Earning through diverse income streams as a 'slow lived' entrepreneur.

Reflections, a piechart, a gamble and a big load of love for Substack!

Hi petals,

How are you? ✨

So today I wanted to share some of the behind the scenes of my visions and goals around income generation for my company of one. I’m very inspired to share MORE transparency about money and how we bring it into our lives. Ever inspired by the transparency of

Keris Stainton

and

Farrah Storr

in this post.

I’m SO excited to tell you - I’ve opened a waitlist for my first ever group mentoring programme and business collective. There are 11 spots and this work replaces my one to one work until May next year.¹. 🎉

You can see and sign up to get full details here. We start 6th November! I can’t wait.

It’s called ‘Your Self Seeded Business Collective’ . It’s a focussed programme with me as space holder for you to set up creative projects and systems that support you to do work in your zone of genius whilst keeping the money flowing in…

Reflections and some context… let’s settle in…

Where I started…

When I first went self employed in 2008 I had one big contract. I kept that contract for 5 years - it offered me the security of a full time job but in part time hours and meant I could adjust my lifestyle and take on other contracted work too.

When I fell pregnant in 2014, I was plugged into too many big contracts and I dropped the biggest one. In one fell swoop I got off the ‘career bus’ and sat down by a lake (literally and figuratively) for a while…

Photo by Wren Meinberg on Unsplash

Motherhood changed everything

Bringing my son into the world changed everything for us. We moved an hour up North to live by the coast. Our mortgage was ‘cheap’, we grew into expansive spaciousness of life outside the hustle.

We both changed the way we worked. We took on huge projects that were nothing to do with earning money. (House extension, yoga studio in our home, an allotment garden and my husband trained as a Forest yoga teacher and stretch therapist). We realised childcare was SO much of work we wanted to do as was trying to find the right environment for our children to learn and our businesses to thrive…

Fast forward to 2017, and I decided to offer a brand new mentioning programme - Inspiration Island. I’d always mentored as part of my contracted work ²but I wanted to put my holistic way of balancing working and living out in the world.

I wanted to support others to design their own lives.

Diversifying my income

In the pandemic, I had more space, more time, more ideas and I brought an ebook called The Artist Boat to life - it was a self guided version of my one to one mentoring. It was my FIRST ever product!

Rooted in slow lived productivity, clever systems, creativity’s impact on our wellbeing.

Confidently in exploring the seen and the unseen; the light and the shadow work…

I made around £400 from selling the ebook. Nowhere near the income of my commissioned contracts but valuable income all the same… More than the income my work made ripples with people, some I’d met in person, some I knew online, some just bought it to support me and never read it…

From that point, I’ve slowly learnt more and I’ve added more streams of income through creative projects to my annual income portfolio…(ebooks, printed journals, ever green masterclasses, courses and more!)

Doing and owning the time it take to do this work the way I want to is empowering… I wrote a little about it here;

creatively.conscious

A post shared by @creatively.conscious

Here and Now - reflections on designing my own life for the season I’m in…

I was doing some work on my accounts yesterday and I made myself a pie chart from my income spread sheet! You can’t imagine how incredibly proud I was of figuring this out.

This is something that my business mentor Leonie Dawson asked me about on our coaching call in July and I had to be honest I didn’t have a clue what portion of my income came from where… I knew there was an abundance of it in the here and now (Stripe email me everyday to remind me people keep buying my work).

When I stood back and saw this chart, I knew in my heart I had to let my beloved one to one mentoring sessions go…

I’ve kept them because the strand of work is so precious and enabled me to step away from plugging into too many contracts but 6 years on I’ve helped hundreds of people and I need a break. Honouring the spirit of what I teach others I’ve let these and some other things go…

What do you think of the pie chart? Money has always felt pretty abstract if I’m honest… I’ve healed some stories recently and got more friendly with the black and white of the numbers! ³

Over to you…

I’m trying to keep these Thursday posts both interesting and short (!) so I’m going to end this one here and hand over to you…

• Do you know how many income streams you’re plugged into?

• Do certain clients take more energy to manage than others?

• Do you have ambition to diversify your income streams?

• Do you have a pie chart like me? 🤓

I’d love to know - let me know in the comments?

And if you’re a paid member here come join me in our monthly chat thread and let’s chat intention setting for October and beyond?

Next week, I’ll be back with my Project Bloom update for paid members - looking forward to sharing the magick!

Sending sparkles for your day ahead,

Claire x

✨

PS - here’s that link again to sign up to the wait list for ‘Your Self Seeded Business’ email me if you have questions - I’ve planned the whole programme - just need to get it typed up… There is one bursary place funded by me - please email me if you’d like it.

1. There are 3 folks on the waitlist and 1 signed up already. 🥰

2. My clients include Action for Children, Andersen Press, Tate Modern, National Trust, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Northumberland County Council and Swallows South Africa.

3. Podia is my online course platform. My tax year runs April to April each year so there are around 6 months left…