A Major Key to Business Success for Neurodivergent Folks:
Omnichannel Commerce.
let me explain.
Not to be confused with omnichannel marketing; omnichannel commerce is a business model that utilizes multiple sales channels and brand touchpoints streamlined to make as many sales as possible.
by andra eugene
| Read time? Time is a construct, beloved. 👹
Ok, you’ve gone through 20 relatable, funny videos until you checked the hashtags and realized…this is a universal experience of being neurodivergent, not just adult humans fumbling through life.
A.k.a the #AuDHD #ADHD #Autism might not be there for funsies and you might have to speak with your primary care provider. It’s not that “everybody has ADHD/Autism/AuDHD now”, you just weren’t diagnosed due to the negligence of an adult you trusted growing up. Heads up: this piece will cover how your views on neurodivergent individuals have been shaped by the media. Also, you may read a personal anecdote on how neuroscience is more genetic rather than “Something that needs to be fixed”.
Neurodivergent people are uniquely equipped for entrepreneurship because of their acute sensitivity, and adeptness of learning new skills and recognizing and memorizing patterns quicker than neurotypical individuals.
The reasons you or others might believe that you’re bad at business as a neurodivergent creative are proof that you’re uniquely equipped to succeed. Think of TV shows or movies that have likely neurodivergent characters. I’m going to break down how these character archetypes are automatically equipped for success despite the “shortcomings” that the narrative of these media pieces is trying to portray.
Time blindness, missing social cues by being overly enthusiastic or stoic, and hyper-focusing on niche interests and topics, among other traits, can allow you to take a step back and find different ways of optimizing your current lifestyle to fit your specialized needs.
Whereas, mainstream media might reduce neurodivergent people to tropes like manic pixie dream girls/femmes, aliens on their first day on earth, or socially awkward robot-sounding personas that are autistic-coded characters cannot socialize properly on the lighter side; on the more negative side people with mood or personality disorders such as bipolar depression or borderline personality disorder, respectively as volatile, hostile, and violent people. Neurodivergent people have qualities that can fix the disparities and gaps in society.
Now, grab some tea or coffee, cuz this is a long one!
Please Don’t Block Me for Using the Term: Manic Pixie Dream Girls, But Hear Me Out
For example, manic pixie dream girls and femmes are portrayed as ditzy, clumsy characters that are too innocent and adorable to be faulted for anything, yet hopeless to ever evolve into sophisticated character development because their complex nature is oversimplified to suit the idyllic views of the main character’s story development.
Individuals that fall into this trope will know that the warm, bubbly personalities of manic pixie dream girls and femmes make them excellent saleswomen, account or marketing managers due to their inherent charisma and wit to make people feel at ease when it comes to making a sale or closing a business deal.
In mainstream media, manic pixie dream girls are usually depicted as working in retail or food service jobs; hopping from job to job because they’re unable to maintain employment. I think this makes them even more qualified for salesmanship and account/marketing management roles. These roles are known for short-term sales cycles and projects that last between 3-6 months and allow for seamless bandwidth switching between daily, weekly, and monthly tasks.
One example of this in mainstream media is the Netflix show Emily in Paris. In season one, we see that while Emily’s affable nature and sharp wit make her great at her job, it causes a lot of confusion in her work and personal relationships. A challenge that we join her in navigating throughout the show. In my 9 years of experience in various marketing roles, I’ve been able to close multiple deals both over the phone, in person, and online with customers and clients because my affable aura and amicable temperament can be felt whether or not the person can see me visibly.
Are They Truly an Alien, a Robot, or Neurodivergent?
Regarding the alien’s first day on earth trope, we typically see them as comedic relief side characters as part of the joke or the joke itself.
This feels subtly alienating for autistic individuals like myself when the story arc shifts into a scenario where they’re being dehumanized such as being bullied for sticking out. As an individual who was subjected to over a decade of bullying from classmates, teachers, and administration in a charter school, it was conflicting to watch these shows and films as a kid knowing that the hero usually won at the end of the film or show, at the expense of a trauma.
The great thing about characters in the alien’s first day on earth trope aside from the odd representation of neurodivergent people is that they’re usually solving a big challenge or crisis.
They’re also only able to solve this challenge because of the innate abilities they’ve accumulated due to their ostracization. In this case, a neurodivergent individual who decides to go into entrepreneurship’s innate ability is crisis management. Given that they stick out their “normal” usually feels chaotic and they’re not in a space to feel like they have a comfort zone; these individuals can stay calm during emergencies and urgent situations. This makes them excellent PR agents, crisis management professionals, or litigation lawyers who specifically service business owners.
Socially awkward robotic personas face similar challenges and scenarios like the alien’s first day on earth trope. While they may also be equipped for crisis management due to their abilities, they can be supremely equipped for non-urgent management positions like project or scrum management.
Think of any person who fits this description, they’re probably great at creating, analyzing, and maintaining data sets and databases. The key for them to succeed at entrepreneurship is to sell solutions around data analytics or project management, such as a certified Notion Expert who creates and sells Notion templates or does creative consulting on building data sets.
Their content doesn’t need their visage to build a personable brand, but an avatar that resembles themself and breaks data analytics and database creation and management simplified in both aesthetics and concepts to build trust with people who want to use Notion for school, business, and personal uses. Bonus points for picking a niche that directly correlates to their daily challenges and experiences that are common amongst a group of people. That way, they don’t come off as socially awkward because this is their zone of genius.
Before we get into the darker tropes, let me address some burning questions you might have.
Brief Pause and Introduction
If you’re wondering what this is and who it’s for, this is my manifesto for neurodivergent people who are looking to diversify their income streams whether it’s through their hidden talents, their arts, a business, or just need to pay rent this month.
You may or may not know if you feel worthy enough to ask people to buy into your “neurospicy” endeavors and say “Yes, I see you. I think what you have/do is cool, here’s some money!” Or, you have a billion ideas that come to you randomly or keep you up at night and you’re wondering which one to start with and add later. You may have been finding funny memes of relatable universal life experiences that some stranger on the internet shares and stopped laughing when you checked the hashtags and saw #ADHD #AuDHD #autism #neurodivergence. That last one was specific because that is what it’s like scrolling on Instagram reels.
In any case, Hi, I’m Andra. I’m a Brand Marketing Manager, and Author.
I help neurodivergent creatives and entrepreneurs diversify their income streams by helping them find their innate magic and manifest their dreams into reality for a living. As you can probably guess from these titles, I launch and manage brands and products and create content for these brands using the products I helped launch.
I also write books and articles. I offer business oracle readings to bring spiritual insight to the entrepreneurs I help on what to focus on and how they can make money using oracle cards, astrology, numerology, animal symbolism, and human design.
Some of these entrepreneurs struggle with inflammation or gastrointestinal distress and need help with eliminating inflammatory foods from their diet so I show them how to eliminate certain foods and ingredients that give them flare-ups so they can stay focused on their projects. For any of these brands I work with that need mid-size representation for their photoshoots and commercials, I stand in for them.
This is a lot of stuff that I do, but how am I doing everything?
For one, I’m only doing this under 1 LLC and 1 DBA.
Que? I don’t believe that if you want to hit 6+ income streams you need an LLC for each income stream. I live in Massachusetts, born and raised; our fee is $520 for each LLC registration. Can you imagine? Who has $3,210 plus tax upfront to start 6 different businesses?
Don’t even get me started on trademarks and copyright applications. I show people how they can diversify their income streams with their passions using research, strategy, and design. My methods are clearly different from others, but the process and outcome are the same.
You’ll diversify your income streams and launch your brands and products to market by the mission you’ve visualized. Aside from having an interesting approach to creative consulting, marketing, and entrepreneurship overall, I’ve had to do things this way because I became disabled at 21 and went from a scatterbrained young adult job hopping my way into a career, to a freelancer who had no other option to make income.
This is not an overnight success story; this is about finding out that even though companies say they don’t discriminate against people who are disabled because of the law, companies lie. I’ve either never heard from jobs I applied to or waited to disclose my disability at the interview to be denied for the job on the spot. While the ADA enforces the law, I’ve been told unless I’ve been fired because of my disability there’s nothing they can do. I’m going to dive deeper into this experience and come full circle, so let’s get back to this manifesto.
I’ve mentioned that the darker tropes portrayed in mainstream media were of people with mood or personality disorders like bipolar depression or borderline personality disorder.
When we hear that someone in the media is “crazy” or “insane” we think bipolar, sociopaths, narcissistic personality disorder, to name a few. In the new era of recognizing neurodivergence, people with these disorders are commonly left out of the conversation.
This brings more stigma by not making awareness of the chemical imbalances these disorders cause and how they psychologically and physically affect individuals who face these disorders.
Remember how I said I became disabled at 21? I had a psychotic breakdown and was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder bipolar type and generalized anxiety.
To you who may be reading this and don’t understand my diagnosis and may dismiss my humanity...
Think of in the first Doctor Strange (2016 film) how the Ancient One flicked Doctor Strange into the astral realm and he was floating in infinite dimensions and experiencing different physical phases that felt real but were not happening to his physically conscious body. If you don’t remember that scene please watch it below.
This is what experiencing a psychotic breakdown is like to the person going through it. To individuals who are familiar with spirituality or esotericism, they understand this as a spiritual crisis awakening. A common event that Carl Jung describes shamans, priestesses, seers, etc experience before the age of 22.
This makes sense given certain abilities I possess that you may know to be considered psychic. In short, a psychotic break is when one’s perception of reality is distorted. They may hear voices, ringing, see shadows or flashes of light, smell or taste things others can not, difficulty with reading, comprehension, or sleeping (National Alliance of Mental Illness or NAMI).
Psychotic breaks happen when one’s psychosis has an overload of stress and not enough rest from its mental processes.
Think of this like your brain getting the flu, but not like a head cold in the physical sense, but the cognitive processes of your brain signaling a great need for rest.
Psychotic breakdowns can be triggered by a combination of physical illness or injury, mental health conditions, lack of sleep, low appetite, genetics, trauma, substance abuse like very strong strains of alcohol, nicotine, or marijuana, and in rare cases, birth control in people assigned female at birth (Australia & New Zealand Mental Health Association).
In my case, I was in a traumatic bond with my then romantic partner and mother and was under a lot of stress coping with the fact that I was unable to find a job and could only find employment freelancing low-compensation marketing roles.
My break was triggered and I had to address my religious trauma in excruciatingly terrifying imagery that no one but me could see and experience.
I was genetically predisposed to schizoaffective disorder bipolar type II from my mother.
Unfortunately, even with her mental health history, her solution wasn’t to seek medical care immediately but to resort to religious methods first which delayed my healing by 2-3 years.
Since this event occurred before my frontal lobe was fully developed, it changed the trajectory of my adult life. I had to learn how to live as a disabled young adult who was already autistic and undiagnosed with ADHD as a child.
I had a different uphill battle than most of my peers in learning how to navigate my new physiology, how to advocate for myself, and treat comorbid disorders of my mental disorders in multiple doctor and hospital visits and hospitalizations, overcome gaslighting by multiple medical professionals who are supposed to be the expert, receive mistreatment from social and emergency hospital workers because they thought my abuser was a saint, find new health and social professionals no matter how long the wait times took because they didn’t align with my priorities.
All while learning how to self-fund a business with meager monthly disability checks and self-researching my solutions because information on making disabled people’s lives easier is somehow not widely accessible to the public as the new TikTok trend or dance. Don’t even get me started with new disabling comorbidities that spawn every year as I get older like the “tooth fairy” leaving change under your pillow; last year was arthritis at 26, and this year its frequent and constant benign syncope episodes at 27.
Most of these challenges happened earlier in my life due to multiple COVID-19 infections. Navigating these experiences as a queer, disabled person of color assigned female at birth at such a young age put my life in “impossible mode” in this simulation we call life.
But it also made me qualified to make the rest of my life’s work to seek supporting other disabled and neurodivergent individuals like myself to help them thrive despite their challenges.
Partly because I have at least a decade of marketing experience, and mostly because no job will hire me because of my disability no matter how many disclaimers are on each application saying they don’t discriminate.
If you’re neurodivergent, you can be considered disabled by the Social Security Administration and can go through the process of becoming certified and collecting monthly Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).
A lengthy process that isn’t worth it because your payments are based on your work experience so if you are young like I was when I started collecting, you might make between $711 - $988 a month at minimum
You can still have a job as supplementary income, but the total asset limitations are $2,000 if you have Supplemental Security Income (SSI). For Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), there are no asset limits. For either SSI or SSDI, a weekly work limit of 20 hours a week; and a monthly gross income limit of $1,550 or $2,950 if you’re blind.
You and I both know that’s not enough for a decent apartment, car payments, etc. While there are avenues to increase your payments or waive large amounts of income to cover necessary expenses, I am discovering and will be sharing my life’s work on this website you’re reading on, you probably want to discover more about how you can diversify your income streams and support yourself without breaking your body or compromising your soul. Being disabled and neurodivergent is not the end of the world for you, but a bittersweet beginning. It’s an opportunity for you to slow down and create the lifestyle you want to live on your terms.
So I Just Need to Sell an Online Course and Do XYZ?
When people first learn how to make money online and diversify their income streams, they often think of “quick and easy ways” to get the job done, such as affiliate marketing, digital products, online surveys, user testing, focus groups, freelance virtual assisting, social media management, design, etc.
But the truth of the matter is the concepts of these methods are simple, not the actual task itself.
Signing up for online surveys, user testing, and focus groups doesn’t guarantee you’ll always find a gig. Not to mention the unspoken downside written in the terms and conditions that you didn’t read that your data is being sold to third parties. Affiliate marketing is not an overnight success or get-rich-quick scheme.
There are rules that you must follow both the manufacturers of the products you’re promoting and the platforms you’re promoting them on. You might have seen countless “marketing experts” telling you that you can make 6 figures with digital marketing with faceless marketing, just after you buy a bundle of products costing anywhere between $27 - $497+ or download a free ebook of information you could’ve simply googled.
People also oversimplify selling freelance services for hire, such as graphic design, writing, social media, virtual assistance, or UX design to name a few. The problem is these are all marketing roles that take skill building, mentorship, and training to be successful.
Some of these skills can be learned in college, an online course, or a tech boot camp. Sure you can teach yourself these skills like I did when I was 17, but you still need to learn industry terms and how to navigate the industry if you want to use these skills whether that’s marketing, advertising, or an in-house role at a corporation.
Having or stacking these skills doesn’t guarantee you a gig or corporate job even with a credible, professional portfolio and personal brand because the key to succeeding in freelance is networking and word-of-mouth.
Social media won’t always guarantee you a gig either. The real skin in the game is a solid lead generation system that includes networking, follow-up, and qualification of scope, budget, and skills.
This can take years if you can’t identify your innate abilities and what’s aligned with your zone of genius. There’s a more efficient way to income diversification than you think.
Enter, omnichannel commerce, a business strategy that aims to provide a seamless shopping experience across all channels, including in-store, mobile, and online. This is a much easier way to diversify your income streams because it’s all done within 1 business.
A Closer Look at My Work as a Neurodivergent Entrepreneur
Since 2017, I’ve been showing entrepreneurs how they can create a customized model of omnichannel commerce at their economic scale so that they can diversify their income streams by capitalizing on every opportunity available to them without burning out by finding things that excite them.
The first successful client I’ve been able to do this with launched their Shopify store in September 2018 and have been able to sell out their inventory on weekend pop-up shops during the pandemic.
Zangar (zung-uh) Freeman, the owner of ZMakesBeads, sells unique authentic African beaded jewelry on his online store, wholesale to niche groups like anime fans, dance groups, and support groups, and he also creates custom jewelry with premium bespoke pieces.
Before working with Zangar, I had never heard of selling one-of-a-kind pieces in an online store. The novelty is that if you see a piece, you must grab it fast because it is the only piece with those exact stones and jewelry patterns. Once it’s sold out, that piece won’t be recreated. It’s what Zangar calls “Piece of Me Worn by You”.
Once a piece of him is gone, it can’t come back; it also is his essence of energy being infused into the making of the piece as if he’s putting a reflection of his identity in the piece he’s creating.
By identifying Zangar’s innate abilities from the creative expression of his work, we were able to craft a visual brand identity that was a nod to his heritage and a website designed to sell his unique pieces, send inquiries for custom jewelry or wholesale orders, and sign up for the next bead therapy class he offers in support groups.
Zangar’s business has 5 income streams when you include his weekend pop-ups. That’s all within one business. Do you see how he doesn’t have 5 different LLCs to achieve these income streams? Very classy, very mindful, very demure. We also crafted Zangar’s omnichannel commerce strategy to fit at an economic scale he can afford to maintain and enjoy and nothing more. He’s able to afford a comfy lifestyle for him and his wife.
"You've been able to keep me in business for [8] years! That is something I never imagined would happen when I first started ZMakesBeads”
– Zangar Freeman, ceo/founder
Where Do We Go From Here
So how can we replicate this success for you? How can you create your personalized omnichannel commerce strategy to diversify your income streams with only one business?
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As a Brand Manager specializing in omnichannel commerce for over 8 years, I of course could invite you to book a creative consultation with me or hire me to launch and manage your brand and products for you. But what if you’re on a tighter budget because you’re a low-income individual or the recession is kicking your ass like everyone else? Thankfully, I have a third secret option, my email newsletter. It’s where all my lessons for starting a Shopify business as a maker or craftsman are held.
You’re in the right place if you’re neurodivergent and aspire to diversify your income streams and optimize your lifestyle to your inherent abilities.
Let’s connect online where you feel most comfortable. I like generously spreading knowledge on omnichannel commerce, neurodivergence, disability advancement, esotericism, and more.
On this site I explore:
🫨Shaking up the digital marketing and online business industrial stratosphere by illuminating avenues toward Income Diversification without multiple LLCs!
🤓 Simplifying the process of starting a business by first filling in knowledge gaps, then tackling experience gaps.
👩🏽💻 Fostering paradigm shifts to regard branding, event marketing strategy, and web design as more involved investments for businesses to reach the next level.
💼 The Venusian Entrepreneur Project so that the makers, artists, and patrons at Make It Springfield can learn how to launch their craft businesses on Shopify.
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A Major Key to Business Success for Neurodivergent Individuals…Omnichannel Commerce. Let Me Explain.
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