From Dream to Profit: Treat Writing as a Business
Simple tips for adapting big-business strategies to your writing business
By Randy Fry
This is the latest in a series of guest posts by writers who understand the challenges of developing revenue streams with your writing. Please support them in whatever way you can.
Recently, I was asked about running a hobby as a business. If you want to turn a hobby into a business, you have to organize and plan for success. Many dream of turning their love for writing into a profitable venture through freelance work, blogging, or self-publishing.
Too many approach writing as a casual hobby, hindering long-term success.
If you’re serious about earning money from writing, the key is simple: “Treat it like a business.”
Take personal responsibility, set a clear plan, organize your writing business, and persevere with discipline. That doesn’t mean spending every waking hour on your writing endeavors.
How I began
Until a year and a half ago, I wrote as a hobby. I have been writing and posting on X-Twitter; I have a blog, and I have been posting on LinkedIn since 2012. I now post on Medium and have followers on all four platforms.
I plan to continue writing, focusing on creating better content, finding an audience, and developing this process into a viable business. I have shifted my mindset to transform writing from a hobby into a business and make money.
I am semi-retired, and during my business career, I bought, sold, and operated several companies. I quit my highly successful job and became a full-time entrepreneur in 1994 with one goal: purchasing my own company. I thought I had a solid grasp on how to run a company. My background was with two high-growth companies and working in many diverse areas of company operations.
I had the vision, the drive, and the experience—what more could there be? After 33 months of evaluating 117 companies, I bought my own company. Then reality hit hard. Running a business is not just about having a great idea or working hard. It's about understanding a complex system and making it work in a way that sustains itself and makes money.
I needed to learn how the business worked. As a company owner, I was responsible for everything. I needed to know how the pieces fit together, and it was overwhelming at first.
The challenge wasn’t just understanding and simplifying tasks but also ensuring that those tasks were done consistently. The company had over 100 employees and the correct departments: sales, accounting, production, engineering, etc.
As an outsider and new owner, I found it difficult to understand how the company operated. I started by developing processes and procedures department by department.
As an example, one of the first areas I tackled was marketing. Salespeople started sending daily marketing emails to keep our business top of mind for customers. It was simple enough to set up, but the real work was staying disciplined. Skipping one day can turn into two, then three, and soon, the entire system breaks down. This is precisely what can happen when developing a writing business; maintaining discipline is challenging, but persistence leads to success.
Measuring success
At my company, I implemented daily, weekly, and monthly scorecards to track progress and hold everyone accountable. These metrics helped us see where we were succeeding and failing, allowing us to adjust quickly.
Soon, we built metrics to view how and why each department worked. We began measuring everything: daily income, daily expense, quality of products produced, production rates, incoming requests for quotes, and more. Measuring performance isn’t glamorous, but it keeps the business moving in the right direction.
A writing business has the same issues, and measurement is important. I have measured everything I can think of: daily word count, daily time devoted to writing, followers, income, views, and comments. Also, I am adding new metrics for publishing on other platforms and tracking submissions to various publishers.
Owning my business, I felt my job wasn’t just to figure out how to run a company. My job was to develop a system that ensured we’d keep doing our processes and be able to monitor the health of the business.
Once I cracked that code, running the company became far more manageable and, most importantly, profitable. I am transforming this operating philosophy into my writing business, building a scoreboard with daily metrics.
You can do the same in your writing business. Add and subtract meaningful metrics. I am adding a dashboard to see and review my daily, weekly, and monthly progress.
As with many ventures I have undertaken, I break down tasks and required work into a daily organized system—success will follow. My company grew and became profitable. Treating writing as a business will result in the same success.
Thank you for reading.
Randy Fry is semi-retired, having fun, and imparting life stories and life learning on several platforms. He helps small to medium-sized businesses that want to get more customers.His goal for those businesses is to find and retain customers in this changing world of sales and selling. Find Randy on Medium.com, too, where you can read more of his great advice.
...always nice to brush with people ''living the dream".
Excellent advice. I come from higher education where metrics mean everything. It's time to treat my writing as important as I did the college and students I served.