Designing Profitable Creative Business Without Burnout, with Jessica Abel

In this episode, Charlotte Ellis Maldari welcomes Jessica Abel, founder of Autonomous Creative, to discuss how mid-career creatives can reshape their client work into sustainable, profitable businesses that align with real life. Jessica shares her journey from graphic novelist and professor to business coach, highlighting the challenges creatives face in balancing client work, marketing, and personal fulfilment.

Key topics include:
- The pitfalls of underpricing and overdelivering, and how to set realistic, sustainable rates using Jessica’s “ground truth calculator”
- The importance of aligning business models with personal capacity and financial goals
- Why many creatives burn out by following mass-market marketing advice that doesn’t fit their business
- Mindset shifts needed to move from scarcity and self-doubt to confidence and clarity
- The value of tracking time and outcomes to make informed business decisions
- How to build a business that supports both creative work and a fulfilling life

Jessica (jccabel on LinkedIn) also introduces her new training, “Stop Working Nights and Weekends,” designed to help creatives reclaim their time and profitability.

🎯 This email is part of Kaffeen’s Reignite Reset series.
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Transcript

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 0:40

Hi, and welcome to the Kaffeen Authority Builder podcast, and today I'm really excited to be talking to Jessica Abel about how mid-career creatives can reshape their client work into a sustainable business model that aligns with real life before they throw time or money, or marketing tactics that don't fix foundational problems, which is something that I've come across a lot during my time working with creatives. So, hi Jessica. Welcome to the podcast.

Jessica Abel: 1:06

Thanks very much for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation. Yes, it is something I come across a lot.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 1:12

We know each other because we were in a group coaching program together. Claire Pells', get Paid Marketing, and we had an overlap in terms of our time in the different cohorts there. And Jessica and I have crossed paths a couple of ways. Now, through that, I was really lucky to be invited to be a speaker at her autonomous creative conference, which happened in June.

Jessica Abel: 1:32

Yep. It was in May.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 1:32

But you have had such a varied career. I'm looking here at your bio. You are a graphic novelist, you're an author, obviously the founder of the Autonomous Creative, where in which capacity we know each other and where you help accomplish creative professionals build businesses as brilliant as they are. And I know, you are drawing on 30 years as working artist and a decade as a business owner, and you are helping your clients to transform inspired, but overwhelming client work into unconventional profitable businesses, which is, yeah. So again, something that I come across a lot, especially with the female, people in my audience, and you are really helping them with the practicality types of things. So. Building financial stability, time, flexibility and autonomy, that true creativity demands. So can you just tell us a bit about your background?'cause that really is varied and you've been, but on both sides of that fence.

Jessica Abel: 2:24

Yeah, definitely. And I think the reason I'm on this side of the fence is because I was I came up as cartoonist and amazing, published a number of graphic novels. Mostly fiction, but one of my best known books is actually called Out On the Wire, which is a graphic novel. It's a nonfiction comic book that is, about the storytelling techniques of radio and podcast greats like Ira Glass and Jad Emro. And. Stephanie Fu and Han Jaffe Walt and people who are really, really good at long form narrative audio. And, so I sort of ex did all these interviews and extracted all this, kind of came up with an essay essentially of what, what do they do to tell great stories? So that's what I was working on when I, or that's what I was just about to launch when I pivoted to, starting my own business. Obviously as an author I had a business, but I was not aware that I had a business. Like most authors, you don't think of it that way.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 3:18

Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 3:19

And it turned out, and I did not know this as I was struggling all these years, that being an author is kind of a crappy business. Like it's a really, really challenging business model. To support a family, even support an individual person. Like, it's just very difficult. And most people who are authors, and so, as a graphic novelist, basically it's the same model. As an author, it's the same thing. Yeah. Like even though the book has pictures in it, it's the same thing where you have, I worked with commercial publishers for the most part. Yeah. And so you get advances in, hypothetically royalties, although that never happens, it turns out. And like most authors, I was teaching, quite a lot as an adjunct for a long time, and then eventually as full-time professor and department chair,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 4:04

illustration, in cartoon. And what, what would you call it? Cartoon drawing. What, what was your role as a professor?

Jessica Abel: 4:11

Well, in the first, so for about 12 years, I taught at SBA, the School of Visual Arts in New York. In the cartoon cartooning department taught comics,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 4:20

cartooning. Okay. That's the word I was looking for, didn't it? Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 4:23

the word for the art form is comics. Comics is like the stuff that goes inside. Graphic novels. Yeah. So it's, it's kind of the generic term for what it is that I do. So I taught comics for a long time. I, I with my husband who's also a cartoonist and also a teacher. We wrote two textbooks about making comics. So that was like the first phase. The second phase was I, got a job as an illustration professor, at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Fine Arts here in Philly. And that's why I'm here in Philly. So that came for that job. And then I was the, you know, main, it's a very tiny school that has now closed, but the, there's the main, faculty member and the department chair of this tiny department. So, and as I was at, at pfa, my second main place, I segued increasingly into professional practice teaching mostly how to be a creative professional and trying to teach business skills to my students. That was what I was already very interested in, but got increasingly involved in trying to design curriculum for undergrads to help them understand just the principles of how this, all this stuff works.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 5:30

But that is so forward thinking though. Sorry to interrupt, but yeah, no, go ahead. I have been a, guest lecturer, of the most prolific graphic design programs here in the uk. because I was so frustrated seeing. Students graduate say that they wanted to start their own business, which is an increasing thing in terms of brand and packaging design. Graphic designers here who are gonna apply their graphic design, degree to, a commercial purpose rather than a more artistic art form. And increasingly they were thinking about starting their own business, but had none. There was just none of the curriculum around anything to do with entrepreneurship. And then I was talking to a colleague of mine who's a coach with medics and she was like, it's a very similar thing. Once you get on that path, you're just like, this is my vocation. You're going down this alleyway highway, and you don't understand where else this might go, what other things might look like. And then how to merge into different areas. It feels like you're just. Especially in academia, things are shut down rather than opened up in terms of how it might be applied and what else that might look like. And in your case, in cartooning specifically or illustration, a lot of those people end up being self-employed, right? Yeah. So they do, things are foundational to their experience when they're applying their trade.

Jessica Abel: 6:45

Yeah. And I mean, comics and illustration are, have a very strong commercial component, commercial art component, so working, freelance, and doing stuff that. But any artist, any visual artist is inherently, if they're trying to sell their art, they have a business. Mm-hmm. And so understanding foundational business principles and understanding as Tara McMullen put it once the invisible architecture of business. What are the ways that these things, these pieces fit together and they press on each other so that when you make a choice to do this, that the result is gonna go in this direction. And if you change this factor, then it's gonna be this. So just understanding how because that's the thing about entrepreneurship is yes, there are principles that everybody needs to understand. And it's very easy to imagine a situation in which you just get a textbook full of principles. it's not applicable to your situation. You don't understand how to look at it flexibly. I mean, that's pretty much what all of my coaching programs I enrolled in and over the last 10 years looked it was this is what the rules are. Here's the skillset, here's the templates, here's the whatever. Not teaching how the underlying. Pieces fit together so that you can make decisions that make sense for yourself. And as a creative, I put the words unconventional in my bio for a reason because even when people really me pivot to business, they're I have a business now. I'm thinking of myself as an entrepreneur and a business owner. The kind of business they're having is typically not in the textbooks. It's something odd. It's something that they're not gonna get a lot of support if they go through, conventional sort of template based business coaching programs. So teaching undergrads is really tricky because they are not ready to understand these things. They have not had any experiences that they can sort of lock into as they, as I give them principles of entrepreneurship. Yeah. They're like. It's all theoretical. I have had a few students who were like, had come back to college, in their, you know, mid twenties to mid forties. people who are older and the look on their face just like, oh my God, if only I'd known this, five years ago when I started to do X. You know, they realized the value. they got it. They really got it. But people who are coming in at 19, I'm still glad I gave it to them and it's, it'll like be this kind of echo in their mind as they move forward. But they're not like, this is why I work with people who are mid-career because they've had, they've gone through the ringer, they see all this stuff and when I say, you know how this happens? And you're like, why do I get these terrible results? And they're like, oh my God. Yes.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 9:26

Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 9:26

Instead of, oh, can that happen? I think this should be possible. You know, so.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 9:31

So when we're thinking about how a creative, that mid-career creative that you're speaking to, what, when they first land on your calendar as a coaching client, what red flags tell you that their business model rather than marketing is the real issue?

Jessica Abel: 9:45

Well, there's usually a very obvious mismatch in terms of, the kind of offers they're putting together versus the, marketing they're trying to do, if any. the offers that people design. and I think of myself again, as a model of this where, as an author you're trying to sell books. Books have an incredibly low profit margin and also just low cost. And so you have to sell massive numbers of them for the books themselves to pay the bills. And not something else, right? And so,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 10:15

unless it's a means to an end. I'm just thinking I've published,

Jessica Abel: 10:17

oh, no. There's all kinds of reasons to be an author. As a means to an end. but I'm saying like, if you're trying to sell the books and make money that way. Yeah, absolutely.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 10:23

Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 10:24

You'd have to sell massive numbers of them. And so people who, who come outta that world, they think about, oh, I need to, be on this podcast or do this, whatever, and I have to be on social media all the time. And I'm what's the real goal here? If you're using this book as a platform to do something else, if you're using it as a jumping off point in some sense, sure. Maybe that works. But if you're trying to sell books, you're gonna sell minuscule numbers of books, it's not gonna affect your bottom line at all. And then you're still gonna be scrambling to fill, to, to pay your bills by doing all this other stuff that's unrelated. Then you're totally over capacity and you don't have any room to do the things that you wanna do, and so you stop doing even Instagram, so it's just this kind of I call it cyclical burnout. This thing of that having a business model that does not match. The financial and time realities of your life means that you're gonna head straight into burnout. There's no way around it. And so if you are, if you're matching the style of marketing you're using to the kind of business model and offer that you have, then you're able to produce the money that you require from that. If you're doing that, then doing better at marketing, absolutely thumbs up. That's where you should be. You know that if you can see okay, if I could just, ramp this up by X amount. Yeah, just top the just top up the volume and I have capacity for that volume.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 11:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Then marketing's

Jessica Abel: 11:46

the question, that's the answer. That's what you should be doing. But if you look at it like you're an author and you're trying to make, whatever,$2 profit per book, and you're like, I just need to ramp this up, and you would need to ramp up from selling, I don't know, 25 copies of your book a month to like a thousand. Like marketing is not the answer because you're one person, you're a single person, and trying to use corporate level sales, mass market tactics

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 12:13

isn't

Jessica Abel: 12:14

gonna work, especially if you're trying to create another book. Like you're spending your time making the thing that you make. Now that, that's an extreme example. The more common example for people like me is that for a long time, I'm a professor, I have been a professor, I'm not right now, but have been in my life for a long time. The most natural thing to me to do when I started into business was make a course. And if you make a course and you're like, oh, I have this special thing that I do, I'm gonna make a course out of it. And the course is, say, 3 95, or even 9 95, how many of those do you need to sell in order to, pay your bills? Right. Once you know that number and you say, all right, so it needs to be, I need to sell, 10 places a month of this thing, or have, four times a year do launches and sell 30 places, or something like that, right? You have some number. What does your audience look like? Is it anywhere near the numbers you need? To sell that much. And if it's not, yes, you can go into marketing and say, alright, I'm gonna ramp this up. I'm gonna, whatever. But then you're pivoting to, again, a mass marketing model, massively increasing your audience, spending a lot of time on the marketing side. And for most people in my audience, that's a, that's a non-starter. They wanna make the work. Mm-hmm. They wanna work with, with students, and they wanna make their own work. They want to bank the thing that they're there to do. And so they're willing to do marketing, but they need to do it in less time than that kind of mass marketing thing with requires.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 13:41

Yeah. Yeah. Completely get it. And parallels with what we were talking about before we hit record as well. So I mean, who are the people you find yourself helping the most? I mean, I know that you talked about mid-career. Can you just define bit more what does that kind of. What does the avatar look like? What kind of skill set do they have and what are they often thinking or sh about or struggling with when they come to you? Is there something that shows up again and again that you really notice is oh yeah, that's gonna be my person?

Jessica Abel: 14:10

I mean, there are two main things I would say when I say mid-career is not very descriptive. It's just means like you've been doing this for a while. Yeah. Really means. And that is part of what's important. Like I'm not working with people who are straight outta school because they have not developed an expertise in anything particular. They're more generalists still. Yeah. And so the people I work with are not particularly, generalists. They have something very clear about what it is that they do and they're good at it and people know they're good at it. Maybe not a lot of people, but the people who. Do know, or like, oh my God, you're really, that's this thing that you do is amazing. And so there's some kind of expertise that's standout expertise, and it's like a niche of some area. And usually, in my case, it's an area that's, let's just say unusual. Like it's not, there're not a lot of people in this field. It's not something that like everybody's doing. That's not always the case. I work with web designers, I work with coaches of, leadership coaches, whatever. I work with people in lots of different areas, but still having some hook into why them, some differentiation that they've developed, however they've managed to do that is really important. So that's number one. And number two is they are ready for the truth. They wanna know numbers, they wanna know exactly how this works. They wanna know, they wanna lift up the hood and look inside. They're not looking for, they would love to have quick answers, but they're not really looking for a magic bullet. They're like, I've tried magic bullets, they suck. I am going to try to actually know what the hell is going on. And my whole kind of approach, when I talk about stuff is to just be very blunt and very real. And if somebody says, I wanna do this, and I'm like, well, you can do that, but it's probably not gonna make you a living. Like, and this is why. And I'll explain why. And they're like, oh damn, but I really wanna do that. And I'm like, well do it and do something else to make a living. let's talk about what you could leverage all this expertise into that might bring in enough money to make time for whatever this thing is that you dream of doing.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 16:12

Yeah, absolutely. I, you described this as selling truth before, which I really love. And especially in a world where we're all a bit jaded and, being lied to about what it takes to build a profitable business. But how do you stay grounded in that honesty, especially when you are surrounded by coaches and consultants who promise results that are shinier or more exciting? What does that feel like?

Jessica Abel: 16:33

It feels really good. I love being the one who's like, no, that's not realistic. No. When they're telling you this, this is why that won't work. This is, you know, or it could work if you happen to be the unicorn. I'm not saying luck doesn't happen. It happens, but are you gonna bet your life on it? You know, are you gonna bet your whole future on the idea of a lightning strike if you want to. Cool. Go ahead. I'm not your person. I, I am fine with that. I, I like being, different. I don't particularly love being a dream stomper. That's not fun. Yeah. But, I do, one of the things that happens when I tell people this idea you have, this is why this is gonna be really challenging, not impossible, but these are the challenges you're gonna face. You can decide to do that. I'll support you if you wanna do that, but this is, this is what's going on there. Alternately, you could go this other way, use this other thing that you are doing and turn that into what your offer is. And for yourself up here, that is a painful moment for people. But the other side of that is so much freedom to do the thing they wanna do without trying to distort it into a revenue machine. which isn't to say people don't make revenue. I, there's a, a visual artist I've worked with, named Samantha Clark, who's really amazing. She's, in Scotland and just won a huge painting prize up in Scotland a year or so ago. And she's doing really well as a visual artist, but it still doesn't pay the bills. So she does coaching, she is writing, coaching for artists artistically minded memoirs. And, is I think, doing a very solid small writing coaching business that supports her studio time. She designs it around having studio time. She still makes money. I mean, she won a, you know, 25,000 pound prize. That's a huge thing, right? Yeah. But it's not enough to support her. So she's still making money, she's selling pieces. her career's going really well as a visual artist. But she's able to just release from caring about all the, like she obviously has to care about contracts and things. I'm not saying she's like letting that go either. Yeah. But that it's,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 18:47

making the balancing act more Yeah. Realistic is kind of what it feels like because I'm, I know like visually kind of like picturing this, it feels like Yeah. Like how much energy are you gonna give to either, like, which one are you prioritizing and how do they fit and understanding the relationship between the different things. Yeah. Rather than trying to be, and it's different for different

Jessica Abel: 19:04

different for different people. Like for Sam being in the studio is, really takes up a chunk of her, like a large chunk of her time and her career is actually taking off right now. It's, and she's in a really good place with that.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 19:14

Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 19:14

And I have another former client who's a filmmaker who pivoted to opening a video first marketing agency. And that took off very, very well. Immediately and then was doing well enough and she had people she was had hired to work on to do most of the delivery. She pivoted back to film and just, directed and released. She, her company produced a Bollywood film. She's in India, so, did this film and released it, which is, and she had time for that because this business was running in the background. So it's that freedom to, make those kinds of decisions. Like, I'm gonna produce a film. put on this giant show. I'm gonna do whatever. There are plenty of other people I work with who just, they still do whatever they do, but they're not spending as large a proportion of their time on it. It's, their own work. It's not like, not everybody has that model where they're trying to maximize that. Part of their career. But, but what I'm trying to say is like, just because you take your foot off the gas in terms of trying to make money with your art form or whatever your creative work is, doesn't mean you can't make money at it. It just means that it takes off, takes all of the, sort of, the most of the distorting factors of like trying to make money out of that piece. Yes,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 20:32

yes. Absolutely. I feel like there's a whole other conversation slash podcast episode I want to get into at this point where I'm thinking about what play and creativity means to me personally and how important that is for me thriving at work and also and real anger around people being told that they're not creative at school.'cause they can't draw a visually perfect horse, for example, and therefore not considering any kind of output that would traditionally be considered creative artistic. Something about self-expression and then actually having issues around that later on because they've lost that kind of sense of connection with having fun. As you're talking, I'm thinking this isn't just about people who may have trained as fine artists, for example, or something, and they have this side hustle so that they can focus on, or side hustle, main hustle so that they can focus on their pure form of art, however they describe that. It, I think it's just a human thing. We need to get this balance just generally, because otherwise we don't thrive if we don't have enough playtime, which is adults, we don't. And a big part of that being things that you can express yourself through, which I think is a big part of creativity as I see it. This is just the thing everyone needs to be doing

Jessica Abel: 21:46

is how I feel. I agree. And I also feel it doesn't have to, I think that first of all, business building is creative. It is a creative thing

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 21:54

for sure. Everything

Jessica Abel: 21:55

we're doing comes straight outta our brain. And we have to make it real. And that is a creative thing. So anybody who's listening to this going am I creative enough? Yes, you are. That's just set that aside. But the second thing is that for a lot of people, what they want out of the business is that they can do whatever the hell they want. They don't have, they're not doing sh exhibitions and films and whatever. They're spending time with their kids. They're taking time off. They are, doing whatever it is that, does recharge them. And sometimes it's creative play. Sometimes it's other stuff. I think it's really important to, to say, it get to choose, you get to choose how you're gonna spend your time. And, trying to the thing that you were mentioning earlier about what does it feel like to compare myself to these other coaches who are promising these kinds of results? The thing that has happened. In last 10 years in the internet business era is that, many, many people have been invited into having their own businesses, which is a great thing. That's, I'm happy that that is true. But very frequently parameters and models for those businesses are just, they're modeled on, There's no consideration of on the inside. They're modeled on much bigger businesses

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 23:06

with multiple somebody else's dream, somebody else's needs.

Jessica Abel: 23:09

Yeah. But also just I mean, the biggest thing that happens is this, in the creative area is like the creator economy. And so now I need to, like the creator economy basically looks like. Being visible and online all the time. You know, making YouTube videos, making, Instagram reels, like showing up all the time, building a large audience and monetizing that audience in some sense. And there are plenty of people, influencers, whatever. That's literally their job. Their job is to monetize an audience. They build an audience. But for most people, I know most people I work with, most people whose work I value, they're not, they don't wanna monetize an audience. That's not what they're trying, an audience. They're trying to find clients, they're trying to find people who wanna hire them for things or wanna buy things from them, or whatever that is, that's different, that's not monetizing attention. That is directing people to work with you. but there's no acknowledgement in sort of the way you see this, advertised on Instagram, that that's a completely different kind of process and a completely different kind of business. Yes. And that most of the people, the kind of people who are here listening to this podcast right now, they mostly want to be working with a relatively few clients doing something cool. Helping them some with something interesting.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 24:27

Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 24:28

And those people mostly don't make buying decisions based on you showing up all the time in their feed.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 24:37

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it really good point to kind of interject and move to the next question because you just pointed out something really crucial there that. A lot of the people listening, a lot of the people you work with and I work with, they actually don't need high volume numbers of clients because of the way that they do price. And I'm really interested, you take a very pragmatic approach to pricing, starting with your capacity, time, money, goals. Can you walk us through how you would help someone figure that out? How, should they charge based on real life and not magical thinking. I'm asking for a friend.

Jessica Abel: 25:10

Yeah. It's, it's a very simple sort of structure. It's not necessarily that easy to, implement, but it's, this is what I start all of my coaching engagements with was we do the ground truth calculator. Do the ground truth, assessment essentially. So we start with, what are your financial needs? And being very, very honest about what those financial needs are. Adding in a lot of. Margin and padding because the nature of our business is to be very cyclical and up and down. And you sometimes you're making a lot of money, sometimes you're not. Also, who knows, you need to take off six months for some reason that can happen. So making sure you're building in margin into the, into your financial goals is essential. To actually feel a sense of stability. And that sense of stability is what allows you to be creative, allows you to do your work and, and feel fully engaged with your work instead of having half your brain constantly like worrying about what's going on with the money. So you start there because it's not just money, it's all these other things. Right. And then I, we go through a quick sort of, not that quick, but like a nice reflection on your capacity. So capacity in a very broad sense. So your, literal time availability. What's going on with you emotionally? What's going on with people around you? Are they very, they need you a lot. I know you have children who are school aged, they need a lot from you, right? Yeah. So I have children who are teenagers. They need a lot less from me. So there's like, it's very time-based, and changes, depending on what's going on in your life. So you do an assessment, which I call a capacity audit, and then, you might do an investigation into your values. You might think of some other stuff. You know, basically you're just trying to, and that's just a, it's a reflection to kind of set that front of mind as you go into the next step, which is to use a calculator I've developed that essentially links time and money. So instead of just saying, how much money do you need to make? Okay, great. How many clients do you need? Cool. Let me get that many clients, which is the old author, I need to sell 10,000 books in a month. Now what? Right. It says, alright, well what does that require as far as time? Mm-hmm. So if you have one client, it's this amount of time you have two clients, there's a certain amount of time that you have to have put into each client. And also there's probably time overhead for both of them, just to run your business, to do the marketing, to do the administrative stuff.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 27:34

Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 27:35

And the, the way I do it is very napkin math. It's not, accurate to the penny, but it gives you ballparks and comparisons. So you can compare ideas for different offers with each other and say well, what if I did this? What if I raised my prices? What if I raised my client load? What happens to my time? What happens to my money? how can I get to a balance here? Where and, and you start with your. Money number, your, what I call your enough number and then your time that you have available, from your capacity audit and just from time tracking, just knowing how much time you have available and you're matching to that. So there's a field that turns green. Good idea within your time, right?

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 28:12

Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 28:13

And you can run multiple scenarios. Yeah. You can duplicate this thing and try different things. So that's what I do. That's literally what we do. The first, one to two sessions of coaching is figure out what could this look like?

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 28:24

That's so fascinating. I was so pragmatic. I love it as a very action biased person that there is actually a calculator that will allow you to understand that and test different theories without having to go through six months to a year of trial and then realizing that it's not all it was cracked up to be, or you kind of, it was a bit of an illusion based on a lot of right idealistic thinking. Fascinating. But we know this

Jessica Abel: 28:49

doesn't tell you if this is gonna sell or not, right? This doesn't answer those kinds of questions. We do market research after that and, and try to really get into who wants this? How much do they want it, how do they talk about it? And try to tailor from there. But you know what you're going for and you know what could work. This is the, the key different difference. And you're saying, you're not plunging six months into something and then finding out doesn't work. What this would tell you is can it work? What would it take for this to work? How many hours would you need to put into it? Hypothetically, how many clients would you need to produce? And then then you have to think well, what tools do I have to bring those clients in? What is the nature this offer? Can it is, is it aligned with the kind of pricing am I'm envisioning, or do I need to change the offer so that it matches up with this pricing? So there's a lot of questions. Pricing to me is, it's just a lens on every other part of your business. It's a lens on offer design. Business model design, yeah. On marketing, on sales. You, if you start with that and you're okay, well this needs to be my goal because this is the time and money equation I'm dealing with. Then you go, yeah. Oh geez, okay. Now I need to really address what it is that I have built. Which of the things I'm gonna lean into? Am I gonna build something new? Finding and, and communicating with the audience that is actually the right audience for this. Yeah. So even people who've been in business for a long time, they, if it's, if they just keeps not working, keeps not working, keeps not working, they're why is the money not showing up? You can run it through this thing. Go oh, oh, you know,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 30:21

but then that leads you with big questions, big crisis or, yeah. Or raise some bigger questions. And what I know when we've chatted before, a topic that's come up that is, I wanna say, I don't wanna say very dear to my heart'cause it really isn't a flipping hater, but I struggle with it, is, the creatives I work with also really struggle with overdelivering. So, you know, not, the typical thing I will see is a design agency. They have debris from the client, they fulfill it. And they're like, but it'd be so much better if we just did this thing. The client said, no, they don't have extra budget for it, but we wanna be proud of this thing we're putting out into the world, so we're just gonna do it anyhow. And then undermining their own profitability and their own pricing by doing so. And also setting on unrealistic expectations with both that client and of themselves with future clients and future pricing, by just kind of making it that little bit better. And I think you could apply that to so many different types of creativity, not just, you know, design studio. Why do you think creative people,'cause I really do think this is an instinct of a creative person. Why do you think we do this so instinctively? And how can we start to build healthier boundaries, especially if we've accidentally trained our clients to expect more?

Jessica Abel: 31:34

I mean, s super good question. I don't know that I have a full answer for that, but I feel one of the things that having this calculator does is it makes you the trade-offs, you're making brutally clear. Where you go, okay, well if I go from say 40 hours with this client to 60 hours with this client, my hourly rate goes from$300 an hour to 150 or whatever it's right, or to a hundred or 99 or whatever, it goes to minimum wage. You, you can see what you're doing and that can help stiffen your spine in drawing those lines because at some point you have to make those decisions. Like especially if you have a scope, you've fulfilled the scope and you're going over it. You need to have know that you're doing that and say, okay, I wanna do this because I see the value in this as a marketing tool or as a something, there's some reason why I wanna do this, but what this is gonna do is X to my financial picture going forward. And yeah, so having those facts to lean back on. And this is also something where, earlier in the process, it helps people, price and stand by their pricing much more. Strongly because it becomes exte external. It's not mm-hmm. I am somebody who's a tall poppy and I'm just think I'm so great and therefore I have these pricing this, these prices. No, it's because this is what it costs to do what I do.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 32:58

Yeah. What it costs. Absolutely.

Jessica Abel: 32:59

And so that, that's helpful sort of earlier in the process. And then I would say too, what do I wanna say about this? Essentially if you go through the offer design process and you get super clear on, on, and you do market research for what people really want, when you have the impulse to add stuff, you need to go back and say what are the outcomes that people actually want and they care about? And am I providing those things? And if I'm, if I'm look overdelivering

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 33:25

mm-hmm.

Jessica Abel: 33:27

It can, I mean, in the case that you specifically named, I'm sure people are oh, that's great. Fabulous. Now we have this extra thing. But in a lot of cases with coaches and with people who are done with you, service providers or something like that, it just overwhelms people. They don't need anything else. Yeah. Completely,

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 33:41

completely. Yeah. It's, I, and I've been in that position where I've been like, I really like this person. They could really value, they'd really appreciate this extra thing. Giving them that extra thing actually just dilutes that relationship and they do feel like it's too much and they don't, so it is ironic'cause you're going to it with the best of intentions normally, but, it ends up being something else. And as you were talking as well, and you mentioned about earlier stage, I was just thinking to myself, if you go through the discipline of that process and understanding how your hourly rate or however you charge, how your pricing is structured and built and what are the different layers within it And then almost like I was just thinking that's the kind of thing I should have a post-it note next to my screen so I can refer back to when I'm making a decision, should I just do a bit extra on this? Because it just make it that bit nicer. The other thing I'm thinking as you were talking was it's not then a shock that the majority of creatives in a commercial situation that I've kind of worked with. So creative agencies, traditionally, they, I was the, I, as the marketing person, I was the only person in the business who didn't have to do time sheets, who didn't have to do time tracking because I was the only person whose time was truly house jobs.'Cause I was working on behalf of the agency. Everybody else within that business was doing time tracking, even the finance people to see how long they were spending on the different client accounts. And when we go, even if you don't work in a creative agency, if you go off to work for yourself and it's a small slash micro business or sole person, you more than likely aren't tracking your time. And if anybody's been through that process and had to do a time tracking thing, it is the most painful thing. My last operations person got me to do it, and I was just, honestly, I hated it by the end. I absolutely because it was extremely painful for me as somebody who is curious and likes to follow, that path of curiosity. But even just going through that process, even if you're just doing one day of it, one week of it, it soon shows up for you. Like when you're then making the decisions about spending more time on stuff. It's really, it's in recent memory when you think well. What did that cost me last time and how painful did it feel to write that down on the time sheet? Because I knew I shouldn't have been doing it like a naughty school child. So even if you're, well, this is

Jessica Abel: 35:56

the thing. I want people to be able to feel like I, this is gonna give me joy and I wanna do this. That's fine. Yeah. You just need to understand what the trade offs are and so the, this is part of a capacity audit, essentially. It's what is literally your capacity? Where are you using your capacity? And I have a time tracking activity that I do in my other program, the creative focus workshop, that I bring in for clients sometimes, which is a little bit unconventional, because what I ask you to do first is lay out what you think your day is gonna be like, what you intend to do for the day. Then you track your time and you compare and you say I thought this was gonna be 20 minutes, but actually it was 90 minutes. You start to get more, that comparison is really useful. Not, I mean, obviously I try to help people, not self fate over the whole thing, but it's,'cause it's not about blame. this is. Now you are seeing reality with a much clearer, it's not just, oh, I spent time on that naughty me. It's oh, I thought I was gonna be doing this and I ended up doing this. And that comparison is super valuable and in reframing your thinking about all this stuff. Again, I think that if, if you're a creative person, you're wow, I really wanna do this extra piece because it just would be the bow on this thing, it would give me a lot of joy. I wanna put in my portfolio, great. Just know what you're doing. And I'm not having anybody in my, in my world, start from an hourly rate. I definitely avoid that. But what I do is I produce a kind of napkin hourly rate, so you can compare different things. So if you, again, if you spend 30 hours on something instead of 10 hours on it, it's going to show up there and you're oh my God, now I should, might as well be a buser in a restaurant.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 37:33

Yeah, I mean that, that quick post-it note on the side of the screen, so your eye keeps starting to it and you're like, oh shit. Gotta tools down, move on. I was think, just thinking then of an example today where I went to do something that my assistant asked me to do that I needed to, that unblock her on so she can move on to the next stage. I went to do that thing. I noticed that there was an error with something. So within that, which then I had to go fix and that led to something else. And, and I was like, oh my goodness, this is just being a business owner. I think even just being cognizant of all the crap that you have to do and getting a realistic picture of how much energy and time that actually takes.'cause it's never as simple as those tools that we're sold, to make out when they're marketing to us. You know, just thinking like password resetting, you know, stuff like that. Yes, it's painful. It's a struggle and I think it's part of being a small business owner as well. But I, yeah, think that any time trucking study or anything along those lines, any kind of reminder of what our time is worth is, is super value and metrics around that. Super helpful. I, I really think

Jessica Abel: 38:42

too, like you were saying, doing it for a day a week, I recommend doing it for two weeks at, you know, and then stop. You could do it again later and check yourself later on, but it's not something where you have to get into a system of time tracking forever. But it's really, it's a reality check saying, what is your capacity? Because the biggest thing I see in business owners and in creatives in general is everybody's trying to cram in 18,000 things, and every solution to the problem. The only fungible thing you have is your time, and you're like, okay, well I'll just put more time into that. And again, not recognizing what that does to. The actual what relationship that has to money, right? So that's a piece of it. But also just feeling like spending all your time feeling like you're failing because you can't check off everything on your to-do list because your to-do list has no relationship to reality, no relationship to your actual capacity. And so, yeah. And using, trying to use that last two to 3% of your capacity to put things over the top just really, really nail. And if we don't build businesses that create capacity and we all wanna have like the abundance mindset, right? We all wanna be abundant and free and feel creative and feel whatever that comes from, the stability that comes from having margin comes from having available capacity. And we have to design for that. It does not, the world does not want us to have that. The world is like, give me every iota of attention you have. Like any hour you have, make it the most productive hour you possibly can cram it completely full. rise and grind, get up, hit the coffee, hit the to-do list, get through everything, and all of that stuff is fight. You have to fight all of those things to restructure around. Yeah. I actually need to look out the, the window for half an hour every day. Like, that's just part of my process to play again. Yeah. Yes. That is so very, very true. A lot to think about there. I'm definitely gonna be mulling that one over tonight, but the

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 40:48

Whole concept of capacity is so big and I think the context you're talking about it within will be. Less known to some of the people listening in, and I feel like that is a whole other episode where we can go into the glossary of the context of capacity and what that means in this scenario and what it means as a creative person, but just as a top line thing. I was just wondering, you know, you struggle a line between coach, teacher, artist. What mindset shifts do you see your clients usually need to make before any of the spreadsheets? Pricing, marketing can really work and come to life.

Jessica Abel: 41:23

I mean, I think there's an ongoing conversation really that people are in with themselves and probably given that I'm working with very accomplished professionals, has been going on for a long time between. I am awesome. What I do is awesome. It's amazing. It needs to exist in the world. And why would anybody pay me for this? And this sucks, and I'm not capable of this and it's too hard, and so you kind of toggle back and forth between those things. And a lot of what I'm doing through my program, which is, three months. There's curriculum. It is very, very much between teaching and coaching, and I'm trying to create various kinds of scaffolds for those different moments. So, we just talked about with pricing, if you have done this calculator and you're this pricing is based on reality, I literally put my expenses into a calculator and figured out what my number was. And then when you're in a pricing conversation, instead of instantly discounting yourself before somebody even says anything, which is so common, right? It's$6,000. Well, but actually I could do it for four, 4,500, not doing that, but standing on your pricing. Having tools and having data and information to me is how you can reinforce these decisions that you need to make. And these places you need to be with your mindset. I don't love the word mindset, period, because I feel to me it evokes a, a tinfoil hat. You can take one off and put one on. You just change your mindset, and

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 42:50

I was thinking as you were talking, it's more the data sets and, everything you're talking about allows you to have an objective view of the impact of what you are doing and,

Jessica Abel: 43:01

yeah.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 43:02

Yeah. So I mean, I'm translating it to a different scenario. because I really relate to the statement, the situation that you just shared. Then this rollercoaster, almost bipolar, schizophrenic relationship with. Self worth around work. But the one thing that when I work with creative agencies, particularly within design, I really encourage them to do is to calculate the effectiveness of the work that they've done. Because so many of us are busy saying it's creative and then really proud of that as agencies. And then o others are like, yeah, but it's creative. It's, I mean, it was just the pretty pictures like you, they seem to alternate seeing these things like no measure the commercial impact. Get data around the commercial impact that this project had in the marketplace. Look at the original client objectives of the brief, not to make it look more beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, but how much more shit did they wanna sell And then see how it compared to that. That is the stuff that is. Those are the pillars that you can keep returning back to, regardless of how you're feeling about how good you are at your craft, having, I just haven't had a bad client meeting, a bad concept stage or something like that. You've got tangible, quantifiable proof that what you do works. And that's so helpful when they've been told at certain points in their life that their job is coloring in. You know, that kind of feeling like to be able to see the impact it has. And I know not everybody has the, capability to do that depending on what kind of scenario they are creative within. But I, I kind of could see the parallel there as you were talking and thinking that's actually what I recommend people do. Yeah.

Jessica Abel: 44:34

Also it really helps with, yeah. I think that's brilliant. Yeah. And basically you wanna get receipts. You wanna be like, this is real, this is a thing. So part of the market research process for me is to have people do interviews with prospective people who are in their prospective client group and find out. How desperate people are, and they frequently are to have a solution to this problem that you actually can do. Like, you know, that's real. And so that's part of it. Like this is needed. I'm not making this up. So that's a piece of it. Doing case study and testimonial interviews at the end. So if your work is less tangible than these marketing agencies where they're literally help helping people sell stuff, what are the results people got? Get them to tell you, write it down. anybody says anything nice to you about your work and is like, oh my God, I appreciate this. Write it down. Put it in a, a document which helps you, you know, you can come back to it daily if you need to. And remember Yeah.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 45:28

For your own mental health boost or for writing case studies or marketing materials or whatever. It's, yeah,

Jessica Abel: 45:35

both. But most importantly, your own attitude. Because if you come, this is something that our, our, coach Claire would say all the time is you have to believe in your. What you're doing, you have to believe in it and, and believe in the results.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 45:46

You have to sell yourself on your own product. offer product, and I

Jessica Abel: 45:49

absolutely agree with that. You have to sell yourself on your offer, and so you need to look for the evidence. I don't think you do that just by going looking in the mirror and doing affirmations. I just do not believe in that at all.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 45:58

no, it doesn't work for me at least.

Jessica Abel: 46:01

Yeah, okay, whatever. If people, if works for that, works for you, fantastic. I'm so happy for you. But I think that the evidence is slim that that works. What works is, wow, my clients, told me how happy they are. My clients are publishing their books. My clients are selling their products. My clients are doing this and that and the other thing, and what I do got somebody from this point to this point in this amount of time and oh my God, that's amazing. This is what they said they wanted and they got it and they got more. Mm. And believing, I believe very, very strongly in the two main things that I do in the creative focus workshop and in my business coaching. And when I do sales, I enjoy it. And for most creatives, that's you what? But I enjoy having these conversations.'cause I'm just in the sales conversation, I'm helping people see stuff. Yeah. I'm helping them understand stuff. They can say no, you know, there could be life circumstances or money circumstances that mean they can't work with me. Fine. Yeah. I believe this stuff. I know it works and I know it because people have told me and'cause I've seen it happen.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 47:02

Absolutely. So, being mindful of time and grateful for yours, I want to finish off by asking where would you, who should get in contact with you and where should they go find you? I know you shared something exciting and new that you've been working on with us, and maybe you can tell us a bit more about that and who should go grab it.

Jessica Abel: 47:18

Yeah, I'd love to. Well, I think if you're recognizing yourself in this conversation, we should talk. I mean, I think that Charlotte, your work is amazing and there, and is needed by people who are at that point where they're like, my offer is validated. It is something that has the opportunity to support me the way it needs to, both on time and money, on a time and money basis. As soon as you know that man, talk to Charlotte. But until then, come to me, and rework the basis of how your business is structured, you know? So what I have is a new training that is, it's prerecorded so you can get it any time. And it is, I'm calling it, you know, stop working nights and weekends. Basically, it's focused around this idea of capacity and why your capacity is completely blasted and then gets into the specifics of. The, I don't do the actual calculator, but like the, the way the calculator works and how you're relating time and money together and why this is the, I have the Solve for Sustainability formula, which is in there as a kind of, here's how you need to be thinking this through so that you're designing something that has the potential to hit your goals instead of designing something that doesn't have the potential and then wondering forever why it's not hitting the potential. It's not your fault. It's a design problem.

Charlotte Ellis Maldari: 48:37

Yeah, absolutely. I love, I even just the title of this so exciting, stop working nights and weekends, so relatable. I've actually just signed up myself. I'm excited to go watch the training. Jessica, thank you so much for joining us today and oh gosh, touched the microphone. extending this conversation. I always really enjoy when we chat and I never feel like there's quite enough time. So, thank you for being here and, I look forward to the next time we get to speak.

Jessica Abel: 49:02

Me too. Every time. It's such a, such a pleasure to talk to you.