourage you to take some time right now and plan things out.
You don't have time, you say, to indulge in planning? Think of this parable:
A person is sawing a tree and is obviously harried. A second person approaches and asks, "How long have you been sawing?"
"Oh, all day and I'm exhausted. Look at how much I have left to do!"
The second person suggests, "Your saw is dull. You need to sharpen it."
The first retorts wearily, "That might be a good idea for some other people, but I just don't have the time to do that. Don't you see how much tree I have left to cut! Get real."
Take the time to sharpen the "saw" of your business life. Make a business plan. (Be sure to check for info on business plans in the Soleil Lifestory Presenter's Manual.)
Making (or revising) a business plan need not be arduous. In fact, it can be rather simple and very satisfying. What I am offering here is a do-able process. I call it a business plan but I might also have called it a strategy plan. (What I am suggesting is not formally a business plan but let's not quibble here. What follows is eminently useful. For more information on formal business plans, visit your local library or bookstore.)
You need to start with a mission statement. A mission statement is a paragraph about what you want to accomplish. Mission statements do not include income considerations. Rather, they contain the reasons you are drawn emotionally to this sort of work as opposed to others. (Why you lead lifewriting workshops rather than sell Amway.)
Here is the mission statement of the Soleil Lifestory Network:
The Soleil Lifestory Network is dedicated to sharing its passion for writing, speaking or otherwise articulating lifestories, to voicing the importance of lifestories in the maintenance of identity, to celebrating lifestories as legacies one generation leaves to the future, and to developing and disseminating the best lifestory expression and preservation tools available to a broad international audience of writers and workshop leaders.
The goal of a mission statement is to be lofty, to say what you want to do--as if money were no object.
A mission statement answers the question: Why am I in this business and what do I hope to achieve spiritually and ethically?
A mission statement will enlighten your activities all year long; checking your activities and choices against it regularly will ensure that you stay on the track of what is good for your soul. You will use it to assess the rest of your plan. Mission statements can come easily to lifewriting workshop leaders. We love ideas and we love being of service. The exercise that follows is less in line with our inclinations, but I've found it to be the backbone of success.
While we are in this particular business for reasons that have to do with nurturing our souls, we must never forget that we are also trying to support ourselves with this very lifewriting business.
Many people work assiduously, never quite getting on top of things no matter how hard they try. Others seem to succeed more easily. While the reason can sometimes be outside of ourselves, it is frequently inside. The difference may be that some people plan their work and organize their work life in a way that maximizes their success.
OK. Let's start planning. The first thing to do is to establish the income you want/feel you need to earn yearly from presenting Turning Memories Into Memoirs® and PhotoScribe® workshops. Your work, if it is to be financially rewarding, should be driven by your realistic income goal.
Let's say, for the sake of this discussion, that you want to derive $10,000 from your effort. Don't start by filling your schedule with as many workshops as you can get and hope that they will add up to $10,000. Instead, translate $10,000 into the number, the length, and the frequency of Turning Memories and Photo Scribe workshops you MUST present to earn this income. This will be your OPERATING schedule for the next year.
Your goal is not to be busy. It's not even to help people, though your mission statement will certainly include that. Your business goal is to be financially rewarded as you do meaningful work.
Here is an example of what you might calculate:
1) My workshops last 15 hours (five sessions of three hours each).
2) If I attract 12 participants for each workshop (a reasonable, "do-able" number) and they each pay $90 per series (15 hours x $6/hour), I will earn $1080 per workshop session. (Will you be offering tuition rebates? If so, estimate how much that may come up to and subtract that figure from the $1,080.)
3) To earn my hoped-for $10,000 per year, I will have to deliver and sell materials at only nine workshops. The tuition will produce $9720 in workshop fees for the year. In addition, since workshoppers (12 in each session) need to buy handbooks, I will earn $7.98 each on the 12 copies of Turning Memories handbooks sold for a total of $95.76 extra per session. This will add up to $861.84 in book sales per year. (The profit from the sale of the Audio Guide or The Lifewriter's Memory Binder is not figured into this calculation. Let that be a bonus for now. Next year, you will be able to estimate how many of each you are likely to sell in a year and you will add that to your yearly projection.)
The projected grand total for your workshop earnings for 2004 will then be $10581.84--surpassing your $10,000 goal by $581.84. This is your GROSS INCOME.
In practical terms this comes out to three workshops in the September-December trimester, three in the January-April trimester, and three in the May-August trimester.
Very do-able! But you haven't come up to your NET INCOME yet. That's the topic we will discuss in our next installment.
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