Can you really make money doing what you love?

Business Mindset, Increasing Revenue, Making More Money, Marketing Skills

“Monica, can you really make money doing what you love?” I get this question all the time! As usual, I am going to skip the trivial, fluffy topics that aren’t going to help you be successful, and dive straight into the heart of the matter.

So the simple answer to this question, is YES! You can absolutely make money doing what you love. If you’ve been an entrepreneur for a while, then you might be asking, “Monica, then why am I so scared all the time, or unhappy or overworked (insert any complaint here)?”

Because being an entrepreneur and making money doing what you love is – well – complicated. I think Steve Jobs said it best:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

So how does this work? 

Get Clear on What You Love

First, you do have to get clear on what part(s) of the business you love. Whether it’s teaching, consulting, baking, making things, stocking shelves, organizing, picking out colors – find that thing that you love doing. That you would do for free if it weren’t for those pesky bills. For me, it’s teaching and solving problems for my clients. I love to be in small rooms or on the phone with my clients and watch them light up after a piece of business advice or a deep spiritual healing.

Remember – everything else you do in your business is in service of doing more of what you love. One leads to another.

When I’m leading an event with 200 people in the room, it’s a gift and a right that I’ve earned as a result of my hard work in marketing and sales. And the opposite is also true – if I haven’t met my numbers it’s always a marketing and sales problem.

Understand the Learning Curve of Marketing and Selling

Second, know that once you know what you love – you’ll only be doing that work for about 20 – 30% of your time, especially in the beginning. For the other 70-80% of the time you’ll need to be doing two main things: marketing and selling.

Marketing is simply connecting. Connecting with others both online and offline to build relationships. And those relationships can turn into sales.

Sales is the process of asking for money. Once you do your marketing, you must ask people to buy from you. You’ll do this either one to one in private conversations or one to many through speaking events, webinars, videos and other channels.

Now the thing about marketing and selling is that they both consist of multiple skill sets that need to be learned over time.

Here’s how that learning process works:

1. Learn what you need to do (i.e. speaking, networking, webinars, writing newsletters etc)
2. Learn how to do each activity in a monetizable way and in the right order (this is what I teach at Revenue Breakthrough – and is the CRUCIAL step that is skipped by unsuccessful business owners who try to learn this stuff on their own or through free classes)
3. Do it for the first time (often badly)
4. Do it again and again (usually with fear and resistance)
5. It becomes easier (yeah)!
6. You create a system for yourself and/or a team member to be able to do this activity consistently. For example, a member of your team researches and reaches out to new speaking venues each Monday. On each Wednesday, you meet with that person to see how the work is going and create new lists. This is how you consistently get new speaking events.
7. At this point, you free up space and time (both mentally and physically) to be able to focus on a new marketing activity. Then you start back at step 1.
8. Over time, you systemize many different marketing activities so that you are consistently putting yourself out in front of possible buyers in different ways.

Here’s the kicker:

Steps 1-4 are hard for everyone! Learning and doing something for the first time isn’t easy. Remember what it was like to learn to swim? You jumped in the pool and barely made it to the other side.

The only reason I even stayed in my swim class was because we got giant red gum drops at the end of each class. By the way, I’m still pretty motivated by food –there’s a pistachio cookie waiting for me at the end of this article. Using a reward is a fantastic way to get yourself through these tough first steps.

As entrepreneurs, we are learning new skills every day. That’s like jumping in a pool and learning to swim over and over again.

To bring us back to the original question – can you really make money doing what you love – YES! But the skills to actually get clients and consumers – the marketing and sales activities – those take some time to fall in love with!

You have to move through steps 1-4 before the love starts to build. But give it time – plenty of my clients have fallen in love with marketing and selling once they start to see the results. It’s rare that I’ve met a six-figure business earner who tells me she doesn’t like putting herself out there. She’s too busy seeing the results and making money!

Don’t get me wrong – you may be someone who has fallen in love with the marketing part of your business as much as the doing the service or product part of your business. Awesome for you! 

But if you are like most of my clients – you’d much rather do the thing you love all day long and attract your clients through telepathy! And some of you are trying to do that right now. How’s that working for you?

Get Consistent with Your Marketing and Sales

To bring it together – can you really make money doing what you love – YES, but only if you are spending a good deal of your time in your business marketing and selling.

The majority of business owners I speak with, just aren’t doing enough – though they think they are.

Let me give you some numbers to play with here. You want to aim for at least 3 sales conversations a week. These are actual conversations where you ask for money – not just connecting with people. You can always start with connection conversations, but eventually you want to move into actual sales conversations. The top 3 ways to get more sales conversations are: speaking, sponsorships and webinars. For more information on these topics of generating leads, please see our other article – How to Make More Money: A Guide for Female Entrepreneurs. 

Get Clear with Your Message

In order for your marketing and sales to take off, you must have a clear verbal message and target market. You’ll need:

1. A specific group(s) of people you target (you can have more than 1)
2. A wake-up in the morning problem (s) that these people struggle with.

So if you love to paint houses. Your group of people could be homeowners who are struggling because they are too busy to be able to paint their own houses or are uninterested in learning how to do it well.

If you want to give relationship advice. Your group of people would be single women who are tired of going to bed and waking up alone and are ready to share their lives with someone they deeply align with.

This last piece is the most important one – you’ve got to make sure that whatever you love doing actually matches with a business problem that people are willing to pay for.

And that you are able to express that problem in a verbal message. Way too often I meet business owners who say things like, “I help people write books.” What people? Why? A better verbal message is, “I help entrepreneurs write books about their businesses. These books then attract their perfect clients.”

With a verbal message like that, you are much more likely to meet a client at an event, or know exactly who you are writing a newsletter to, or speak more directly on a video.

All of your marketing and sales activities become so much easier when you are clear about your market and the problem that you solve. 

So there you have it – a long answer to a short question – can you do what you love and still make money? YES! As long as you:

• are clear about the parts of the business you love

• understand the learning curve around marketing and sales and be patient with yourself as you get through it

• focus and get consistent with your marketing and sales

• pick a clear target market and problem

Many of you ask me, “Monica, can someone else do the sales and marketing for me?” Yes, they can assist you with it. But you do need to direct them, have meetings with them and check their work. Which means you need to learn the basics of how to do it.

I just met a couple who gave $10,000 to a marketing team who promised them the world. A year later, they didn’t see any results. The problem wasn’t the marketing team. The problem was that this couple didn’t oversee what was going on. They didn’t participate. Remember, you can’t throw money at a problem and just hope it will go away. But you can absolutely get support around it. You just need to set goals, direct your team members and meet regularly to make sure all is going well. 

Here’s to doing what we love, making tons of money and changing the world! One day at a time.

Photo: flickr, michal adamczyk