Failure to Thrive

When your small business or art sales experience a failure to thrive, it is most often NOT about the overall market, or your quality of craft. Failure to thrive is statistically a resulting symptom of creators’ systems issue.
The challenge most small business owners and artists face when reaching a growth ceiling, internal collapse, or blockage is determining which systems are gummed up, outdated, or in need of improvement.

Why are you stuck?

Running a small business on shoestring budgets or getting your art commerce platforms off the ground can be challenging enough as it is. Overwhelm, discouragement, and frustration are par for the course. Sudden bursts of success or precious positive feedback keep the faith alive, helping to fuel the determination to JUST PUSH THROUGH.
And we do. We double down—or quit. Those who double down will often push through.

When we double down, that fervor of energy and will to break through the ceiling often creates a clutter field. That means we push the smaller things, the low priority processes or projects, to the side in order to maximize our push through. That’s normal. It’s human. It’s just business.

However, those clutter piles and debris fields build up in our business planning, structures, life, and especially our creative psyche.

When those clutter piles of business matters, systems, processes, lack of upgrades and adaptations, missed functions, excessive waste, or de-prioritized projects build up there is eventually a tipping point in your business or craft.

You hit a tar pit or even a wall. Growth halts. Outreach just frustrates customers who can’t get their needs met. Your creative energy dwindles. Stress. Panic. Debt. Hemorrhaging funds. We’ve all been there.

Worse—you experience a series of opportunity loss because you no longer have a system that allows you to grow and expand your craft, sales, or business functions. Again, we double down or quit.

Eventually, there will be a mess you cannot break through or clean up. That’s usually when I receive a call from a corporation that needs help getting unstuck.
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The thing is—these breakdowns are preventable. These ceilings are easily identifiable in advance and can be avoided. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to only have challenges in growth related strictly to market demand and the quality of your art? Those would be simple challenges to face when all the other debris and growth strains are not a drain on your business or your creativity. 

Why do we hit clutter and debris ceilings?

The truth no one talks about when becoming an entrepreneur, a selling artist, or a marketable creator is that it CHANGES you as a person. Becoming a member of the trade pool (large or small) fundamentally requires you to bisect your old life from your trade life because those changes require continual upgrades and automations for continued growth.

Then it requires you to elevate your habits and patterns each time you reach a ceiling if you wish to achieve a new level of productivity, output, or profit.

What does that mean?

It means the habits, patterns, and processes you had in place when you were starting out are insufficient if you want to grow out and up. This will become more evident each time you reach a ceiling and struggle to break through.

You will still be YOU, but your habits cannot be what they were on the tier of development and output they were before you or your business began its growth. Sure, some habits will still sustain and maintain your health, happiness, and functionality.

But if you are living and working in habits that ONLY sustain and maintain, then your business is unlikely to grow. If you’re creating with the mentality of “that’s a problem for future me” which many of us do—then one day future you will look at a solid blockage preventing your prosperity and say, “Crap… how did I get here?”

Where do I start when evaluating my small business and creative systems?

Start with soap.

I bet you didn’t see that coming.

We all use soap. All businesses have soap, and cleaning materials, right? Whether your home is also your office and studio, or whether your small business has a customer/employee restroom, there is soap.

What happens to a global system when there’s a breakdown in practical social hygienic practices like handwashing?
Now think of your craft or service and start your systems analysis with an easy target like soap.

You need it. You use X amount of soap in X number of locations in your home business, life, studio, storefront, etc.
When evaluating a habit or system that supports or inhibits, start with these questions:

1. Do you need it?
2. How often/much do you need it?
3. If you remove it, what are the consequences?
4. How can you automate this process to save time, energy, or money?

Evaluating and automating something as simple as your business hygienic systems can shuffle energy to alert you to interdependent or interconnected systems that also need your attention.

For example: a home office and studio setup.

Soap is used at four sinks, two showers, a dishwasher, an exterior garden station, and a laundry room. Go through your business or home office and round up all the soap. Pull the dry stock from storage shelves and do a full inventory.
Now that you know how much you currently have, and where you’re using it estimate how much you need by how often you want to order it. Smaller budgets might be on a monthly ordering system. But larger systems you don’t want to have to think about or manage, use quarterly or annually.

Then set up an account with your vendor of choice and schedule the soaps to be delivered to you regularly based on your estimated volume.

Ordering and coordination are a standard part of any organization’s planning structure. We do it in smaller systems regularly in life and in our trade planning. Most small businesses or artists don’t believe they have the funds to set up an ordering schedule or the need.

The reality is—you might not need it NOW. But if you hit a growth spurt, which is certainly part of your long-term plan, you will wish you had simple optimized systems in place to help you stretch and reach for those larger opportunities when they come in. No one wants to be the company that gets visited by a massive investor who asks to use the bathroom, and you have to say, “Oh, wait, I gotta run to Costco for soap because we’re all out, and I just haven’t had time to do it because XYZ.”

It’s not a good look. That’s the feeling of opportunity not meeting preparation. Insufficient planning and preparedness. Also, that investor is not going to want to shake your hand if they know you aren’t using soap. Just sayin’.

Now that you get the gist of a small system you can apply it to all your automation needs. You can apply it to your marketing analysis. You can apply it to your subscriptions, licenses, regulatory, and financial planning. You can apply it to your service vendor strategy, CRM, outreach plans, and file storage.

Microsystems support minor systems—which inform all other major systems and processes in your business, artistic commerce and creative development.

You will notice that the way you were ordering soap (or any other system you use to compare) before was a process that sort of worked for you when you were smaller. You patched it together. You held it in place through a few pivots and upgrades, but you didn’t circle back to streamline that function.

Now when you go to wash your brushes at sink A and there’s no soap, you’re walking your brushes back to sink B and berating yourself for not remembering to put soap on your weekly shopping list. You’ll think about it five times (which drains your energy) then you may or may not remember it on the next trip to the store.

This is a scenario that can be applied to every function in a business when we get overwhelmed or lost in the weeds. We miss the details, and those details eventually stack up and leak energy, funds, attention from those things which should be a higher priority focus such as creativity or recovery.

Leaking funds because now you’re out and don’t have time to bargain shop when you could have used bulk purchase power to buy soap at a lesser cost. It costs you more to do immediate convenience shopping. Leaking energy because you’ll think about it five times before you get it done. Leaking attention because you’re now preoccupied with soap—not with creativity. 

Whether this exercise is really about soap or some other microsystem in your business or craft, the point is that automating your smaller systems will help realign you to your primary goals, energy, best practices, and eventually get you through the ceiling without bottlenecking at the same spot the next time around. Start with the little things, the stuff you usually overlook or ignore—they are the keys to getting unstuck.

Large companies understand this principle when they’re managing giant resources with heavy supply orders. Ironically, they often forget these practices are universal within their company matrix.

By the time I get a call about a breakdown in process flow asking if I can review and reorganize a digital content archive, the microsystems supporting that digital archive have already failed.

“It’s a mess and we don’t know where to start.”

“No worries. Let’s start with your file hygiene practices. Tell me a little about how you store your content in the digital archive. What’s your first step?”

Usually, I learn they once had a system, then they had a few growth spurts, some turnover, a new platform was purchased, and then bam—the old way stopped working so they just started stuffing the files in willy-nilly.

The upgrades you apply to your business growth must push up while also trickling down to adjust those microsystems to become supportive to your expansion strategy. Thus, the more familiar you are with the microsystems in your business and practices, the easier it will be to gently tweak them as you go.

You don’t need to be a large corporation to benefit from this simplicity or process design. You only need to find what works for you, and clean, clear, declutter the processes that are leaking your funds, energy, and attention so you can get back to doing what you were born to do.
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Creating. Connecting. Prospering.