This week, I’m suggesting a really big shift in the way that you love your business. I’m John Paul Fischbach. I’m the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. And this tip offers you one of the most successful ways to create a sustainable creative business. You know, the biggest mistake that most of us make is that we actually are in love with our business or, you know, our products or our services, not with our clients. So, this week, I want to talk to you about loving your customer more than your product or your service.

Now, I get it, you know, we’re creative, we love our product, we love the thing that we make, right? We feel that everyone should experience it. So consequently, we spend our time, and our money, and our energy making that creative offering, right? So we pour our love, we love the thing we do, we wouldn’t be doing it, right? Love what you do, do what you love, that sort of thing. Well, that’s great, but that’s a huge massive investment of all of our energy. But we want our business to be sustainable, right?

So this week, I want you to consider where your attention goes. First art, the creative stuff that you create, the product or the service or the customer, okay? If all of your love is going into the art, maybe you should share some of that love, okay? So I’m just…this is a challenge, should you be putting some of your attention on the customer? Well, why? Okay, there’s three reasons.

Remember that I talked about the fact that your brand in the marketplace is a combination of your enthusiasm and your likability, yeah? So who is that’s perceiving that? Is your art perceiving your enthusiasm, your likability? No, your customer is, okay? The second reason you would care about this is that the most sustainable business is the one with the customers who are raving fans. If you want your business to be sustainable, you need customers who are raving fans. How do they become raving fans? You give them a little love, okay? And the third reason you do it is because the best customers, the customers you want are called customers for life, not just one-time purchasers, okay?

So there’s two things that I would think you should do in the how part of loving your customer. Number one is observe your market. Really, look at who you’re serving, look at who your customers and clients are. Anticipate their needs. Now, there are six human needs, if you meet one, you’ve got a customer who’s interested in you. If you meet two, they become a customer. And if you meet three of them, they fall in love with you. So those needs are certainty, variety, significance, connection, sometimes that’s just love, and growth, and contribution. So think about those six needs. That’s how businesses work.

The second reason is…the second part of how you would do this is to know more about your ideal customer than they know themselves, okay? So what I want you to think about is who’s your ideal customer? You need to get to know them. Know what they need, know how they live. The more you know about them, the more your creative product or service is gonna meet their needs, yeah? Okay. And then what would you do to love your customers? Well, really two things. Leave them in a better place, right? They met you, you gave them art that opened their heart, stretched their mind, changed their life. You’re gonna leave them in a better place. Make sure that they know that you brought them to that better place and your art brought them to that better place.

And the second thing that you can do is to give them unexpected surprises, right? They did a transaction with you, they bought a ticket to your concert, they attended your show, they came to your gallery opening, they bought a piece of your art. What can you do that would be an unexpected surprise? Okay? So, that’s it. What I want you to focus on this week is to switch your attention just for this week. Switch your love from art to the customer. And then I want you to meet two needs of that list of six and just know what they are. Okay.

So when you need other practical advice, I want you to check us out here at www.auspiciousartsincubator.org. And if you want to go into deeper love, deeper depth and explore what those six needs are and look at some of the other things that you could do, I’d suggest you check out the ASAP, the Auspicious Successful Artists Program. Because inside that program, you’re gonna get a lot of great content, including an extended version of this tip. Okay. That’s all for this week.