What do you think?
Rate this book
Building Your Business the Right-Brain Way: Sustainable Success for the Creative Entrepreneur
If you’ve started a business, you know that the journey toward success can be both invigorating and confusing, so where can you find advice that is practical and focused but still as playful and passionate as you are? Look no further than this book, which combines solid business expertise with a right-brain perspective that inspires creativity and innovation. Jennifer Lee’s fresh, empowering approach emphasizes taking action and continually improving to achieve extraordinary long-term results.
Building Your Business the Right-Brain Way offers real-world-tested techniques that can benefit all sorts of businesses, whether you’re a sole proprietor running a coaching practice, a crafter looking to license products, a wellness professional with a team of employees, or any creative soul making a meaningful difference with your work. You’ll discover how
* assess your business’s unique “ecosystem”
* build your brand and attract, engage, and keep ideal customers
* develop new income streams that better leverage your time and resources
* promote your products and services with authenticity and ease
* grow your team (virtual and in-person) and manage staff and vendors
* establish infrastructure and procedures to keep operations running smoothly
* carve out vital white space to pause, reflect, and celebrate
Building Your Business the Right-Brain Way offers real-world-tested techniques that can benefit all sorts of businesses, whether you’re a sole proprietor running a coaching practice, a crafter looking to license products, a wellness professional with a team of employees, or any creative soul making a meaningful difference with your work. You’ll discover how
* assess your business’s unique “ecosystem”
* build your brand and attract, engage, and keep ideal customers
* develop new income streams that better leverage your time and resources
* promote your products and services with authenticity and ease
* grow your team (virtual and in-person) and manage staff and vendors
* establish infrastructure and procedures to keep operations running smoothly
* carve out vital white space to pause, reflect, and celebrate
248 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2014
36 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 11, 2014
A good way for creative business-owners to take a look at their business building and do something to change or increase it.
It's not packed with revolutionary ideas, but it IS packed with new ways to tackle those odious business-building efforts and administrative tasks that make most right-brain people dither and stumble. The book is cheerful, helps point out where the dark spots are and how to shine a light in there. It has solid ideas, uses sketch-notes (illustrations for directions and concepts) and makes reading it easy.
It's not packed with revolutionary ideas, but it IS packed with new ways to tackle those odious business-building efforts and administrative tasks that make most right-brain people dither and stumble. The book is cheerful, helps point out where the dark spots are and how to shine a light in there. It has solid ideas, uses sketch-notes (illustrations for directions and concepts) and makes reading it easy.
May 15, 2016
Many creatives don’t see themselves as business orientated, which is why today’s book is so useful for creatives interested in promoting and selling their art.
I am an avid reader so when I heard about Jennifer Lee I watched some of her workshops during her last online summit and read her book Building Your Business the Right Brain Way.
I enjoy reading books on business from different perspectives and I can see from the start why Jennifer Lee resonates with creatives. She is a creative herself and created resources to visually express and map out our business needs as working artists. She connects the creative process for art making with the creative process of developing and refining our business strategy.
Lee’s advice comes from a place of pragmatism, with smart, actionable steps we can take to reflect on and develop our business. Her work also acknowledges the importance of our intuition and soul-connection to our art. Included are fun and playful worksheets that get down to the nitty gritty details of business while also acknowledging our creative spirit.
I enjoy the activities Lee created because they are visual and expressive. It takes the bite out of the daunting nature of creating and managing an arts based business. It also gives us practical reflections for us to consider to build the business we want to run.
I really enjoyed one of the first exercises in the book, the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s a great way to get a literal picture of your ideas/goals/practice when it comes to the business side of your creativity.
One really good tidbit that resonates with me:
“Be willing to take action and put yourself out there, even when you don’t feel ready and even if your idea is not yet perfect. You’ll actually learn more and gain more clarity the more you interact with your idea and get feedback.”
Too many artists wait until they are “good enough,” or until they know their work is “perfect” to showcase it, promote it, or consider selling it. This attitude is an obstacle to creativity. The focus of this book is about creating and maintaining a sustainable artist practice and business, something we all need to be thinking about as we pressure ourselves to create.
Knowing what we want our business to look like is important.
I appreciate the advice that we spend our time on what we are best at. Lee shares how rather than spend her time creating the lovely images for her book she knew she was better served to focus on the writing and activity development, so she hired her friend to illustrate it.
Sometimes we ask ourselves to be and do everything when there may be resources to use or people we can hire to support us doing our best work.
Lee deftly includes real life situations of creative businesswomen applying strategies offered in the book. The personal stories of real people makes you feel like you are part of a community; in fact, you feel like you could even be one of those creators mentioned by Lee. It makes all of the tasks, suggestions and information feel attainable, possible, and worthwhile.
In the end it’s clear that we need to have a specific picture of what we want for ourselves going forward to make any strides. It sounds simple, but getting through the muck of emotional and social messaging that muddy the waters of goal-setting and creative dreams can be difficult. We have to do some inner work to discover what we really want for ourselves and our art if we are to create a life we love.
“Dig deep to uncover and honor what truly fulfills and serves you…” - Jennifer Lee
If you have vast business knowledge this book would work best as a refresher text, offering new ways to look at your business strategy. It really shines for a creator seeking a map to build a sustainable business making the art they love.
In the end this book is only as good as the time you put into it because you are only as successful as the time you dedicate to yourself, your business and your art.
Read the full article here: http://www.artiststrong.com/book-revi...
I am an avid reader so when I heard about Jennifer Lee I watched some of her workshops during her last online summit and read her book Building Your Business the Right Brain Way.
I enjoy reading books on business from different perspectives and I can see from the start why Jennifer Lee resonates with creatives. She is a creative herself and created resources to visually express and map out our business needs as working artists. She connects the creative process for art making with the creative process of developing and refining our business strategy.
Lee’s advice comes from a place of pragmatism, with smart, actionable steps we can take to reflect on and develop our business. Her work also acknowledges the importance of our intuition and soul-connection to our art. Included are fun and playful worksheets that get down to the nitty gritty details of business while also acknowledging our creative spirit.
I enjoy the activities Lee created because they are visual and expressive. It takes the bite out of the daunting nature of creating and managing an arts based business. It also gives us practical reflections for us to consider to build the business we want to run.
I really enjoyed one of the first exercises in the book, the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It’s a great way to get a literal picture of your ideas/goals/practice when it comes to the business side of your creativity.
One really good tidbit that resonates with me:
“Be willing to take action and put yourself out there, even when you don’t feel ready and even if your idea is not yet perfect. You’ll actually learn more and gain more clarity the more you interact with your idea and get feedback.”
Too many artists wait until they are “good enough,” or until they know their work is “perfect” to showcase it, promote it, or consider selling it. This attitude is an obstacle to creativity. The focus of this book is about creating and maintaining a sustainable artist practice and business, something we all need to be thinking about as we pressure ourselves to create.
Knowing what we want our business to look like is important.
I appreciate the advice that we spend our time on what we are best at. Lee shares how rather than spend her time creating the lovely images for her book she knew she was better served to focus on the writing and activity development, so she hired her friend to illustrate it.
Sometimes we ask ourselves to be and do everything when there may be resources to use or people we can hire to support us doing our best work.
Lee deftly includes real life situations of creative businesswomen applying strategies offered in the book. The personal stories of real people makes you feel like you are part of a community; in fact, you feel like you could even be one of those creators mentioned by Lee. It makes all of the tasks, suggestions and information feel attainable, possible, and worthwhile.
In the end it’s clear that we need to have a specific picture of what we want for ourselves going forward to make any strides. It sounds simple, but getting through the muck of emotional and social messaging that muddy the waters of goal-setting and creative dreams can be difficult. We have to do some inner work to discover what we really want for ourselves and our art if we are to create a life we love.
“Dig deep to uncover and honor what truly fulfills and serves you…” - Jennifer Lee
If you have vast business knowledge this book would work best as a refresher text, offering new ways to look at your business strategy. It really shines for a creator seeking a map to build a sustainable business making the art they love.
In the end this book is only as good as the time you put into it because you are only as successful as the time you dedicate to yourself, your business and your art.
Read the full article here: http://www.artiststrong.com/book-revi...
October 18, 2016
I'm re-reading this book two years after my first encounter with it, along with Lee's first book, Building Your Business the Right-Brain Way.
I am finding it very helpful, and very much written in a way that speaks to the way my brain works. I particularly like the Left Brain Chill Pill sections!
Overall, I think it has more "meat" in it than the first book... if you're already running a business (be it as an author-entrepreneur or anything else), this is a better starting point than the Right Brain Business Plan.
But if you need to be walked through a vision or a purpose, The Right-Brain Business Plan is a better start.
I am finding it very helpful, and very much written in a way that speaks to the way my brain works. I particularly like the Left Brain Chill Pill sections!
Overall, I think it has more "meat" in it than the first book... if you're already running a business (be it as an author-entrepreneur or anything else), this is a better starting point than the Right Brain Business Plan.
But if you need to be walked through a vision or a purpose, The Right-Brain Business Plan is a better start.
October 29, 2015
Creative thinkers who want to turn their passion into a business work best when they use the strengths of the right hemisphere of their brain. By turning an entrepreneurial idea into something that is visual, playful and deeply human, you’ll be able to sustain the imaginative spark that drew you into the world of business in the first place.
December 29, 2016
Business stuff can be tedious as hell...but this book breaks it down for us creative types to really get a handle on how to approach a creative-oriented business. Chapters conclude with right- and left-brained focused checklists, and there are a plethora of resources, anecdotes, and examples to read through.
Read
March 30, 2021Flicked through this and nothing really caught my eye.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews