Work-life balance, Income Streams and Partnerships.
Following on from Part 2 in this series, Nanu talks about how she goes about managing her day-to-day life of being the creative, the marketing person, the manager and overall being a jack of all trades. She also discusses the various income streams she has from creating artwork and shares ALL 9 of them.
Besides working on art, she is hoping to expand through getting investments and partnerships and is looking to hire CEOs/CFOs, social media manager, assistant and forming a team for future projects.
Here is part 3 of the conversation:
Bridget Greenwood: This seems like an awful lot of work. How realistically do you manage to find the creative space to come up with your art? Then you’ve got to create your art, there’s the technical side, and there’s a marketing side.
Are you doing this on your own? Do you have other people to support you? What does that look like?
Nanu Berks: It’s a nightmare, but it’s also the dream. It’s both, we live in a polarity planet when everything’s both end. But yeah, it’s really hard. I have been doing mostly by myself for the longest time.
Now there’s partnerships that are starting to show up that are really amazing. I had good partnerships in the past to either a brand that’s really cool and that really buys what you do and they’re willing to cross promote. I like cross promoting a 50/50 split. It doesn’t matter how much work I’m doing, if I’m going to work with somebody else using their music or they’re animating something for me, or I’m making a shirt for them and they’re promoting for me, I feel like the split should be fun for everyone and then everybody goes above and beyond. Those are the partnerships I like.
Right now, I’m so grateful the space has changed so much from the beginning where it was all competition based. Now it’s very much, I call it cross investing, better than cross-promoting because we are investing in each other all the time. I genuinely want everyone I connect with to do well, beyond me and in their own ways.
I think that’s attracting the same people that have good interests for my brand as well. Because I’ve attracted plenty of unhealthy connections before and got burned a lot.
Now I am in the process of revamping and I’m putting together a pitch for a couple of investors, have had some really good meetings and I’m basically locking in some budget to have a serious marketing campaign for the next two years.
I am looking to hire a CFO/ CEO
I think I can start small, get some type of lawyer and some type of assistant. Those are the two roles that I’m going to be populating first because it is crazy. Doing everything, being an entrepreneur and wearing every hat from CFO to CMO, to lawyers, all the things, it forces you to understand your workflow. And that has been so amazing and useful for me in life in general.
What I’ve noticed is that I have about four months where I am creating with my hands. I like to paint and I like mixed media. It’s two to four months, but then I go into this low when I want to travel because I’m tired of being in the same space. I’m very nomadic. When I travel, I mostly just draw.
I just draw and go into poetry and content creation. I’ve learned to write my blogs and the content for marketing in those months while I’m drawing. And then I’ve learned that in the months that I’m hyper creative with my hands. I don’t need to do anything about marketing because my brain is just not there.
And I need to channel those 17 hours a day of obsession, creating a piece like these ones behind me. These big resin pieces in the back, I need to channel that and just stay awake and paint through the night, whatever needs to happen. Then some of the things, overlap a little bit, but then also from feeling your waves of productivity, you’ll feel your waves of down and like lows and what you need to do to avoid those. For example right now I’ve been mostly marketing and promoting a ton and I’ve gotten pretty burnt out.
I decided to stop that and give myself two weeks, and have some of these talks that are more fun and interactive. And also set goals for myself. I have the Bitcoin conference coming up in three weeks. I need to finish contracts and law. Just an insanity of things I don’t want to deal with. But after that, I get to hang out with people in person. It’s going to be fun. I get to sell some stuff. And then I come back and I’m going to paint.
I’m promising myself that in a month from now, I’m going to go back to creating with my hands. But you do have to gently nudge yourself into the waves of how you work. Otherwise, everything will go out of balance. You can’t be marketing all the time. You can’t be painting all the time.
But it’s crazy. I wanted to be a full-time artist. I never wanted to be a CMO. Once you realise that you ask yourself “okay, how do I go back to being the artist?” Otherwise you created this whole dream and then you’re trapped in a role that you hate. I’ve been trapped in that role for five years and struggled with that.
Do I quit?
In the early days you don’t have the capital to delegate and you have to do it all. Do you love what you do enough to do these six roles that you hate for a while until you can cross back over to doing things you love?
Most people don’t have that commitment and it does take 10 to 15 years to build something sustainable. Everyone would tell me that “I’m on year three. I put so much work in. Why is it not happening now?” and year six, now the team is showing up.
Now the capital is showing up. It’s been real humbling.
Bridget Greenwood: Thank you so much for sharing that, of using the energy when it comes to you and being productive in those moments as you can. Talk to us about the various income streams that you’ve got coming in and what you’ve set up.
Nanu Berks: I have about nine right now which is fun because all these things I’ve been developing for a long time. Some of the main ones, I have a crypto clothing and a graffiti swag clothing, most of the paintings I have, I turn into fabric and I make that into clothing.
For me, for the type of art I make, it makes sense to extend that into every single technology outlet. I go from painting a physical piece to making a video of that, making that video on NFT. Using the NFT video to augmented reality enable my piece.
That gives value to my art from two different angles.
Then I take a still photo of that same painting, and I turn that into fabric and I sell that as clothing. I sell the physical painting that is AR enabled. I sell the NFT, that’s two. I sell the clothing, that’s three. Then I can sell prints, for example, that’s four. And I can make all of those collectibles.
If you own the painting, you might want to own the leggings and you might want to own the actual print. Then you might want to own the NFT. And then if you only have the NFT, you might want to flaunt that and be excited that you have the only original.
Courses are definitely a fifth. I’ve been allergic and resistant to courses. I’ve written five or six in my notebooks and I’ve never been able to get one done. Until recently, an amazing old friend who has an amazing podcast decided to produce it. A lot of these things need to plug into the right team. It’s taken me three and a half years to put out my first course ever. I have them in my journal. I’ve never been able to push it until this NFT course that’s the right time. That’s the fifth one right? Fine art, clothing, NFTs, prints, courses.
I write books as well. I have three books out there. I like writing short guides. And this is one of those where I could be making so much money and this is what I say to people.
“Come exploit my brand with me. Can we please make money together?”
I’m leaving so much money on the table because I literally don’t have time to sit down and write a 30 page guide that I know would sell so easily that it’s accessible for everyone because it could be $20. I’m optimising that channel a bit more. The other one is probably speaking, I’m going into schools and corporations and bringing information there. Those subsidise, or those pay for the ones that I do for free or that I do for the community. That’s seven, right?
Eight, I do workshops that are interactive. I do them online, but also in person. And these are creative flow shops to help you hack back into your creativity mode. I teach anyone how to freestyle rap in 20 minutes, or how to get back into your inner child creativity. These things seem so silly, but they’re actually very freeing and liberating and healing. I love doing that work.
That’s eight and then nine, I guess I have a healing arts part of my company as well. Where I channel poems, I channel symbols for people help them get in touch with blockages in their body.
There’s millions of things we can do for revenue. And right now, the easiest ones to optimise are to market the online shop more, the NFTs, the fine art and the public speaking. But every everybody can create at least four income streams. I could see at least four for any one, a photographer, a coach, there’s at least four ways you can monetise.
It’s a good idea to find at least four streams that you can monetise and cross promote.
Bridget Greenwood: I have two more questions for you, and then I’m going pass it over to the audience to be able to have chance to ask their questions.
Question number one. Can you be a little bit more clear for anyone who’s listening who says, “actually I would like to be able to work with Nanu. I recognise her vision. I appreciate who she is. She’s put a lot of work in. This is something that I am very excited about.”
What are the roles? What are the partnerships that you’re looking for with regards to that?
Nanu Berks: Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much. I’m definitely looking for an assistant that is excited about learning everything.
I’m on top of deadlines and I’m doing 10 million things at once and it’s a lot. The feedback is, “Hey, I’ve learned so much, you’re a master marketer and I’ve learned, I feel like I just went through a marketing course and now I can see everything I didn’t see before.” I know that the value in just learning, being in the trenches of any brand, that’s going to bring you a lot of value.
I’m looking for somebody who genuinely cares and genuinely wants to learn. I’ve done a lot of trial and errors.
If it’s just for money, it’s not going to work.
And if it’s just for the brand, that’s not going to work. It has to be a combination. I’m looking for a marketing plugin, whether that is a big company that wants to market this or whether it is a couple of people, a social media person that knows her stuff, analytics person, marketing person that knows her stuff.
I’m looking for collaborators that want to start with a really big revenue split. I’m finishing up my pitches to lock in some hefty marketing budget. I also plan on hiring people as well. But I’m open to collaborating with people and see where it goes.
Everybody that I’ve collaborated with I’m still friends and we’ve all made money and we’ve all continued to grow together. I just like long-term friendships, it’s just better.
Bridget Greenwood: Wonderful. My last question, before we turn it over to the audiences, you’ve mentioned that you need to get another 200 subscribers.
Is it subscribers to your YouTube channel? And then you can monetise it. Please tell us the different ways that we can support you and thank you for the fantastic information that you’ve been sharing with us on this conversation.
Nanu Berks: Thank you so much. I so appreciate that. I think you need to be at a thousand YouTube followers to be able to monetise.
I will be posting weekly, best tips and best practices. This is the reason that I want a team, because if I have the time to take all these questions and do weekly or biweekly bits, 15 minutes or something, it’s going to be helpful. I really want to do that. Sharing my Instagram posts and sharing the Twitter and any outlets that you have that you wanna connect with me there and share those posts. You can subscribe to Nanu’s Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeGlr1vZLFT6VokLpH4S6AA
My biggest hindering
I guess, my biggest roadblocks is, one that I started posting about crypto really early on. I got shadow banned by my Twitter, my YouTube, all my channels got shadow banned. This means that people don’t really see my content unless they search for it.
For me, integrity’s first.
If it resonates with you. The energy follows energy. I really believe that.
If you’d like to purchase Nanu’s course you can discover more about it here: https://podcastfarm.mykajabi.com/sales-page-f22627c0-2fe0-49e5-826a-8726bccb411b