Why I Started Treating My Art Business Like a Consulting Project
How a simple mindset shift freed up hours of time and let me focus on what actually matters
Nerd alert! I'm about to get technical about business frameworks and how they saved my creative joy.
Picture this: It’s early October and I'm sitting at my desk, staring at a content calendar, trying to figure out how to make my astronaut cat illustration fit into spooky season.
My art? Bold colors, nerdy space themes, terrible puns, and Pacific Northwest landscapes. Halloween content? Orange and black witches and pumpkins.
The disconnect was laughable, but there I was, spending an hour trying to force my work into arbitrary seasonal boxes because that's what all the creative business advice told me to do.
Here's the kicker: I run a successful strategy and operations consulting firm. I help other businesses streamline their processes, eliminate inefficiencies, and focus on what actually moves the needle. But somehow, when it came to my own illustration business, I'd thrown all of that expertise out the window.
I was treating my creative work like it existed in some magical realm where normal business logic didn't apply.
The Day I Became My Own Client
The breakthrough came when I realized I was feeling completely scattered—exactly like the business owners who come to me for help. So I did what I always do: I stepped back and treated this like any other consulting project.
I sat down and asked myself the same questions I'd ask a client: What's not working? Where are you wasting time? What systems and structures do we need to put in place?
The answers were embarrassing. I was approaching my illustration business like it was fundamentally different from any other business, despite having years of experience helping companies solve these exact problems.
Once I started applying the same frameworks I use with consulting clients, everything changed.
How Business Strategy Transformed My Creative Process
Project Management Became Personal Workflow Management Instead of scrambling to create content on the fly, I mapped out my entire creative pipeline. When do I need to start a new design to have it ready for social media? How can I batch similar tasks together? I built workflows that connect seamlessly—from sketch to finished piece to marketing content—just like I do for client projects.
Operational Reporting Became Creative Business Intelligence I started tracking my own patterns the way I analyze team capacity for clients. Which illustrations get engagement versus which ones flop? Where are the bottlenecks in my process? What's actually profitable versus what just feels productive?
The data revealed something surprising: my quick "throwaway" sketches often performed better than pieces I'd labored over for hours.
Change Management Became Strategic Pivoting When I need to adapt my style or approach new markets, I treat it like organizational change management—for a team of one. The same frameworks that help clients navigate transitions work perfectly for creative evolution.
Automation Became My Secret Weapon Every efficiency tool I recommend to consulting clients became crucial for my art business too. AI for audience research and product descriptions, scheduling tools for social media, automated workflows for repetitive tasks. Anything that could be systemized got systemized.
The Content Calendar Disaster
But the biggest transformation came when I tackled the social media nightmare.
I was spending countless hours a month trying to create content calendars around holidays and trending topics. Halloween posts, Valentine's Day themes, Christmas graphics—none of which had anything to do with my actual work. It was absurd.
I was posting things I wasn't proud of, engaging with content that felt forced, and constantly scrambling for ideas that fit someone else's calendar instead of my own creative vision.
The Property Owner Mindset
Everything shifted when I heard Andy J. Pizza on a podcast talking about what he'd do differently if he started his creative business over. He described how much time he'd wasted building audiences on social media—people he didn't really know, couldn't contact directly, and could lose instantly if algorithms changed.
His analogy hit perfectly: it's like renting from a landlord and investing in renovations, only to lose everything when rent gets too expensive. Versus buying your own property and building something that actually belongs to you.
"Build on your own property," he said.
That's when I made the strategic pivot to Substack as my primary content channel. But here's where the business thinking really paid off—I didn't just randomly start writing. I reverse-engineered the entire approach.
Who's my target audience? People who might license my work, buy prints, or other artists building community. What do they actually want to read? What would provide genuine value rather than just promotional noise?
The Beautiful Simplicity of Systems
Now I write one substantial Substack post weekly. Then I take the same image I'm sharing there and create a social media post that goes live shortly after the newsletter. Everything is scheduled in advance. The only additional social posts I do are when I release a new design—which happens regardless of what day it is or what holiday is coming up.
No more scrambling for holiday content that has nothing to do with my actual work.
The irony is perfect: by treating my creative endeavor like a business, I freed up exponentially more time for actual creation.
What Success Actually Looks Like
Here's what most of us miss when we're starting businesses: we get so caught up in following everyone else's playbook that we forget to define what success actually means for us.
You don't need to post daily if weekly works better. You don't need to offer 47 different product variations if three bestsellers generate most of your revenue. You don't need to say yes to every client inquiry if half of them aren't a good fit anyway. You don't need to hire a team if you're happier and more profitable working solo. You don't need to expand into every possible market if your current niche is thriving.
The beautiful thing about running your own business is that you get to decide what "enough" looks like. You just need to figure out your actual goals, then reverse-engineer the most efficient path to get there.
For me, that meant recognizing that my consulting skills weren't separate from my creative work—they were exactly what my creative work needed to thrive.
The Confession
Here's what I'm slightly nervous to admit: I would genuinely love to quit almost all social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—I'd delete them tomorrow if I could.
I dislike social platforms way more than the average person, and as a business owner, they still feel necessary. But honestly? I'm not sure if that's actually true or if I've just convinced myself it is.
The obvious experiment would be to stop posting entirely and see what happens. I'm not quite ready for that leap, but only because the current system is so low-maintenance. Since everything flows from Substack now, social media has become a 10-minute afterthought rather than a constant source of stress.
Maybe that's the real lesson: you don't have to love every aspect of running a business, but you can definitely make the parts you dislike as painless as possible.
Your turn: What's one administrative task in your work that you could automate or streamline this week to buy yourself more time to focus on the part of the work that you genuinely enjoy?
Leave a comment and let me know—I'd love to hear about your own experiments with working smarter, not harder.