BUSINESS UNVEILED

How to Build Assets for Your Business

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MARK MCGUINNESS ON BUSINESS UNVEILED

How to Build Assets for Your Business

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If you’re a creative professional who is serious about making big changes in your career or business, this episode is for you! Building your business on a strong foundation is the key to success. 

Our guest today is Mark McGuinness, a poet and creative coach and we are talking all about the importance of creating assets for your creative career or business.

Mark's background as a psychotherapist with clients such as actors, writers, directors and creatives,  inspired his decision to create a specialist coaching service for creative professionals dealing with the ups and downs of the creative industry and how they can overcome those challenges.

He created a course for creative business professionals to guide them to success and outlines how they can thrive as 21st Century Creatives.  His books, Productivity for Creative People and 21 Insights for 21st Century Creatives are popular with artists of all kinds because he provides emotional sustainability whilst also addressing professional and financial sustainability.

MAIN TOPICS

  • Forget the career ladder; start creating assets
  • What is Emotional Sustainability for your career/business
  • How to create Professional and Financial Sustainability for your career/business 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Why creating assets provides emotional sustainability because you are working on projects that fulfill you 

The crucial strategy for creative professionals in the 21st century

How creating assets also provides professional and financial sustainability, by attracting more opportunities and income (with less effort) as time goes by

MORE ABOUT OUR GUEST

Mark McGuinness is an award-winning poet and a creative coach, on a mission to help fellow creators achieve their artistic and professional ambitions – via his 21st Century Creative podcast, books for creatives, and his free 21st Century Creative Foundation Course.

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LINKS MENTIONED

  • Listen to Mark’s podcast The 21st Century Creative HERE
  • For coaching inquiries for experienced creatives/entrepreneurs click HERE

EPISODE TRANSCRIBED

I'm so excited for our guest today, because we're going to talk about something a little bit different. We actually haven't talked about this in a while. But it is so super important to start doing this the day or even before you launch your business. And so if you've been in business for a long time, and you haven't started doing this, don't be hard on yourself, because you don't know what you don't know.

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But today, we're gonna be chatting with a poet and a creative coach. He's the founder of the 21st century creative. And he is going to talk with us about the importance of creating assets for your creative business. And really, it helps catapult your career I wish that I had done this from day one when I started my first business, but y'all social media didn't exist. And the internet is not what it is today. But if you blink your eyes, and you wake up a few years later, it's like, wow, I really have a lot of assets. But also it's like who owns them. So we're going to talk about that today. So Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you, Angela. It's lovely to be here. And you're all the way from England. Right? I am, you can probably tell. I love the accent. I absolutely love it. So before we jump off and start talking about your career ladder in the the journey that you have been on, take us back a little bit and let us know a little bit about your childhood where you grew up. And what inspired you to become this creative business owner that you are today?
That's a good question. So I grew up in a little corner of Southern England called North Devon, which is a very wet, very lush, very out of the way and countrified part of the world. And I think, you know, that's given me a love of the countryside and nature. And when I was a teenager, I started writing poetry. And one of the big influences on my poetry was a poet called Ted Hughes, who I never met, but he lived just down the road from us in Devon, and some of his, there was one book of poetry he wrote called Motown. And as soon as I read it, it was just describing the landscape down down the road for me. And I remember reading that and thinking, wow, poetry isn't just Shakespeare, and Milton and Homer and all these grand people, it could be about the stuff that's just happening down the road. So that was really where the kind of the creative path opened up for me was realizing that, you know, poetry was was just something that I wanted to pursue with my life. It's really an art, like, because I can't I mean, it's funny, I can't really make two words, Ram. And recently, I was watching the lady that was reading, because we're in an election year, like, you know, say, yeah, and so the, the young girl that was reading, I'm like, you know, I haven't heard of like a poet like it, like read like that a really long time to write anything like that. And I really think like, it's a it's a super gifted talent. Like, do you remember the How old were you when you sat down? And like, wrote your first poem? Like, do you remember?
I think, Well, unless you count stuff. You know, when I was really small, which I probably don't. But I think the time that I really remember thinking, oh, there's something here for me was
an exercising class that we were sat on, I must have been about maybe 13. And we had to go away and write a ballad. And I just found myself writing it. In in other lessons when I was supposed to be to things like chemistry and history and geography. I sneaked out the book at the back of the class. And I because I just kept getting ideas for another line and another line and another line and it just grabbed me from that day on and you know, it didn't feel like I think people a lot of the time people have a bad experience with portrait school. It feels like that something is distant.
And formal and, you know, doesn't really relate to them. I guess maybe for me at that point, it felt the opposite. It almost felt like an illicit pleasure that I couldn't help it. There was a compulsiveness about it. So that was probably the beginning of it for me, then. That's awesome. So that's,
I don't know, again, it's such a talent. Like, it's, it's not something that my brain like, doesn't work like that. It's like, I'm a creative, but when it comes to design, not so much like about writing poetry, but how did you get into helping businesses create assets and create, when we say, create assets, for anybody that's listening, this may be a brand new entrepreneur, or they own a new business. Like I often use the word copy. And some people that are new, they'll have to stop me and say, I you're not making sense, like in my head, I've seen like a copier in an office. And I'm like, Oh, no, no, no. So can you explain to us just dumb it down for anybody's listening? Like when we talk about, like creative assets? What does that really mean?
Sure, okay. Well, I'll tell you about the assets in a minute. And so then it's a good question, how does a poet end up on a podcast for entrepreneurs talking?
assets, because you probably don't get too many of us talk. Subject, I'm so excited. So really, the the long detour was through psychotherapy, in London, in the mid 90s, I started practicing psychotherapy. And I had the whole range of human life, come through my consulting door people with all kinds of issues and problems and challenges, as I'm sure you can imagine. But in and amongst that, there was one particular category of clients where I really felt a very strong connection. And that was the creative ones. And it's probably because being a writer and a poet myself, we were somehow on the same wavelength. So this would be the actor from the West End play suffering from stage fright. Or the famous novelist suffering from writer's block, the film director dealing with the pressures of the film industry, or
a freelance designer, you know, dealing with the ups and downs of the freelance life. And
these sessions had a real energy and intensity, but also a playfulness about them that I was thinking is this really therapy. And I came to the conclusion that a lot of these people didn't really have a mental health issue in the traditional sense. But being creatives, they put their heart and their soul into their work. So sometimes it makes sense for them to work on their heart and their soul. And that's what I found I could do.
So I helped them navigate the ups and downs of the creative life. And
it got to a certain point, I thought, you know what, this isn't really therapy, I'm going to call this coaching. And this was back in the, in the 90s, when no one was really talking about creative coaching. But I thought, well, that's what I'll call it. And,
you know, and I really decided that I wanted to work with the creative professionals. So with these people, you you're working on the creative side, but also the professional side, either they're, they've got a career or a business to manage. And I still do this today, I help them kind of, you know, find that balance between the personal and the business between the the artistic, and the professional. So
coming back to your question about assets, Angela, this is one more thing that I realized, because
a lot of these my clients, and also myself, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners find themselves on a certain day, you know, when things are not going well, you and your hearing so much about cousin George, or who is doing so well in the big law firm, or as a doctor or, you know, in the big city firm, and you get some version from family or friends or society of why can't you be a bit more like cousin George.
And it's so easy on those days to be sat there thinking, well, it's easy to see how somebody like that is progressing up the career ladder. And meanwhile, what am I doing? I'm here in my studio on my own with my laptop, you know, maybe I'm working on something, I've got no idea whether it's going to succeed, or I'm just off the back of another glorious failure.
And what kind of progress Am I making in my career? And the answer I came up with after several years of trial and error was,
forget the career ladder, start creating assets. Now, assets in the financial sense, it's something that you buy or acquire in order to generate ongoing income. So you might have a property and rent it out or you might buy a company and generate money from that or a stock portfolio.
Do and so on. I'm not talking about those, this is more like an analogy. But the good news is if you are a creator, you can create your own assets out of thin air.
So I'm talking about things like if you're an artist, your portfolio, your back catalogue, if you're an entrepreneur, your product range, if you're a novelist, you're
all the books that you've written. If you're a performer, you have a reputation in all the productions that you're featured in that that builds you equity in, within your industry, people know you for a certain standard of work and are likely to want to commission you for more work.
And it struck me that these are the assets, yeah, you can break it down, you can have an artistic asset like your work.
There's also the intellectual property into that there's copyrights, there could be trademarks, there's the opportunity for licensing deal. There's a whole category of what I call social assets. So this could be your brand, your artistic reputation, your network, it could be an audience or a readership, followers on social media, or subscribing to a podcast like this, or to a YouTube channel or a mailing list. If you obviously own a company, the company itself is an asset, there's the product range, there could be a team, there's trademarks, there's the website, and so on. And it struck me that the most successful and the most fulfilled creators are the ones who have the right blend of the right kind of assets. So if you're a novelist, then you've got a string of bestsellers, you've got licensing deals from those, you've got an audience, you know, you may well have a mailing list or your publisher will be promoting people on your behalf.
And this works on both sides, it works on the personal as well as the professional. So looking at the personal ninni, all these assets come, they're self generated products, projects, they wouldn't have existed, if you hadn't dreamt them up, if you hadn't said, I'm going to start this business, or I'm going to write this book, or I'm going to go for this or audition for this certain type of production, it would never have happened.
And so this is where we get our deepest creative fulfillment is doing the stuff you know, this is the follow your heart, follow your passion,
answer the call. And if you're a creator, and I've got to tell you this, whether or not this is your main business, you're going to run into trouble. If you don't have this in your life, if there isn't somewhere in your life, where you are creating in that pure space of because I want to do it, almost because I can't help doing it, you're going to run into problems, at the very least around emotional sustainability. Because if you're not getting up every morning with something to fire you up, there's a certain type of person who can go to work and treat it as just a job. But that person is not a creative, right. And so if you are a creative, you've got to at least have room for that somewhere in your working week.
Ideally, if you're a creative professional, then you want that to be at the heart of your career. And so this is where you start to marry it with the professional development and advancement. So to put it bluntly, doors will open. If you are a well known figure in your industry, if you've got a track record of great work, if a lot of people know your name, and that name has really positive connotations, then
opportunities come to you. Income may well be flowing to you each each day through sales of product.
Your reputation out in the world means people want to work with you. So they're likely to be coming to you. And if not, at the very least when you reach out to them, they will know who you are. So give an example A few years ago, I went to see Kate Bush when she gave a very rare series of shows in Hammersmith in London. And of course I bought the program and I was reading the prime it was an amazing show, obviously. And I was reading the program on the way home talking about wanting to get the and the light show and the the theatrical were absolutely out of this world. It was it was a completely immersive 3d experience with people actors running around the theater and a helicopter landing on our heads and stuff. Wow. It was really stunning. And so in the catalog, she was talking about setting up the show and there was somebody I think it was a lighting designer that she really wanted to do it and she said she said she was really nervous because he was the best person in the country and she but she plucked up her courage to ask him and she was like, overwhelmed, you know?
be surprised and glad he said yes. And I was thinking, of course, he said, Yes. Yeah, you're Kate Bush. Exactly, exactly. That's the best phone call of his year or email. Right. But I mean, it was a lovely humility from her to say that, and maybe says something about creatives that even when we're right at the top, there's always a little part of us, that doesn't quite believe it.
But, you know, if you get the phone call from Stephen King today, and he says, he just had an idea what I wondered if you consider working on it, you probably said yes, in your head, even before you know what it is. Right, exactly. So we don't all have to be Kate Bush or Stephen King. This is the point, you know, this is this is the the age of opportunity, you know, the internet's opened up, as I'm sure your listeners are very aware. But we can all have a small amount if even we had 5% of the the assets and the equity and the reputation that someone like a Porsche or Stephen King have, you know, that can go a long way you can have a thriving business and a fulfilling career based on that. So, absolutely. So and you also you wrote a book about this. And I would love to know what inspired you, like did it did it just keep in your creative coaching business, which I love that you were doing it back in the 90s. Because when I started my first business, like coaching and consulting, like none of this stuff existed, like all the tools that we have today, I feel like if I had the guidance, and the tools that I have today that I could have, like, really shaved off like 10 years, like, Mo, amen. Amen. Meet it out. I mean, there's so much now, if I'd known about that, when I was cuz, you know, I guess a lot of us were dreaming up these things in isolation. Yeah. And it was really hard to connect. I mean, I mean, to me, it was obvious when I was working, say one on one with someone that this, this was a really powerful experience, the coaching I was doing, but then we'd go out even in town like London, where there's a lot there's pretty, you know, high, high density creative population, the chance it was so much harder to connect with people have been known by them. But whereas now with,
like, you say, We're lucky, we've, you know, we've we've got all this at their fingertips. Yeah, almost felt like the first couple years. Like, I didn't even know what an entrepreneur was, like, I didn't grow up. My mom and dad weren't entrepreneurs, my family was, but I didn't really hear that word. And I definitely didn't hear the word creative. And I guess I was like, around 30 years old before I like found my people, and like, got into a group. And I'm like, these are my people, Oh, my gosh, like, my life is starting, like they understand me. And I was so thankful to get surrounded and involved in like, some of these organizations that have hundreds and some have 1000s of people today, but when they first started, years ago, that we were 4050 people in a restaurant, you know, not not like, you know, in a restaurant hanging out. And now, what the Internet has done with social media, the opportunities that we all have, I mean, even you and I connecting, it's like you're half way across the world, right? Because of the internet. And because of these different opportunities, you know, we're able to connect with people all around the world. But so what inspired you to write your book? And how did you decide the title because I love to hear the stories about these books. So this book actually came out of a very long blog post that I wrote a few years ago when I hit 21 years as a coach. And I thought, Well, okay, let's mark the occasion. And I challenge myself to write a long blog post called 21 insights from 21 years as a creative coach. Okay, that's just what I found. And the criteria for getting in was that they were insights that had emerged in the process of coaching. And, you know, we're talking hundreds of clients at this point,
and 1000s of conversations, and there's a kind of a Darwinian selection process that goes on, which is, I find myself saying the same thing over and over to a few clients. And I think, okay, that means this works, it must be true for at least for this audience, this, this kind of group of people. And so I start writing them down in all my, I mean, I've been blogging since 2006. I've written four books now. All my books, all my blog posts, all my nearly all the, you know, sections on my podcast have come out of either my own suffering and my own path or these conversations with clients. So I thought, okay, let's capture 21 of these in this blog post and likes quite most of my blog posts these days turned out to be about five 5000 words. And it went down really well. People liked it, but I got a few comments of Look, this is really not easy to read on my phone or my browser, can you you know, wrap this up in a PDF or an ebook. And I looked at it and I thought, you know what I could, I could
Do better, I could do even better than that, let's develop it into a short book. And so each of those insights that had a paragraph or two in the original blog post, I extrapolated into maybe two or three pages, and made it a deliberately a short book much shorter than my other books. And my challenge was to just give the insight and then get out of the way of not, don't over explain it and go well, on the other hand, or here are the five steps you need to do to put it into practice. No, just give people the insights, and make it really clear what they're about. And it's gone down really well. I think people like it, they give a lot of people, a few people have said, it's really nice, because it's so short, I can finish it. And I feel I finished one book this week.
But I got you know that there seems to be quite a lot in it. You know, it covers the whole range from personal and creativity and business and so on. So
that's awesome. So tell us more about the professional and the financial sustainability for creative entrepreneurs, for people that because I know there's some people listening. I know, in the beginning with my family, my parents because I was in health care. My dad's like, Did you fall in hate your head? Like you had a really good job? Would you quit your job? Like, why would you resign? And I'm like, Well, I got this opportunity to do this show. And I'm going to go on the road with the country music artists, and I'm going to do that. And my parents just thought someone had like, put a pill in my drink, like, Why the hell would I leave something so stable, that I could stay out for 30 years and climb the career ladder? Like what was wrong with me? And so I want people to know, well, again, like we were saying a few minutes ago, it's much more access acceptable now to like, be a startup and be an entrepreneur. It's like, cool, and it's acceptable. And, you know, you're, you're hustling and all of that. So I feel like it is a little bit more different. It's much more acceptable. And many people are creative entrepreneurs. But when does it really mean? Because again, for me, I was an OBGYN for 10 years, and I had a side hustle. But what's the financial sustainability of really making it like a full time career long term, where you can support yourself and your family in that you have like an actual real business?
Well, to me, they have to go, the financial and emotional sustainability have to go hand in hand if you're a creative. And this is partly because I'm a Romantic poet, and I believe you've got to follow your heart. But also, because when I did my masters A few years ago, in creative and media enterprises, which is kind of an MBA for the creative industries, one of the things I looked at was the research into the psychology of creativity. And apparently, it's a very robust finding in psychology, that creativity is highly correlated with intrinsic motivation, which is scientific speak for doing what you love. So, you know, on some level, if you don't love your work as a creative, it's not going to be that good. It's not going to be that original and different. And if you're looking at it as an entrepreneur, it can be really hard to stand out unless you're being original and different. And bringing something new and valuable to the table.
And I think you've got it, probably everybody listening to this is has got experience of hearing one way or the other. Because on the one hand, I certainly know what it's like to,
to be struggling financially to have a sense that, well, I've got a great service or a great product, but I'm not finding a way to connect, I'm not selling enough units. And that is, you know, extremely stressful and very uncreative, by the way, because it's really hard to be to dream up something great when you're worried about next month's bills.
On the other hand, it's easy to go too far the other way. And there's a lot of great advice for entrepreneurs, and a lot of it I think we need to filter and ask that's great on paper on a spreadsheet, in logic, but is that really the kind of business that I want to create and it takes a lot of emotional intelligence to really get this and make your peace with this. And there's no one size fits all. The I honestly, I think the kind of business that each of us can create is a little bit like the kind of art that each of us can create, maybe it's gonna be a bit different to the other things that are out there. And you have absolutely have to get all the technical advice and all the listen to the industry, best practice and so on so that you're not completely going off pieced. But at the same time, I think you've got to know the kind of creator you are and the kind of work you love to do. So for instance, I'll give you a specific example. I've had a load of people
Tell me, as a coach, you know what you should do mark, you should hire other coaches, you should develop the mark McGinnis creative coaching methodology, you should trade market and franchisor. And then you have all these coaches out there into the world, and they're providing that service and then you get whatever percent of what they earn, and then you can retire early. And it makes complete sense on paper. But when I hear about that, I just want to go lie down and forget all about coaching means it's not the business I want, or, you know, I, I want to coach and the way I scale my businesses, I work with amazing, high achieving creatives who are doing things that are going to have a big impact.
But, so that's my choice. And there are pros and cons limitations to that. But that's sustainable for me on both fronts, I get up every morning, I am inspired. My number one criterion for a new client is I need to feel inspired when I see that person's work. And I see how they show up in the world and what they put into it. And that means I have inspiring conversations all week, all year. And it's financially sustainable. And I mean, I could be doing this in my 80s.
You know, whether I will or not, I don't know, but I absolutely could because it gives me energy each day. Yeah. But to give you the counter example, because everybody's different. I had Michael bungay stanier Come on my podcast, maybe three or four years ago. And he was telling me the exact opposite story, which is, he thinks coaching is a wonderful thing. And he was a pretty good coach himself. But he realized it wasn't what he wanted to do to spend most of his days, what he was really passionate about was the impact that coaching could have within an organization where all the leaders are coaching the people below them. And they're coaching the people below them. So it's kind of cascading throughout the organization.
So he sent up his company Box of Crayons in order to train and facilitate and help those leaders be better coaches for their teams. And he's had a massive impact
on all kinds of industries doing that. And it fired him up. I think he's moved on. And he's got a new business now. But you know that he had the wisdom to know that that would make him happy and sitting in a room one to one or on zoom one on one with people like I do, that would have been unfulfilling for him.
So I, you know, this is my point.
Derek Severs puts it really beautifully. In his book, anything you want. He says, Your business is your utopia is where you create your perfect world. And you design all the rules, and all the government and so on. And it's got to be a sustainable world. But you know, if you contrast me and Michael, you can see we're both coaches, but you can have a very different kind of business, depending on the kind of person you are, and what is going to fulfill you and propel you over the long term.
Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree more. I have people that have told me the exact same thing. I'm over here laughing of what you just said, where they're like, why don't you hire all these designers and planners, and then you can franchise? Because when, in my event company, when we used to do a bunch of design, everything we did was based off of psychology, that's what I went to school for. Right? I get the question all the time. How do you get inspiration? What magazines at the time, it was like, What magazines do you look at? And I remember before all these cool apps, like I was the girl cutting out pictures, putting it on, like Girl Scout poster board for my clients, but it was an inspiration board that I was building for them. I wasn't looking at magazines just to get random ideas. It's like you've got to be in I was inspired. You got to look at the person and the couple and what inspires them, like if they were going to have a dinner party. And they're building a home together. And it's an open house, like what would that look like? And that's what you want to create for an event for a client that's branding something or if they're celebrating a number one song, or, or if it's a wedding, it doesn't matter. But the inspiration comes from the people. And so I would get this question all the time from people saying, like, if you're riding on a train or flying out somewhere, like do you see billboards and you get all this like excitement of, Oh, I want to do this and I want to do this. I'm like, No, I don't do any of that. Like I just take it based on case by case basis based on the couple and based on the people like my clients, and people thought I was crazy. And I'm like, no, it all comes down to psychology. I don't just go randomly looking at now it's all Pinterest, right? So I'm like, I don't randomly get on Pinterest and just pin things that I like, like I have to have an intention. And I have to understand the psychology of like what I'm doing like there's purpose behind it. And so I've had people say well
Why don't you teach that and then you could have all these people exact same thing. And I'm, I'm like you I'm like, that's just sounds like a nightmare. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to manage all these people. And I don't want to deal with franchises like, it's just that, to me, it's just that's a whole nother business. And I'm not really interested in do it is the same thing when we had an app. And the app was great when we created it, and I created it for our clients and for other people. And no one used it. And the reason they didn't use it, and one day, my business manager said to me, and no one's using it, because these people are paying you high dollar for you and your team to do it for them. They don't want to get into the app and use it for you to luxury experience, you don't create like a DIY experience. And people will just pay to outsource stuff all day long. Because a they don't know how they don't want to learn. They're busy and focused doing their other their main business, because most of our clients are entrepreneurs as well. So it really helped me, my group, my form group, my advisory board, they helped me stay focused on exactly what you're saying, What are you passionate about, and that emotional feeling, you have to be excited about it. And if I was like, going to train a bunch of people and on psychology and you either kind of get it or you don't like you're either kind of a creative or you're not like it's not really something that you can go in and teach somebody, like if you see a lamp on the table, and you go into a completely ugly warehouse, and I'm like, well, we could take 55 of those looking lamps and hang them upside down and put all kinds of crystals and flowers and fill up that ceiling to bring the ceiling down and and then people are looking at me like I've 10 heads and they're like, but it's a lamp that you plug in on your table. And I'm like, well, that's what you think. But you can't you can't teach like those out of the box experiences. And my favorite is I would walk into a huge event it was this was many years ago when Donald Trump was building all types of hotels that it was his lead construction companies daughter's wedding. And so I had a huge crew and we were done setting up and right before the guests came in. We always stand back and I say is there anything else that anybody sees? That is not perfect, that if it shows up in a picture, or a video, I want to make sure shits perfect. Like that's where my design comes from. So we're in this huge tent, and I have probably 20 girls around me. And I'm like, okay, anybody see anything? We've got 60 seconds. And all the girls are like, Okay, well, the pillars are the same. And their turn and no tags are showing in the feet on the tables are covered with linens, and we're all good. And I'm like girls look up, look up. And I'm sure I'm five foot, I don't look up much. But I'm like, look up, there were a ton of electrical cords hanging down, like towards the back of the tent, which we're going to be completely be visible for like a tall person that's looking up. And none of them caught it. And I was so disappointed. But but it was a kind of like a pivotal moment for me that like, I can't just take people's money and expect somebody else to go do it and train them because these these things come with experience. And so in that moment, I'm like, I can't go train a bunch of people to do this. I could, I could, but is it going to be perfect. So that's why I was thankful to discover affiliate marketing and online courses. Because that that was something that I could teach a strategy and train someone to do it, and then recreate that over and over. But like when it comes to creative poetry or design, it's just so unique to the person's imagination. And then also like the experiences so I completely feel like everything that you're saying, because I feel like I've been in this situation before. Um, do you have any final remarks? Like, where can people find your book? And I would love for you to let people know like, what's your favorite platform to connect on and all that good stuff. And guys, if you're listening, and you're running or you're driving, we will put all the links in the show notes as well. So don't stop keep doing what you're doing.
Okay, so the book is called 21 insights for 21st century creative so you can get that on, obviously Amazon and on all the usual book retailers.
My main kind of channel at the moment is my podcast, which is the 21st century creative. And I guess another way there's the you know, the book grew out of the podcast too, because a lot of the insights came on the podcast. So every week I have in season I have a new insight from me and then I have an in depth interview with a creator in the arts or the creative industries. And then my website is lateral action.com. If you're interested in coaching, that's the place to go. I work with experience.
To creatives who are on a mission to do something amazing in this life. So if that sounds like you then go along to lateral action.com, and I've got a set of coaching questions for you to get the ball rolling.
In terms of social media, Twitter is about the only one that I really use consistently. So I mark McGinnis on Twitter. Awesome. And we will put all of that. So if you guys are interested in the book, we'll put the Amazon link, and we'll put the coaching link lateral. How did you a lateral action? How did you choose that name? I'm just curious. I didn't my business partner, Brian Clark came up with
Brian founded copyblogger.com. And we worked together about 10 years ago to launch lateral action. And Brian being the the great copywriter, that is, you know, we are whole
we had a blog, and we had a course. And it was all based around the idea of merging creativity and productivity, because Brian had this insight that,
you know, these are two industries, there's the Getting Things Done industry, which is all very well, but what do you, you know, is anything meaningful? And then there's the creative thinking industry, which is great, but you need to pair it with action. So Brian came up with lateral action. And we've worked on that for a few years together before I went our separate way. So Brian takes the credit for that one. I love it. Because, I mean, I'm a productivity consultant. And then, but also have the creative mind, but you're exactly right. Like, there's some days where it's like, okay, I just need creative days. But then our calendar is blocked with things where it's like, we've got to put things on the calendar, we've got to block the calendar, we call it GST, get shit done. Otherwise, I'm not GST, or my team is not GST. And if I'm like, Okay, can you help me do this, and this and this, and this, and then they're all looking at me. And they're like, but what's the deadline? And I'm like, Oh, yeah. When you can get to it. They're like, no, Angela, we need to know. Like, when we need to do this more specific. Yes. Like, I've learned over the years that if you don't have a deadline, if you don't have a goal, if you don't put it on your calendar, like it just doesn't exist, and like stuff doesn't get done, like you said, so. Absolutely love that. This was amazing. Mark, thank you so much for your time. And thank you so much for being here. And everyone that's listening. Thank you so much for your time, be sure to tune in next week to another episode of business unveiled by yo. That's it for this week's episode of business unveiled. Now that you have all the tools that you need to conquer the world and GSD get shit done. Would you share this with your friends and fellow business leaders? One thing that would really help us and help new listeners is for you to rate the show. And leave a comment and Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you tune in and listen to business unveiled. You can check out the show notes at Angela proffitt.com slash podcast and link up with us on social media so you can share your biggest insights. And I want to know your aha moments. Until next week, remember, the profitable shifts and structures you're creating in your business, help you be more present in your life. So get out there and GSD

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