The Case of the Tangled Brands

Back to our conversation about what it takes to really run a creative business, let’s consider branding for a moment … and the case of a self-help author I know. He felt vexed by the fact that he’d spent the last year (and untold thousands of dollars) developing a corporate coaching niche on the Web, only to find out he had a completely unrelated self-help book to write for an unrelated audience.

 

Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out how to reconcile the two. How could he justify all the consulting he received if he just walked away from his site, even though it wasn’t as much of a passion as he thought it would be? And how could he build another platform for his practice from this strange new book project? What was he supposed to do next?

 

The problem was that he was trying to figure out the path without letting it unfold naturally. He was assuming that the business plan was correct, as opposed to his all-critical radar and instincts. He was forgetting that great, old golden rule of creating: Go with your gut.

 

So why do you need to listen to the wisdom of your gut if you’re a creative type? Because this is how you make choices -- out of a combination of sensitivity, emotions and intuition, rather than logic and facts. This access to your emotions is what enriches your work, and makes it so necessary for the rest of the public to respond to. Take away an artist’s emotional infrastructure, and you have no art left, basically.

 

So this is why sometimes the greater wisdom to building your business is to relax, stand back, and watch what unfolds. You don’t necessarily have to know how everything is going to turn out, nor can you. You may even lose money or clients or … god forbid… your business. But you will learn and if you stick with it, you will forge a stronger commitment to accomplishing your dream. And you will forgive yourself, because all truly artful businesses are built on successions of mistakes.

 

Back to the tangled brands for a moment. My advice to this fellow was simply to let the two develop side by side and see what comes of it. And that’s exactly what he’s doing. It’s entirely possible that one will emerge as the other fades away. And so the natural process of evolution wins again in the inevitable path of our dream.