Hello everyone, my name is Kat McCullough and I am the owner and creator of a company called Parachute Promise.

I’m honored that Jodi asked me to be a part of this wonderful week of creative women! In addition to being a business owner I’m also a multi-faceted artist, as are many of us in this creative community. That is one of the things that makes being an entrepreneur today so fascinating—we do not have to be defined by just one thing.

Many of us are approaching our crafts as one would approach a portfolio, to borrow an example from Free Agent Nation by Daniel Pink, published some 10 years ago. I am paraphrasing here, but basically he gave the example that no investor would ever put all of their money into one stock—that would be insane; diversify is the name of the game. As solo-entrepreneurs, we often do the same thing. We invest in ourselves to carve out creative ways of living, and that requires many of us to diversify.

I have found that my creative spirit and voice are not contained by one artistic expression. I’m constantly diving into new territory, exploring it, and sometimes I’m focusing on sharpening and honing my craft in one particular area. It’s an evolutionary process. In our creative endeavors we learn what works and what doesn’t, so it is also how we learn our “business.”

Essentially, we are always running two parallel paths—creation and business savvy—in order to turn our creative work into a self-supporting enterprise. It’s from this parallel that some of my greatest challenges as a business owner have stemmed: How do I present to the world this completely diversified portfolio of my gifts and talents? If people look to me as the owner of Parachute Promise, what implications does that have when I’m in the world doing self-portraiture and photography work that at times can be extremely boundary pushing? Will that artistic work somehow devalue the beauty of a company like Parachute Promise? Essentially, how much ofme do I let you see? All of it? Pieces of it? At the same time, I need all of my portfolio to work for me with regard to streams of revenue.

I’ll throw this in right now: I just walked away from a ninety-thousand dollar a year job last week. I needed these questions answered like, yesterday. Fortunately, I have enough confidence in my talents and enough trial-and-error business experience that I can draw on. That foundation was already in place, otherwise there would be no way to be comfortable with such an extreme life change. I began to find answers long before I actually took the plunge.

The reality is, nobody knows any better than anyone else. What works for the one guy you’re eyeballing in the marketing world may not work for you or your business. I sort of did an esoteric post about this on my blog a few weeks ago; this guest post will hopefully make it a little less esoteric.

We are constantly learning from one another and being transformed and reshaped in the process. This is a creative community that shapes itself, feeds itself, and evolves. I’ll give you a little example using something I believe about impermanence: If you and I have a conversation, and both of us are fully present for that interaction, we are in some small way transformed by that interaction and leave different than when we got there. Simple, right?

Apply that to creative community, business, and particularly social media within creative community. Those of us who are creating content—surprise! —we dialogue. We talk to one another, we watch one another, we learn from one another, and we even start trends (quite accidentally) influenced by one another. We cannot afford to be elitist toward any newcomer in any already established creative community online or off. The next new voice may very well be pointing the way to the future. It takes all of the parts to make up the whole. I want to encourage anyone who is intimidated by what “looks” like a hard and fast way to do business in the social media realm—or even in brick and mortar business for that matter—to not be intimidated.

I am not suggesting anyone should quit their job in pursuit of their dreams or desire to live creatively unless they are absolutely prepared to do so. I’m also not advocating any one-size-fits-all approach. I’m not even suggesting that my ideas are remotely “correct”—they’re just ideas. Fortunately, I get to share them in a community that is roomy enough, gracious enough, and loving enough to let me have them;)

I often times take lessons I learned in spiritual practice and apply them to how I do business. If it doesn’t feel authentic, I quite honestly don’t like it, and it doesn’t ever make me feel very good.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “walk the walk” or “talk the talk”? I am a person who needs real experience—I need to have it personally and real experience is what I need to hear about from others I trust. If your business is built around telling me how to run a business then what do you really know about running a business? Your business may just make you really good at selling. Selling a shiny idea that I get all excited and amped up about—YAY! OMG! That can work for me too! That is talking a talk and not walking a walk, and I call bullshit. Look at the thousands of business books lining the shelves—we have just as many books lining the shelves about how to become “enlightened” That’s because there are many, many paths—both in spirituality and in business.

When I’m talking about things like inventory, P&L sheets, cost of goods, marketing, good customer service—this is the practicality of my business. There are other things which aren’t quite so tangible, like demographics: Who is my audience? Who might be interested?

What if I told you Parachute Promise has proven to be the hardest thing I could ever try to “market” in a traditional way? Take a room, fill it with 100 people, and draw a line down the middle. Fifty will “get it”…and 50 will have their eyes glaze over in the back of their heads, while they’re thinking, “I don’t get it.” There are 50 people yelling at them saying, “What don’t you get?” with absolutely no way to help them understand. So everything I ever learned from Blockbuster’s or Starbucks’s business models went out.the.door. I created a company about connection—so if I can’t authentically connect with you and what you’re putting into the world, frankly, I don’t want it. That is where I am as a consumer in this country- period. I know what I want from a company, I know how I want to be treated, how I want to be heard and you can bet your ass I know what I don’t want. I incorporate what I want as a consumer into running my business. I don’t copy what pisses me off and then apply it- that’s dumb. If it pisses me off as a consumer, well, it’s probably going to piss off anybody I’m trying to reach as a customer. It’s not quantum physics folks.

Look, I am not a shiny, pretty person. I cuss—a lot. I wear combat boots and look to be in my 20s despite being 37. I don’t get taken seriously by anyone with a traditional MBA or a background in corporate structured anything. I have tattoos, I have dirt under my nails, I graduated from the school of hard knocks, and I absolutely detest how big business does business. This being the case, why on earth would I ever copy the marketing strategies that big business uses? (Forgetting the fact entirely that tried-and-true practices fail to work for the tangible good I have to sell anyway)

If I go to Best Buy and order one thing—boom! Guess what? I’m on a mailing list.I’m on a mailing list, though no one even asked me if I wanted to be on it. Or better yet, I unchecked the little box and submitted the form and left the second entry of my email address blank, so it kicked the form back and damned if that little “send me email” box didn’t automatically check itself again. Now in this quandary, when your mass email is telling me about something I want nothing to do with (since I already bought the one item I wanted from you), in order to unsubscribe I have to be rerouted out of my mailbox, where the company will ask me twice if I’m sure I didn’t make a mistake. Big business has now stolen my time, which is incredibly valuable to me, because it’s wasted with everyday bullshit just like this. Are we pissed yet?

We in this creative community have the opportunity to recreate how we want to conduct ourselves as business owners and creative entrepreneurs, and we are powerful enough to shape what works. I absolutely get it, and I applaud those in the world who do that one thing and do it really, really well. Bravo to you! But I know, without a doubt, that I have things that come really, really easily to me—like seeing the big picture, my confidence behind the podium, my leadership skills, the application of lessons learned—and for so many people, that stuff is really, really hard. No matter how much they want it—sometimes a heart full of the most honest want in the world will not get you there.

You can get there though, with honesty and open dialogue and supportive community that are not quiet about its lessons. There needs to always be safe places where each of us goes to say, “I am absolutely failing at this.” and not be met with an affirmation, but a real fucking example and shared experience we can sink our teeth into.

The only thing I can offer is my experience, to share it and say, yeah—I once had to make the hard choice to throw away a few thousand dollars worth of printing because the word “an” versus “and” was so critical to me, and I missed it on the proof. Twice. That’s where I learned to say, “Fuck it—I am going to mess this up, and I have got to wrap my brain around making that somehow okay” I will not hide that fuck-up from anyone—to hide my mistakes makes my experience useless to anyone else but me. If my experience can prevent you from making a thousand-dollar mistake in your own business, then by God I’m going to share it.

This road is broad and roomy and all-inclusive. There is room for every single one of us here to have a voice, to learn, to grow, and to share. You know who I watch? I watch Amanda Oaks at Kind Over Matter to see how amazing, true, authentic connections are made. I watch Jenn Gibson over at Roots of She, creating this incredible space where authentic voices are heard. I watch Lisa Lehmann, because Lisa took her love and talent and built it into this incredible business that is absolutely worth watching and learning from. I watch our host Jodi here grow and evolve and take risks, and oh my God, with an enduring enthusiasm I wish I could have half of! I watch my friend Jamie just starting out in the blogging world over at Mommy’s Cigar. My friend Kirsten over at Kirsten’s Art and Soul, just starting her photography Etsy store. They are starting out where we all start out and with the same questions.

My advice is this:

Don’t worry, your community will find you.

It’s okay for it to look messy, you finding your voice.

It will change; it’s allowed to, and it should.

Never get so big that you forget the most important people who have been with you every step of the way.

You cannot be all things to all people, therefore, live your truth as authentically as possible and the rest will follow. I said truth, not dream—if you live in your truth, you step into your dream, because it has always been holding space that only you could ever fill.

Kat McCullough is the owner and founder of Parachute Promise, public speaker, photographer, writer and overall rabble rouser. You can find Parachute Promise and Kat:

www.parachutepromise.com

www.parachutepromise.com/blog

www.Facebook.com/parachutepromise

Twitter: @Parachutepromis

 

 

 

Photo credit goes to Deb Taylor of Did Deb Do It?