We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shaochen Wu. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shaochen below.

Shaochen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

Earning a full-time living from your own business takes time, so go into it with a long-term outlook and patience. The journey looks different for everyone; for me, I left my corporate job abruptly and when I reviewed my finances, realized that I had enough runway to work on starting a business for at least 6 months before having to worry about making rent. It seemed like “now or never”, so I took the leap and told myself I would evaluate where things were after 6 months. It was hard not to put pressure on myself during that time to make money and use that as the only success metric, but I knew it was more important to learn, explore, and set the foundation for my business, because entrepreneurship was different than any job I had. I ended up making $10k during that launch period – which wasn’t enough to pay myself a salary but it was enough to show me that I should keep at it, so I came up with a plan to give myself more runway.

3 years into my business, I now pay myself a salary that’s enough to cover my day to day expenses with some savings each month. Two things helped me to get here – niching down and creating multiple income streams. I know those may sound contradictory, so let me elaborate. I’m a calligrapher, and about 1.5 years ago, I decided to only take on weddings. No more custom projects or other types of events. This allowed me to streamline my operations and get really good at mastering the needs and considerations unique to a wedding, which built credibility with my clients. This snowballed my business as potential clients saw me as an expert in my industry and other wedding vendors and past clients referred me. I began booking more and larger wedding clients, and am now lucky to have a steady stream of leads without having to do much marketing.

Within that wedding calligraphy niche, I diversified my income streams. I started an education side of my business, primarily focused on teaching other calligraphers how to book wedding clients. I have affiliate links for the supplies and software I use that are specific to my business type, and I’ve also expanded my team to include another calligrapher, where my role is primarily design and client management. Having multiple streams of income within my niche allows me to pull different levers at different times – for example, focusing more on the education side of my business during wedding off-season. Understanding your income streams and how they perform also allows you to create a plan for how to hit your target revenue each month, which puts you on your way to predictable, full-time creative living.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hi, I’m Shaochen! I’m a wedding calligrapher and business mentor for fellow calligraphers. I started learning calligraphy in late 2018, and when a work situation led me to leave my tech job in 2019, I decided to give my own business a go. Only I had no idea what that business would be! I enjoyed calligraphy as an escape from the stress of my fast paced job, felt that it was something I could master, and saw it as a business opportunity with low start-up costs – so Monstera Gold Calligraphy Studio was born!
As I celebrate my 3rd year in business, I’ve worked with hundreds of wedding clients to bring their signage and decor details to life, mentored over 150 calligraphers to build their own businesses, and have led a team of calligraphers to work on-site at corporate and luxury brand events all over the US.

I love the challenge of being my own boss. The world is my oyster as far as what direction I want to take my business – and while at times that can feel paralyzing, most of the time it’s incredibly empowering.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Let’s talk about 2020 :) Every single one of my weddings was postponed or canceled, just as my business was picking up momentum. Monstera Gold was less than 1 year old and I really thought that was going to be the end. I started looking at job postings and just couldn’t stomach going back to the same career I’d been in for a decade. So I got creative, I started experimenting with individual product sales instead of high value packages (I sold hundreds of wax seals that year), built my portfolio by doing styled shoots, and most of all, I began my mentoring business.

I started off by doing a free pilot for business mentoring and realized – holy cow, there’s a lot of demand for this! As I learned about calligraphers’ pain points to starting their businesses, I realized that there were several key themes and learnings that everyone benefited from. I used that to develop my signature Calligraphy CEO 1:1 mentoring program and continued to refine that with over 30 students. I took the templates I developed to build my own business, and productized them into tools that people could buy a la carte. And then I took everything I learned from starting my own business and coaching those dozens of calligraphers, and built an online course, Pro Wedding Calligrapher, that enrolled over 100 students. Every single one of those steps in building my education program felt like a mountain to climb – a new challenge I had never tackled and the imposter syndrome was REAL. But I not only had my own experience of starting a business, I drew from my college business degree, my years of consulting with Fortune 500 clients and start ups to streamline their businesses, and I realized that I have a lot of value to provide.

Creating the education side of my business was always in my 5 year plan, I just didn’t know it would be part of the 1 year plan. While I’m not happy about the pandemic, I’m grateful it pushed me out of my comfort zone to launch this part of my business early, because it has helped me build the most amazing community and fulfill my passion of helping others create their dream businesses.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I come from a “non-creative” work background and here’s the thing – everyone is creative. I was known as the “operational” person at work, the one who loved efficiency, scaling, customer service and things that you wouldn’t really think of as being creative. But there is creativity in the work that we do every day, it’s all about how you think about that work. You can do the same task exactly as the person next to you does it, or you can find a different way to do it, maybe a better way to do it, and that’s always how I felt about all my jobs, even the ones that weren’t in the creative field.

When I started this calligraphy business, a lot of people were surprised to find that I had an artistic side. Well, I took my first calligraphy class 6 months before I started my business and I think that goes to show that you don’t need to be an artistic genius to be “creative”; you can take whatever spark is inside all of us, and you can nurture it and harness it. It’s a muscle just like any other skill that we can exercise and grow.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.monsteragold.com/ AND https://www.calligraphyceo.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monstera.gold/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/monstera.gold/

Image Credits
Joe Chrzanowski Shannon Rosan Photography Kendall Aubrey Photography Olivia Marshall Photography Lauren Finch Photography Samuel Marz Photography Huong Nguyen-Takeba