Creative Entrepreneur

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Daren Smith, owner of Craftsman Creative, located in Provo, Utah, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

I run Craftsman Creative. We serve artists, creators, and entrepreneurs who want to build successful businesses to support their work full-time.

Tell us about yourself

I'm a career creative of over 16 years. I started in sound doing live events, touring with bands like Neon Trees and Imagine Dragons, and doing post-production sound for film and television. In 2009, I started a boutique video production company with a director friend and ran that business until 2017. We created commercials, documentaries, and short films for brands like Freshly Picked, Comcast, Salesforce, BBC, and ITV Global. I left that business to pursue producing full-time, and my first client was the TV show Relative Race for BYUTV. I was a senior producer on the show for four seasons and then left to produce feature films. My first film was with Amy Redford, called The Thing With Feathers, which got into the 2022 Toronto Film Festival and was purchased by IFC Films. It'll be released as What Comes Around in the spring of 2023! In 2022, I did two more films, Give Me Your Eyes and The Carpenter, the latter filmed in Cape Town, South Africa. In between film projects, I work on Craftsman Creative, which I started at the beginning of the pandemic as a way to stay busy, and now is a full-blown business that serves creators who want to create success in their own artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Producing a feature film internationally feels huge. I worked for 12 years as a producer before I finally produced my first feature. To have that milestone come just a year later feels like a huge blessing and a massive leap forward in my career.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

The hardest thing is identifying and focusing on the most important thing. It's easy to get distracted or to let your focus get diffused over a number of projects or tasks, but being able to focus on one thing at a time until it's done or it's delivering the desired outcome is so important. This is part of the bigger answer, which is mindset. Success is 80% mindset, only 20% strategy and skills.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Align your business with you as the creator. If you try to build a business by copying someone else's success, you'll build a business that can't succeed in the same way as if you build one that works in the way you need it to.
Focus on your mindset. Shift your thinking, decide what outcomes you want in your life, and put a plan in place to achieve those outcomes.
Systems will save you. If you want to build a successful solo creative business, you need systems working in the background for you so that it doesn't consume all of your creative energy. To get help learning what those systems are and how to build them, head to build.craftsmancreative.co

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.craftsmancreative.co/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/darentsmith
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darentsmith/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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