I Started Running My Business Like a Farm and Everything Changed 🐄🌻

Diana Davis Creative: I've got 20 minutes. We're going to record a podcast because this is how we get shit done. We do little bitty things that move the needle in the time that we have. And that's how our dreams come true. So let's fucking go. Today, I'm going to be talking about an analogy I've been using like crazy in cusp and with my clients about your business being a farm. All right, y'all, we have one week, depending on when you're listening to this, until the Gemini mastermind kicks off. Six months together. A group of amazing, high-level creative entrepreneurs. An in-real-life retreat, which y'all have been asking about, and we'll be figuring out the dates once everyone is signed up so that as many people can go as possible. It's included. All you have to do is get yourself there. Masterminding, coaching, guest coaches, nothing is going to be added to your plate. This is about getting support with where you are at. This is about having a group and a coach to go to while you are expanding. It's about actually betting on yourself, staying accountable, and growing. Hear me out on this. ⁓ Stick me. If you know me as a coach, ⁓ I, of all, am a coach for creative entrepreneurs. And I love a frickin' analogy. So I've been talking about how, when we get ⁓ our this opportunity to do what we frickin' love, put our passions, our art, ⁓ our out into the world. We're basically given this plot of land. Picture this beautiful plot of land you can do anything with. That is your business. And you get to decide on that plot of land how it's going to look, how it's going to run, how it's going to grow. And often, what we're told to do from the gurus on the internet and what we think we should do because it's a quick, like, little fix, the thing. We have so many incredible entrepreneurs already in there and they are all so multi-passionate and I bet you are too. And you're a good fit if you already have a business that's thriving but you are wanting to expand it in some way or even get a whole new branch of your business going. A whole new arm. We talk about the octopus which is from my mentor is we end up just building a skyscraper on that plot of land. This beautiful rolling hill farm vibe, and we end up just building this ugly ass rectangular, like from the 80s skyscraper on this piece of land. We just go for it. We build without intention. We build without heart and soul because someone somewhere we are the head and different parts of our business are the tentacles. Did you know that each tentacle has a separate brain in an octopus? I thought it was heart. It's not, unfortunately, brain. But it's so cool because we get to build something brand new whenever we want because we are the niche. Stop. hold us in a course here are the five steps to building a profitable business. But I'll say it again, we are creatives and creative entrepreneurs work differently. Creatives work differently. We operate from here, not always here. And if we operate from here all the time, our souls are literally gonna just shrivel up. listening to the people who tell you you need to box yourself in. I have a client who is in Gemini that we just finished one-on-one coaching who has a movement dance company. Almost knocked my microphone down there. Has a movement dance company who has a coaching company and a photography company all under one umbrella. One Instagram, one umbrella. She's in Gemini, that's the vibe. She wants to grow that, expand it, serve more people. And you know what I mean. If you've been there, you know what I mean. When you've done the five step strategy to XYZ my income, you know that you shrivel as a creative entrepreneur because we didn't come here and quit our corporate nine to fives to freaking just do another robotic plan. Right? If we wanted to do that, we would be in a cubicle. get things rolling where she's just at a place she can't even believe her business is this good and she's not fucking burning out. So join us. Apply. The link is in the show notes or just shoot me a DM and be like, yo Diana, I don't know if I'm a good fit or not. Could you, could we have a conversation? I have a lot of conversations happening next week. I will make time for you. And if you're listening to this after the fact, making our money, getting our health insurance and going home with our 401k. But you're here. You're doing creative entrepreneurship. So that means we need to be creative about our business. So what I love in this, this vision actually came through in one of my own coaching sessions that I was doing. It was actually a healing session where I'm doing ⁓ a lot of inner work, parts work, thought work, memory work. Get on the wait list for the next round. All right, let's get into this episode. It's a little microdose just for you. internal family systems kind of stuff. And I just pictured my business as this beautiful farm. And I grew up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, Colorado. My dad's a cowboy, if you didn't know that. And I pictured this beautiful farm, chickens laying eggs and cattle and horses and all of these beautiful things on this farm. That's like our business. We're given this plot of land here, go do what you want with it. And what if instead of building this ugly ass skyscraper, we treat it like a farm. And every morning when we wake up, we go, what kind of chores do I need to do today? We always do our chores. If you live on a ranch, if you live on a farm, you got to milk the cow twice a day. You gotta feed and water the chickens and the dogs and the barn cats and the horses and the cows. Right? You gotta do that every day. So the fact that we think it's so all or nothing in our business is just silly. There are things we need to do every day for our business. Those might look like those might look different for everybody, but for me, it looks like showing up on social. It's the easiest thing to do. All I have to do is water the chickens, keep them alive, stay relevant, stay visible. Doing this podcast, all of the things that are also planting the seeds, right? What crops are we deciding to plant in our beautiful farm? Is your farm a California farm? Mine probably is. It has oranges and peaches and lemons and artichokes and all of these beautiful things. and all the animals. We have to get up and do our chores every day. That's the part like I'm doing right now in the 20 minutes that I have for this podcast. That's me doing my chores before the call that I'm about to jump on. What are your chores? What's your version of feeding the chickens? Right. And then we go, yeah, and some days We need to like rebuild the barn. The barn's falling down. We need to rebuild it. We need to, if you saw my, one of my recent reels, I'm building barbed wire fence because that is something that I do with my dad. I helped him do that. So I'm building barbed wire fence in one of my reels and that's something sometimes you have to do. That's not something you have to do every day. It's like building a new product. I'm building and launching Gemini. Launch season, we start April 30th. I have nine days left. Launch season is this very specific time. We get up at the crack of dawn. We do our chores. We're building the fence. We're building the barn. We're doing the extra stuff. We're planting seeds. We might even be harvesting. It might be harvest season. We can't just let those lemons rot, right? So there are seasons to business. Instead of building this ugly ass skyscraper with just a bunch of offices in it, and we're all grinding away like robots, we basically built our own cubicle, our own jail that we tried so hard to get out of. What if we woke up every day and just was like, what needs planted? What needs tended to? What are the big projects coming up? How can I prepare my energy and my resources for that? What things need to be done today to keep things going, to keep things rolling so we don't wake up with rotten eggs in the hen house, rotten lemons all over the ground. Dead chickens. What can you do to build your business as a farm, a beautiful farm? And I'd love to know in the comments, what does yours look like? Do you have sheep? Do you have lemons? Do you have, are you in a mountain town? What's the vibe? What do you want it to be? And guess what? You can have so many different enterprises. My dad talks about this. He's actually on the podcast. If you search Larry Davis, I think his episode is really good. And he talks about a lot of ranch life and building different enterprises. When you're on a ranch, you don't just rely on one stream of income. Trust me, because hail could wipe out your entire fucking crop. All your cows could get struck by lightning. Did you know that happens? Like 50 cows can die at a time by like all being struck by the same bolt of lightning. Morbid, I know, but it's true. It's true. So how can we have our different streams of income, different enterprises? Maybe you're shooing horses. If you don't know what that is, look it up. Maybe you're selling cattle. Maybe you're harvesting oranges. Maybe you're making wine. Maybe your freaking farm. has a pet this lamb for 20 bucks little station. Cause I've seen that. My algorithm is fully Ireland right now. I'm wearing my Irish jewelry. ⁓ I'm dating an Irishman. We talk about going to Ireland all the time. And there is a famous farm in Ireland that is going crazy on the internet because you can pay to hold and pet a baby lamb. pay. So don't come to me when you're like, I don't know how to make money. There are so many things within your world already that you're just not utilizing and on a farm on a ranch you utilize. Everything. Everything has to be efficient. There's no waste. Right? So how can we get into this mindset instead of just building the freaking thing on our beautiful plot of soil and wasting it? And then two years later, you're like, I need to demolish this skyscraper. I hate it because it has no soul and it's outdated. And then what? You have to buy a whole new plot of land because you ruined it. You didn't tend to the land. you weren't a good steward of what you were given. So I hope this little microdose mindset shift helps you today. I'm hoping ⁓ that you start to infuse more of your soul into your business. but also do it in a strategic way. A farm has to run, a business has to work. If you don't make money, you're just a hobby. You can have a hobby farm, you can have a full-time freaking job and chickens in the backyard. That's cool. You can do that. But if you're wanting the farm to like really run, you have to be strategic about it. But you also have your blood sweat and tears into it in the best way without burning out. Some days again you just feed the chickens and sit in the hammock and drink iced tea and some days you're going to rebuild the barn and do a hundred miles of barbed wire fence.