How To Be Creative & Business Minded At The Same Time w/ Chris Sharpe

If you're like me, you started off in this business to make films, but now you find yourself as more of a business person. Priorities change and now you spend more time doing operations, sales, and marketing than filming. But, as you'll hear today, that doesn't mean you have to surrender your creativity.

Chris Sharpe is many things. He's a writer, director, producer, and digital content strategist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Yoga with Adriene, which has over 5 million YouTube subscribers. Chris is the author of YouTube Black Book which is an incredibly useful guide for helping people grow and monetize their YouTube presence.

In today's interview, Chris takes us on the journey of how he built a career on YouTube. It may have taken some time before it became the success it is now, but today it's more profitable than he ever thought it could be. Chris details his day to day responsibilities running a YouTube-based business and how his company is structured.

We talk about how to sustainably manage your business as it grows, such as hiring the right people and putting repeatable systems in place. Much of this involves removing yourself as the bottleneck of your company so that the work that needs to happen can take place. Chris also lays down some sound advice for figuring out where your niche is so that you can find more and more business.

What do you do every day to foster your creative side even as you systemize your business? Share it with me in the comments on the episode page!

In this episode

Key ingredients for building a successful video business
How to be creative even inside the boundaries of a process
When and who to hire as your business grows
The advantages of being a filmmaker first and an entrepreneur second
Putting processes in place to make your job easier and allow the work to flow easier throughout your business
Advice for narrowing down your focus so you can find more work

Quotes

"Our mission is to reach as many people as possible with high-quality free yoga videos, and YouTube is such a great platform for that." [11:23]

"If you're sitting there, fine-tuning edits, your business is probably getting away from you in other areas because you're so focussed in this micro-level and you have to be able to step back and see the big picture for the health of the business and the employees that you have." [19:45]

"Look for ways to turn everything into systems so that you can replicate it and keep moving forward and not get bogged down on the little stuff." [45:07]