As creative entrepreneurs plan for the future, it’s easy to fall into the trap of watching what everyone else is doing, analyzing competitors, scrolling social media, comparing aesthetics, tools, and engagement strategies. But in this episode, we unpack a critical truth: confusion will derail a creative business far faster than competition ever could.

When creatives focus outward instead of inward, they lose clarity. The real struggle isn’t what others are doing, it’s the indecision, overthinking, and constant spinning that keep businesses stuck. From shiny object syndrome to perfectionism and fear of making the wrong choice, many creatives find themselves trapped in endless creation without execution.

Through real client examples and relatable stories, this episode explores why structure doesn’t kill creativity, it protects it. You’ll learn how systems and processes act like a supportive container, allowing creativity to flourish while still driving profitability and momentum.

This conversation is an invitation to stop chasing what others are doing, get crystal clear on your own vision, and build habits, systems, and decisions that support both your creativity and your business goals.

Key Takeaways:

1. Confusion is more dangerous than competition: When you’re unclear on your direction, every outside influence pulls you off course.
2. Your biggest competitor is your own indecision: Spinning, second-guessing, and overanalyzing quietly drain momentum.
3. Shiny object syndrome feels productive but it stalls growth: Constantly starting over prevents ideas from ever gaining traction.
4. Creativity needs structure to thrive: Without systems and processes, creativity turns into chaos.
5. Decisions create movement even imperfect ones: You can adjust a moving plan, but you can’t fix a stalled one.
6. Doing something once isn’t a test repetition is: Momentum is built through iteration, not one-off attempts.
7. Clarity comes from committing, not comparing: When you focus inward, competition loses its power.
8. Your systems should support creativity:
9. Structure is the container that allows creative work to scale sustainably.

Unlock the Secrets to Building a Resilient and Profitable Business at the Profit Connectors Club - https://profitconnectors.club/

About Sharon:

Sharon Galluzzo, Profit Growth Strategist at Profit Connections, is the author of several Amazon Best Selling books including “Legendary Business: From Rats to Riche$.” She ran a successful multi-six figure, award winning business for more than a decade before selling it for a profit. In her more than 19 years as an entrepreneur, Sharon has coached professionals across the country from franchisors and solopreneurs to businesses on the verge expansion.

http://sharongalluzzo.com/

https://www.facebook.com/sharonagalluzzo/

https://www.instagram.com/sharon_galluzzo/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharongalluzzo/

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Welcome back profit connectors. Today, we're going to talk about some things that come up this time of year as we're planning to for the future and building our businesses. A lot of times, especially creative folks, will spend a lot of time looking outside of their own businesses.

What is everyone else doing? Who's doing this? What kind of competition should I be looking out for? What is everyone else doing? What do their social media posts look like? How are they engaging their clients? What tools are they using? And we're so focused on the competition and the external

that we don't realize a critical element, and that is that confusion can kill a creative business faster than competition ever could. Everyone is so worried about the competition and what is out there, they forget to figure out what's going on in their own business. Most often, the biggest

competition that you need to worry about in your business is yourself. It's you and your mind and what is going on that is causing confusion, that is causing you to have plateaus that are keeping you stuck, the inability to make decisions, the time that you spend spinning and spinning, spinning, thinking

about what someone else is doing instead of getting really clear on what you want in your business. So today, we're going to talk about how to clear up some of that confusion and reset your vision. Reset the place that your mind goes whenever you're working on your business, to work on your business and

getting crystal clear at home before you go looking for what everyone else is doing. Because for creatives, let me tell you, shiny object syndrome is real. We want to know what everyone else is doing and what what are they doing, what's working for them? What should I be doing? And that will actually create a

lot of confusion within your own self. One of my clients was so overwhelmed and frustrated because she just couldn't figure out where to start, what to focus on. She was very cognizant of what everyone else was doing in their social media, how their pages looked, how everything was, how they were doing this,

and how they were doing that and and that. She needed to change her esthetic. She couldn't be who she was as an artist, because she had to match what everyone else was doing. And let me tell you, that caused a lot of heartache and stress and anxiety because she didn't understand that you or didn't

believe I guess she understood that you can be who you are, but she didn't kind of have that belief. And she was really stuck in the confusion of but everyone else's looks like this. She was really stuck in in creation phase. I need to be I need to work. I need to make a new thing. I need to create a new

step. I need to be in, be into whatever is coming next, like that whole creation phase. You know what I mean? It can be writing an email. You could get stuck for a week or a month or a year trying to figure out how to word an email correctly. It could be confusion in implementing social media. And

we get create as creatives, we get really, really stuck in that. We we want to look at everything. We want to make sure everything is just right, and before we send it out, before we make that step, we need to have everything correct. And so my client was very stuck in that that creation, and looking at

what everybody else was doing, she was scared to make big choices, because that might mean that she was going to make a mistake. And I think that that is a repetitive refrain that I hear from a lot of my clients, and when we allow ourselves to be stuck in confusion, when we get to that place that we can't

make any decisions, we can't move forward because we are just stuck. There's too much going on, and our and our logical brain will tell us, Oh, it's not you, it's the competition. And when we're looking at the competition, when that's where our focus is going, that is where our energy is going to go.

That's where we're going to spend all of our time. And if we can grab that energy and focus and pull it back in and get really clear and have. Clarity on your business and what you want to do and the difference that you want to make in the world, then you can actually move forward and honestly, when

you get crystal clear, and you really get your systems and processes in place, and you're really structured in a way that is flexible enough for you to be creative, but also allows you to be effective and profitable, then competition really has very little to do with what you do. Competition can then inform what

you've already decided to do, instead of getting you confused in 65 different directions because you're focused on them, and you're not focused on yourself. This. Does this sound like you? Does this sound familiar? You have too many ideas. I could do this, or I could do this, or I could do

this. Oh, this is really cool. Let's do this. I, oh, wait, wait, wait. I woke up last night from a dream with a perfect idea. You are focused on creating, creating the things, and coming up with new ideas, and you really get caught in that creation of now, those wonderful ideas have to be

brought to life. And so we spend time in the creation and the development and making it just right, and making it fit, making it feel good, and then we decide, You know what, I don't think I like that anymore. Or you know what, I tried it and it didn't work the first time I tried it. So I'm not going to

try it again. I'm just going to start something new,

and then you make decisions, as I said, based on what everyone else is doing. Those are the places where we as creatives, get really, really stuck, and they're the easiest places to go because we've done them so often we keep repeating those same things because they make us feel safe, they make us feel

grounded, they feel good because they're creative, and they're coming out of the part of us that makes us feel alive. And so it's really a paradigm shift in thinking for creatives to be able to say, Yes, I can be creative, and I can have all of these ideas, and I can move in the space that makes me feel

really good, and I can have structure around that. That's a really that's a feels uncomfortable to think about, and honestly, it feels uncomfortable to start. However, once you create it, and you do it often enough, it becomes easier, because now you've created a habit. You've created

a way of repeating something over and over so that it now feels natural. The problem, the challenge that the Nikki feeling that we sometimes get whenever people say, Oh, you need to get a system and you need to have a standard operating procedures. The reason that that feels constrictive and it feels out of

alignment is because it's just not what you've done, and once you do it, and once you practice it, and once you get good at doing it over and over and over again, it becomes comfortable. Whenever we had our video production company, I had a telephone answer, a four part greeting. When I answered the

telephone, I answered the phone the same way every single time. So it felt a little bit uncomfortable at first, and I had to have a script next to my telephone, and I would say it over and over and over again until it just became natural and I was able to say it and have inflection in my voice and and

give them, you know, a greeting with a smile, as opposed to, you know, I'm reading it, I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable. And that was actually something we had all of our employees do. And they also, when they started, were like, but once they got used to it, once it fit, once the jeans were

stretched out and the boots were broken in. It was comfortable. My daughter got a pair of Doc Martens, and if you've ever worn Doc Martens, they are horrifically stiff when you get them, they are very uncomfortable. It takes a while to break them in. However, once they're broken in. They are the

most comfortable shoes. And my my daughter's a teacher, she wears her Doc Martens to work. That's how comfortable she is in them. So it's like that. It's like breaking in a pair of boots. If you can think about putting these things in your business, systems, processes, all the things that I talk

about. If you can think about it as breaking in a new pair of boots, and once you have them broken in, oh, you never want to take them off. They're so amazing. So I got a little off track there talking about because I think that's, that's something that that's a pushback, that's that's our

comfortable selves, the one that wants to create and come up with ideas and start things and stop things and and look at what everyone else is doing. That is a a habit that we've gotten into that is a neural pathway. Speaking about neural pathways, whenever you do something over and over and over and over

again, you've created a neural pathway. It's it's just easier to go that way. It's like a dirt road versus a highway. A highway is much easier to drive on. It's smooth. It has lines, you know where to go. A dirt road might have potholes and washouts and and kicking up dust everywhere, and it's the road less traveled

at that point, because our brains are plastic. We have neuroplasticity. We can actually create new highways. We can turn that dirt road into a highway by using it over and over and over again. So once I was when I was the client that I was working with once we were able to sit down and look at her business

and really get clear about what she wanted and what she wanted to work on, and made choices that we were able to then make a plan for, she was able To actually get her business going at a at a different level, because once she knew what she was doing, we had a plan, she had a timeline. She had all of

the things like, mapped out what we wanted to do. And within that framework, and within that structure, there was room for creativity. As creatives, we have to always leave room for that. You know that that bobbing and weaving, that, ooh, I had a new idea. And how can you take a new idea and work it into what

you're doing now? Or do you take that new idea and write it down or record it, or somehow make a record of it and put it just on the side of your desk until you're ready to move into that and then you can rope that new idea into what you're doing. So once we work together and got all of her pieces worked out, we

figured out what she wanted to do, how she was going to get that done, we put we put dates on a calendar. She had a process that she followed to make sure she had enough inventory for the things that she wanted to do. She was able to actually make money. She was able to be organized, and she was able to

allow her creativity to operate in in its creative space, and allow her business now prowess to enable her to make money in her business. And that is the kind of thing that we need to get really, really clear about. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how, how do you get there? What? What do we do with that?

Well, the first thing that is most important, I think, and I'm right about this is you have to know where you're going. What do you want to do? You have to have that vision piece, that profit path, that you have to have that really clear about what it is that you want, how, how? What do you want to do? What do you want

your business to look like, how many hours do you want to work? Do you want to be full time? Do you want to be part time? Do you want to have do you want it to just be yourself? Or someday, do you want to have employees? And if you can't bring the employees in right away, that'll be the employees will be a long term

vision. But what do you want? What is that first piece, what do you want to do? Who do you want to serve? And that's the most essential piece, because if you don't have a destination, you'll never, ever know if you get there. If you don't say this is where I'm going, this is what I want to accomplish, and this

is what I want to do with it, then you are not ever going to figure to be successful. You're not ever going to feel successful because you've never gotten anywhere. You just keep spinning your wheels in the same place, because you just never made a decision. So the first thing that you want to do is you

want to figure out where you're going, and you want to figure out where you're going. Why? Why are you even in this business? Why are you doing this? Do you have medical bills to pay? Are you putting a child through school? Are you putting yourself through school? Are you are you contributing to household

income? Are you having this business so you can create a life? Style for yourself. Why? Why are you doing this? Is there a difference that you want to make in the world? If you figure out the why? If you figure out what lights you up, what is going to keep you going in the darkest hours, you have a

powerful motivator for yourself that you can pull out anytime that things get rough, anytime things get hairy, and you're thinking about quitting, if you know why, if you know why you're doing this, even if it's just a piece I know sometimes whenever, when things get crazy in my business, I think about my

clients, my if things are crazy on my end, I remind myself that my clients don't know things are crazy on my end. My clients deserve to have all of me and my A plus service and my A plus products. So that has been always for me a Why is I'm serving my clients so when I can get myself back to that, why?

Because my clients, I made an agreement with them to, you know, provide a service to solve their problem then, and they didn't just, you know, they don't, they don't know that, you know, I don't feel like coming into work today. They don't know that, and they deserve for me to show up my at my best every

time. So that's my why. That's a way for me to pull myself back to why am I doing what I'm doing? I'm doing it for my clients.

And then you need to clearly define what what do you what do you want to make? Well, how much money do you want to make? How much money do you need to make? To make profit, you need to clearly define a number around your around your income, right? If you want to be a profitable business, you have to do a lot

more. You have to there's a lot more components in making yourself profitable. But if you just come up with a number, what is that number? However deep you want to go in the analysis of that number, as long as it doesn't become analysis paralysis, then you can dig into that as well. But you figure out

how much money you want to make, how much profit is there? Figure out how many people you want to serve? How many widgets Do you want to sell? How many videos do you want to make? How many people, how many weddings Do you want to shoot? How many pieces of jewelry Do you want to make? What are the what? How many

clients, or how many pieces of product do you want to create? Because if you're an artist who creates something that takes hours and hours to create, you are going to be limited. And it's it's like with your very own hands. It's not something that you can make on a machine and do like a lot at one time,

but something that you make with your hands, you have to take into account how long does it take you to make that thing? How many can you make? So that will actually attribute to contribute to the it will contribute to the number of clients you can serve based on how much you can do physically. So you so you wanted

to clearly define how much money you want to make, how many people you want to serve, or how many of your product you want to give out, and then you want to and then you make, start making choices you need to decide. And here is where you may get stuck. Here is where most people sink into the quicksand of

indecision, and that is just making a decision on how you want to move forward. There are infinite, infinite numbers of answers to any question when it comes to business. So a lot of times, business owners will just get stuck in the deciding part. What is the right thing to do? What if I make the wrong

decision? What is somebody else doing? And they go into this swirl of trying to decide, and they're maybe making lists, and maybe they're not making lists, and it's just the the pressure, the anxiety, the frustration around making the right decision can absolutely stop your business Cold In Its Tracks. So

here's what you need to do. You need to look at everything, do an analysis, give yourself a time limit if you are one of those people that can research and ruminate for weeks and months. You're going to need to be a little bit faster on that trigger. So give yourself

a week, a day, two weeks

to do your research, to look into what it is you want to do next, and then make a decision. It doesn't matter what the decision is making, the decision will actually move you forward. And if you make the decision like, let's just say I'm buying a new computer, and I'm going to, I

don't know whether I should buy a computer with this much memory or this much memory, and I can't decide. And I can't decide and, well, you know what? For budgetary reasons, I'm going to pick the computer with the least amount of memory. Now you can go into you buy the computer. I've made the decision. I'm moving

forward, and now suddenly I realize, Oh my gosh, I need more memory. I made the wrong decision. I invested all of this money. This is ridiculous. This happens to me all the time. I never can make the right decision I thought I was in and you know, you can buy more memory for your computer just

because you made the quote, unquote wrong decision doesn't mean you can't make an adjustment to that decision. If you decide that you're going to make a program or you're going to go to a festival, and you and it doesn't turn out the way that you wanted it to turn out. A couple of things to think about.

Number one, it is really not a good set of of data. If you do something one time and it doesn't work and you never do it again, sometimes you have to do things multiple times to figure out what worked and will that actually work? Because sometimes maybe enough people didn't know about it. Maybe there, there

was, uh, your marketing could be better. Maybe, was it? Maybe it was a piece of something that that contributed to it not being what you thought it would be, that wasn't the actual thing that you chose to do. So first of all, doing something once and then never, doing again it again because it just didn't turn out

the way you thought it would. Is not a success strategy. If you did something once and it didn't work out, then you need to analyze everything to figure out what was the piece that didn't work. And a lot of times that piece is just people knowing about it and just having eyes on your product or your service so

that they could purchase it from you. So doing something once and then saying it didn't work, and then changing gears and starting again is a place where, especially creatives, we get stuck because that didn't work. I'm just going to try something else, and I'm going to try that and that didn't work, and I'm

gonna try something else and that didn't work, and I'm gonna try something else. And now we're at, you know, November, and nothing that we've done this year has worked because we kept throwing things out without analyzing what was why it didn't work and how we could improve it and do it differently the next

time. So if you've heard me talk about the flywheel, there's a concept in a in a book called Good to Great. And it is that that whenever you do something one time, you're pushing a really heavy flywheel, and it's really excruciatingly hard to get all the way around the circle the first time, and then

the second time that you do it, it's almost just as difficult to get all the way around. But if you keep repeating, and you keep doing that thing over and over and over again, it creates its own momentum, and it actually becomes easier and you can that momentum will actually build your business faster and and

more easily because you have that momentum. And so when we start things and stop things, it's like pushing that heavy flywheel around exceedingly slowly and with great effort. Every single time that we stop and start, we stop and start so getting that momentum by doing something once, figuring out why

it didn't work the way we wanted it to fixing something, doing it again, and getting that repetitive momentum going is really a very powerful tool, especially for creatives, because we are very likely To do something once and then throw it out and start all over again. So choose something and do it a

couple of times, a few times, figure out what's working and what's not working. Say you wanted you you went to a festival and you expected to. So whatever amount of money, and you didn't sell that amount of money, well, instead of going, I'm never going to that festival again, because if that festival

is your right audience, if it is the right fit for you, and you know all of the things are good about that particular festival, then look at what what didn't work was where, where was another piece that didn't work. And if you can afford to attend that festival again, because it's your right market, it's,

it's the right place for your product and service, then you know, you go back again, figure out what went wrong, where, what didn't go so well the first time, and fix those things. So then when you go back to the festival, the next time you have that experience, and you can make those adjustments, and the

more that you tweak and repeat things, the the better they become. Now, after a few times, if you figure out you know what that really did not work, then you can make another decision and change direction, but just the doing things one time and then not doing them ever again because it was too hard or

didn't work or didn't get the result that you wanted. It wasn't what you expected. It's easy for us creatives to just go, I'm going to create something else, all together, all again. So so you need to choose, make that decision, and then don't just throw the baby out with the bath water if it

doesn't go perfectly the first time.

So once

you have made a decision, then you need to make a plan. And there are a lot of us out there who love to make plans. We love to make lists. We love to create the methodology that we're going to use, and then it sits on our desk and it collects dust, and we don't do anything with it. So the last

part of the plan, of the last part of the process, is to take action on that plan. So and the plan doesn't always mean that you have to do everything yourself. That plan can include getting help with going to where your destination is right. It can include hiring people. It can include getting coaches. It

can include bringing people into like vas. It can include whatever you need to accomplish that thing, it is okay to get help once you make the decision. So, so what? What do we do? We're going to we're going to start with our why. We're going to figure out where we're going. We're going to clearly decide

how much money we want to make and how many people we want to serve, and what that difference is that we want to make. We're going to make a decision, we're going to choose a direction, and we're going to go then we're going to make a plan, and if we need help, we're going to get help, and we're going to take

action. And just one more thing on the making a decision. When you make the decision, it's never, almost never, the wrong decision. It becomes wrong whenever we don't it didn't quite go the way we thought it was going to go and Ugh, that was the wrong decision. Making. Any decision is a positive

thing. You make the decision, and then you take action towards making that decision come to fruition. And generally, once you start taking action and you're on the way, you'll figure out what is really in alignment and what's a little bit off. And instead of just throwing everything out, you can make

adjustments on the way. So I really encourage you to think about your business. Think about what you're creating, what you're putting in the world. Get really clear about who you are, what you're doing, what how you're serving people, what you want to make. And make those decisions confidently. Make a

plan and get some help. Take that action. And once you are doing these kinds of things, then the competition sub competition conversation in our head gets a lot quieter. Now you still want to know what other people are doing. It's important to understand trends and that kind of things in the market,

but don't let yourself get overwhelmed by focusing out and not in your business. So focus on your business. Get really clear and don't worry about what they're doing, because if you get really good at what you're doing, they're going to be looking at you. Thank you for joining me for the podcast

today. Don't forget, we have the profit connectors, dot club portal that is profit connect doors. Dot c, l, u, B, that's profit connectors. Dot club, that's the portal where we have all of our podcasts. You can see all of our gifts from our guests, the bios for the guests. How do you get in touch with

them? It's we're updating, and it looks really. Really good. So go into the portal and you can get all of that information. Profit connectors. Dot club, we'd love to connect with you there. And thank you for showing up. Every time you show up, your future self will thank you. And remember, go out and make a

difference. It's your impact. Go make it matter. I.