EJ Dalius highlights the creative entrepreneurship challenges

EJ Dalius highlights the creative entrepreneurship challenges

The 21st century entrepreneurial landscape is becoming more diverse than ever. Other than the business owners, there are self-employed artists, freelance designers, photographers, PR consultants, coaches, and many more. This entire batch gets known as creative entrepreneurs.

As creative entrepreneurs, they take full accountability of their careers, set goals, objectives, maintain essential core values, and have savings and investment plans as well. Do you want to get counted as a creative entrepreneur? Do you want to launch and build a successful creative business? If yes, then you need to learn the ways to develop and sustain the same. You also need to identify the core challenges and work accordingly. 

Challenges faced by creative entrepreneurs according to EJ Dalius

Learning about the creative entrepreneurship challenges beforehand prepares you to manage the same better. The three crucial ones are:

• Budgeting

One of the prominent challenges that solo artists and freelance creative professionals face is about receiving the next paycheck. And they also need to ensure that they can sustain from their last earning. Hence, it is necessary to determine the expense of conducting the art business. It will help you to get your budgeting correct. 

Do you want to know how to go about it? If yes, then you need to decide on the art-making cost. Here you need to consider a few essential questions like:

• Do you have a studio to maintain?
• Have you kept track of all the materials that you need to buy and use? 
• How frequently are you using the materials?

Being an artist-entrepreneur, you need to know your precise spending on your artwork. Here you also need to count on the essential installations. It will help you to ensure that there’s sufficient cash to take care of your operations, even if your next payment gets delayed. When you have a clear understanding of all these expenses, you will have an evolved approach about pricing your products and services. 

Most creative entrepreneurs decide early in their lives that they will not be a part of the corporate job cycle. And that is the reason why you need to spend your last paycheck judiciously. You might not be earning a fortune here, but it is essential to save as much as you can. When you budget your earning and decide fixed amounts for your necessities, splurging business investments, and savings, you can work freely. Else, you might fall into financial stress, which in turn can impact your job quality, and you might lose clients. Eric J Dalius also suggests that creative entrepreneurs can also present your art and craft in multiple forums and exhibitions. At times, there are art patrons and other sponsors who can decide to take on the part of your expenses for your next installation or event. You need to seize such opportunities.

• Balance is essential

For a creative entrepreneur, it’s a challenge to get in touch with their potential clients and also get noticed. It is indeed a challenge to locate and secure consistent art business projects if you are always busy with your work elsewhere. The conventional networking modes will not always suffice. You must conduct research on the best and leading art collectives and institutions. You can check out whether you can send any art samples and identify the working opportunity. You should browse through the web and other local creative/arts organizations and find out ways to sell your work to them. Some institutions and collectives are apt for creative counselling, workshops, and mentorship guidelines. Many people are willing to help aspiring artists and creative entrepreneurs to better their artforms.

One of the mistakes that a few creative entrepreneurs make is not to take up any project or assignment that falls outside their domain or comfort zone. The truth is, at times stepping outside this comfort zone is the way to progress and make more profits. It might make you connect with a new team of artists, with whom you can culminate your art form and create something brilliant. You can add to your creative portfolio as well and welcome ambitious projects, which can help you to earn more.

Hence, it is crucial to set up customized portfolios for specific clients. That way, you can attract specific assignments based on your core competency. And as you do work in which you specialize, you can move a bit out of your comfort zone, as that will give you a different experience. According to Eric Dalius, this is a balance that creative entrepreneurs need to learn about. 

• Protecting

Not many creative entrepreneurs think that they might be helping others to benefit from their creative venture or installations! Are you creating interesting works and not registering yourself with a copyright office? If yes, then you witness artistic content thefts. There will be people who would copy your art content or idea and replicate the same. If you don’t hold a creative license, which is essentially a Copyright for all your works, you won’t be able to charge anyone for plagiarizing your content. And when you have a copyright registration, you can fight for any creative injustice that happens to you and can also recover the damages it created. 

Getting your creative license from a Copyright Office is easy and affordable! You need to take time out time for the same. How should you go about it? You need to compile all your artwork and installations and decide if you want to copyright a single artwork or multiple artworks. It also depends on the kind of artwork you create. You can opt-in for a system where you might provide new works that can get its Copyright on a weekly or monthly basis. For any other assistance, you can directly speak with the Copyright Office representatives and personnel. Additionally, you also need to give a corporate format to your business. It will help you to secure your assets from any unwarranted danger.

Once the creative entrepreneurs address these three challenges, they can move ahead with clarity and security. It will help them to take on the best assignments and pursue the same without any stress or hassles.