by seanlow on September 1, 2010
Process matters. What your creative business does, how you communicate with your clients, your staff, your colleagues, and your vendors is just as important as the art you create. Moreover, each step of your process has to be deeply reflective of the ethos of your creative business. This much I stressed back in June. However, what I did not talk about was that your process has to be forward looking. It has to reflect your creative business as you want it to be as much as what it is.
For instance, if you are trying to expand your services to include product sales with your service (i.e., a planner selling wedding gifts, an interior designer selling fabrics, a graphic designer selling branded items), then you have to provide a grounding for why your clients should want what you are trying to sell them. You cannot just expect clients to get why you are changing. It has to fit. You might have the finest linen, stationary, furniture, accessories, etc. to go along with your design, but why yours is the best for your client has to be because it is in the fabric of your business not just because they are great products. There are a lot of great products out there and if you do not incorporate yours well, clients will be alienated and feel like you are trying to “sell” them something. Not only will you not get the sale, but you will undercut their trust in you as well. You lose twice.
A great process should always answer the “why” of all that your creative business does or does not do. Your job is to identify the need your clients want filled (note: do not ask them, they do not know) and fill that need with the value only you and your art can bring. You cannot do it in a vacuum or only one time. Your core value proposition has to be related, integral and identifiable throughout your business process. Your business model justifies your price only if it validates your core value proposition. If you are Colin Cowie, you can charge a large design fee because his premise (validated by his superstar clientele) is that his designs are unparalleled. If, instead, he chose to mark up everything 300% when the market is closer to 100% then he would be undercutting his value as a designer (a wholly subjective notion) by being outrageously expensive (an objective definition). When (and if) Colin ever decides to shift his model, he will have to make sure the new process reinforces the subjective and not the objective.
Competition and the economy have forced all of us to reexamine our business models. Any identifiable process is better than none. However, your long term success will be based on your ability to have that process drive change in your creative business, not the other way around.
by seanlow on August 26, 2010
For creative businesses, money is a dirty word. Whether it has to do with pricing, paying yourself or your employees, even valuing your art (and yourself), your relationship to money lurks behind it. You might believe you can never have enough, only have to take what you need, or money is the root of all evil. You can say you do not care about it and the art is all that is important or you might need to show how much you have to validate the persona you portray to yourself and the world. I am indifferent to how you relate to money. There are too many far wiser people than me to guide you towards what is the healthiest relationship for you. I am only asking you to acknowledge the power and emotionality you have given to money.
Money is not real. It is just a construct society has created in order to better organize itself. Money exists and can do what it does because we all agree it does. Money is also not the root of all evil. The love of money is. To which I would like to add, so is the hatred, envy and just about every emotion you can attach to money. By evil, I would like to take a more holistic approach and say it is emotions attached to money that are the seeds of our own undoing.
I have made a lot of money in my life, lost all of it and come back to life again. Money is a crutch for me. It is something I can obsess over and create drama from. I can stop the fluidity of my life in a nanosecond by thinking about how much I have, do not have or even will have. And when I bring myself down to dollars and cents, I conveniently wipe out my own spirit in the process. If you value your entire being by how much you are (or are not) paid, it will never be enough. My aim is to embrace my ability to generate money and see it for what it is: that which will afford me the opportunity to live the life I desire.
While money is not real and has no emotion, it is energy. Literally, money is the food your creative business needs to survive. There is no such thing as overcharging or undercharging, just charging what you believe is fair value for the product/service you provide. The measure of fair value is what you need to earn in order to sustain your chosen lifestyle.
For creative businesses, fair value is not what the market will bear. You do not make widgets. The intrinsic value of your creative business is your ability to create. A rose might be just another rose, except that it is not when placed in the hands of an artist. Those that argue there is a limit to what they can charge (in most cases, a limit that is less than they think they are worth) create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The limitations speak more of emotions attached to money than to reality.
The emotions you attach to money will distort your own measure of fair value in one way or another. The more you acknowledge the emotions, the better chance you have to free yourself from them and to allow your creative business the opportunity to earn all that you need it to.
