The Business of Being Creative

Happy happy to everyone.  2018 is going to be a remarkable year. More than ever, there is an ability to see the reality of what was only a fantasy a few years ago.  Things like commercial space travel, 3D/Virtual Reality everything, renewable powered cars and homes, and on and on.  Go watch any 80’s movie if you want to see just how far we have come to the future we now inhabit.

So in the spirit of setting the right tone for what creative businesses need to be focused on to be relevant in today’s future, let us all now commit to two (not a hundred) practices that will reshape all of creative business.  These commitments I have not said (many times) before but always worth retelling:  live and die by your design statement and lose line-item pricing.

Design Statement – This is the ethos of why you do what you do. It is not about pretty, it is about what you think about when you set about your creative process. Your design statement is THE thing you care most about as it defines why you do what you do and how you do it.  Your design statement is meant to be raw and real and profoundly you.  If it happens to look like someone else’s then it needs to be a complete coincidence else you have not gone far enough.  Whether you put your design statement on public display (website, social media, etc.) or share it after you first talk to a potential client is up to you. But share it you must.  What would the world look like if the decision to hire you and your creative business or not was truly based on not just on what you envision (or have envisioned) but on why and how you envision the world you wish to create for your clients? Let us make 2018 all about having clients choose based on who they most relate to and make that choice front and center.  Leave the choosing on price, amount of stuff or services delivered, and false fluffy promises to the amateurs.

Line-Item Pricing – Line-item pricing connotes a world gone by.  A world where absolute and relative value could only be communicated by dollars.  We can all do better than that today with all of the tools available to us.  No more training wheels please. Clients do not know they can get better value from artists until determined artists show what that value is.  Communicating value through depth of feeling and relative feeling is here to stay. No doubt, it is more work.  However, short cuts are just that: they ending up cutting you, your art and your creative business short.  So do the work of having a harder (not because it is, but because it is different) conversation and deliver better value to your clients. Lose line-item pricing to help them trust you more, not less. There will be many that will disagree with the last sentence. Let them. They are wrong. The bastion of those who just want to get to the next step is the crutch of pricing.  Yeah, so not good enough. Teaching clients to demand more will just serve to expose the mediocrity for what it is.  Given the choice to be mediocre or remarkable, I would hope is not a choice at all for you, your art or your creative business.

Why focus on the Design Statement and No Line-Item Pricing? Because they will both force you to be better and by being better I mean more authentic, more exposed as the artist you are and the art you most wish to create. Scarier for everyone?  Sure. More valuable?  Not even close.

With a design statement in hand you will have to own your process.  When you own your process, your contract will tell a story and be a living breathing guide to the journey you will take with your client. Definitive process supported by a vibrant contract sets the stage for profound moments of trust and compels you to do more than just mail it in with line-item pricing. With trust in hand, deep value is delivered BEFORE you ever show up with your finished art. Then, of course, the magic of your finished art is inevitable. Rinse, lather, repeat.

With the new year upon us and selling season close at hand (or, in many cases, already started), be better by refusing to entertain short cuts as anything other than cutting you short.  Rather, do the hard work of speaking a language that matters with today’s future; a language that starts with a Design Statement and No Line-Item Pricing.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity and deep pleasure of speaking to interior designers in Boston as part of Editor-at-Large’s Launch series.  I talked about pricing and client management as I have done in New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles several times before.  Everything centers around the idea that value and process drive price, not the other way around.  Of course, the difference between subjective and objective value is critical as is the difference between cost of production and the investment required for the designer to do his/her work.

Then we get to line-item pricing.  I say that it is irrelevant and inevitably there is a “what did he just say” moment.  And then just as inevitably there is the “nice in theory, but you do not know how it works in the real world.  My clients expect to see these prices and would NEVER accept me not showing them.”  To which I say, “if your clients expect you to dance the two-step while presenting to them, are you going to do that too?”

This is our leaping off point.  How do we upend traditions/practices/language that only serve to keep us stuck?  Yes, I talked a little about old terms that need to die in my last post, but this goes deeper.  This post is about retraining both how we speak as creative business owners and also retraining clients to come to have a different set of expectations that will define the value they are paying for.

I happened to watch Back To The Future Series for the 10,000th time over Thanksgiving and what struck me is that the series did not contemplate all that we live with today.  The second movie (not my fave) is based on a stolen sports almanac book.  Actual book. It contemplated that fax machines and paper communications would still exist as they did in 1988.  No email, texting, etc.  My kids love it because it is so silly to them that this would the future someone imagined thirty years ago.  So too with line-item pricing.

Whether or not creative business stops the practice of line-item pricing is far less important than contemplating its value in the creative process.  If you use line-item pricing to justify the value of what you are spending your client’s money on, you are tacitly (or not so tacitly) saying that each investment matters as does the relativity of the size of investment to others (how much was the couch relative to the dining room table, the flowers to the catering).  What you are not saying is to judge the design on its own merits, to define absolute value and relative value by another measure, something other than dollars.

Three things then: first, can you work to convince your clients that using dollars to define the value of design (absolute maybe, but certainly relative) is a VERY bad measuring stick of value; second, can you define what a better measuring stick is; and third, can you be the third person in so as to shift the entirety of creative business?

Of course, where I am heading here is to define the power of the idea, to improve not only presentation but the presentation process, to demonstrate how valuable what you envision is.  This means not just investing in better tools of communication like virtual reality, 3D floorplans, etc., but also in storytelling, presentation skills, expository writing, anything that will bring your vision to life.

Until clients are deeply comfortable with the totality of your vision we will never be able to lose the idea of dollars as the definition of value.  If clients cannot become fully immersed in the story you and your creative business wish to tell with your art, you will be left dinosaur tools like money, the fax machine, mood boards, basic floor plans and table set ups.  However, if clients can be immersed in the story of your vision we can find out ways to value how they feel about what they have experienced from your vision, the way they are asked in just about every other area of their lives today (emojis, likes, swipe left or right, etc.).  And with that definition can they say that they value what they are going to have to invest to get it?  Relativism would then come from the series of moments created not by the price of the couch versus the dining room table, but instead about how they feel about the relationship between the two (i.e., how that relationship makes them feel and the depth of that feeling as you, the artist, would intend).

The whole point is to expose line-item pricing as fundamentally limited as a measure of creative value and offer the alternative of feeling instead.  I am not about to try to convince artists who choose to use line-item pricing as their measuring stick to give it up.  They are happy in their limitations and likely daunted by the challenge of telling a better story.

The creative business owners I seek to change are those who are ready to do the work, to truly go to the next level, to go to the place where we do not need roads (last BTTF reference — could not resist).  It will not happen overnight.  Drip by drip by drip in every market until there are no more fax machines.

Everything that we have come to rely on for our every day lives is less than twenty years old.  Sure the microcomputer existed in the 1980’s but the dawn of the Internet age changed everything.

And yet.  The language and practices we use are straight out of the 1990’s.  For this post, I will focus on some sacred cows in the event industry, but my hope is that, for those of you not in the event industry, you will see deep parallels in your area of creative business.

For event professionals, some sacred cows that are needing to go away are: Table set ups?  Packages? Underpromise, over deliver?  Great customer service? Excel?

When we rely on language and practices that are wildly unrelated to today’s environment, at best we sow the seeds of confusion and, at worst, marginalize the entire event industry (and possibly all of creative business).

So let us take a closer look:

Packages — Oldie but a goodie that lives everywhere.  A short cut that undermines everything.  Packages focus on stuff and what will be done for the client.  It connotes sameness and choice when neither could be further from the truth.  Package is about process and what matters to you.  Use those words instead.

Live Table Set Ups and Tastings — they mean nothing as they are, most often, completely unrelated to the environment and instance that will actually happen at the event.  Yes, smelling, touching and tasting is fun, but we can do so so much better.  VR, Livestreaming, Edited Video, better rendering work are just the beginning.

Hourly Fees – When your time mattered, hourly fees did too.  Of course, there are parameters to your work, especially on the day of the event and abuses need to be avoided.  However, charging hourly fees is not the way.  Communication and mutual understanding of what is necessary to get done is.  Why a charge for 2 hours of overtime, when a $5,000 do not be a jerk escrow fee might suffice?

Contracts – Why is it ever the first document you send?  Your clients are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions and you cannot be bothered to work out a term sheet with them first?  You look like a dinosaur when you start with a dense contract that it not related to your actual work.  Take the time to lay out the 4 W’s and How in a plain language document everyone can agree on.  Then send your contract as a reflection of the letter.

Using Old Software – Timeline Genius will create day-of event timelines for a negligible cost.  Slack is the fastest growing work management app, umm ever.  Basecamp or whatever project management tool you enjoy is infinitely better than your Excel spreadsheet.  Information flow is vital to any project and you are responsible for it.  Not embracing technology to help you manage the flow today is like relying on fax machines and FedEx to get the job done. Not quaint or retro.  Worse than useless.

Uncurated Portfolios — Not that there ever was a time to show less than your best work, but today the very idea that you would allow an image of yours to exist that you would not stake your reputation on is tantamount to a confession that good enough is good enough.  Yeah, good enough never is and forever more never will be.

List of Services – If you have to spell it out for a client, they are not your client.  Enough said.

Things You Never Do – If you talk about things you never do and/or do not really want  to do, stop.  Be who you are and celebrate the power of niche.  We are long since past the time when did not fully embrace and understand The Long Tail and its implications.

Line Item Pricing – Completely irrelevant to the client relationship.  None of you are in the get-it-for-less business so the price of the linen only matters in context of the price to create the rest of the space.

Cost v. Investment – Cost is something we have to spend to get what we want with only the expectations we set for it.  Investment connotes a return that is in excess of the investment.

On the other side of the coin, here are terms, concepts and industry norms all creative businesses need to embrace: a design statement, the one thing that matters, cost of production vs. investment in your creative business, and, most important the promises you intend to make to earn trust and deliver your best work.  Your core, yes, is always timeless and eternally resonant; its expression, however, demands that you embrace all that today’s world offers.  Tomorrow’s too.

Change is really, really hard.  If you intend to move to another place in your creative business, as opposed to just putting window dressing on what you already have (lipstick on a pig?), you are going to have to risk the status quo.  Nobody wants to be wrong or to realize that good enough just is not.  So we invest in staying stuck, impose artificial limitations on ourselves that, ironically, keep us safe.  When confronted with real change, fear kicks in, fight or flight or in many cases stubborn resistance to anything other.  Even if you move your art and your creative business towards the change you seek, the shadow anchor is always there, ready to pull you back whenever there is a shred of evidence of “this will not work”.

It is far too easy to say you have to persist, fight through your fear, believe in the change you seek.  Like telling any addict that you have to have willpower and faith to beat the addiction.  No, you need humility and you need support from those who have been where you are and/or are willing to walk the path with you.  Again, though, too easy to give yourself over to a group or a teacher or a guide to have yourself and your creative business saved.  Nobody has the answer except for you.  Support only matters if you are ready to actually walk the path to another place.

Let’s then get real about fear.  Fear is not about losing business (you never had it in the first place), nor is it about having your creative business fold, nor about not making enough money.  No, fear is about rejection, having someone else see you and your art and say “no thanks”.  Most of us will do just about anything to avoid the raw and absolute “no thanks”.  Our response to the (potential) rejection is to hide.

Here is what hiding looks like: creating art that you are not proud of, for a price that does not work, for a client that does not really care about what you, your art and your creative business offers.  There may be sprinkles of yes in your world (with clients that truly value you and your art), but they are dwarfed by the volume (maybe number, but definitely noise) of those that do not.  Neurosis is acting out behavior you know to be destructive and irrational over and over again.  The momentary high is dwarfed by the reality and scope of the decision.  Feeling the “Yes” from any client overwhelms the notion that you NEVER want a “yes” from the wrong client.

Before you think me condescending, let me say we are ALL scared and fear bites us all at some point.  I have chased more than my fair share of nightmares, all along deluding myself that it would work out if and only.  It never did and it never does.  The wrong client is wrong for the simple reason that they just do not care about what you and your creative business care most about.

We hear all the time about letting go, focusing on your strength, having confidence, faith in yourself and your creative business.  Lovely thoughts that you cannot buy a cup of coffee with.  You need to be rooted in a foundation of why.  Why you are an artist, why your art matters, why you are worthy of the responsibility to create your art for your clients, and why tomorrow’s version of your art and your creative business will always be better than today.  All of these whys are real, tangible concepts you need to live by and forever work on.  You cannot face the fear of rejection without them.  And even with your whys, you may still be bitten by the fear of rejection, it is that strong.

The exercise is this – change happens drip by drip, detail by detail, moment by moment.  You have to go through the Dip to get to the other side.  This means when you actually need to be rejected by someone you care about and who cares about you, your art and your creative business.  You have to ask yourself in this moment if you are hiding in some way.  Then you have to become more raw, not less.  More resolute in your mission not fuzzier. You will be afraid, you will panic, you will think your world might end.  It will not, certainly not the world you truly wish to inhabit at least.

The specific work is this — what is the one thing you absolutely have to have in your creative business — maybe a minimum budget, size of project, type of project, type of client.  The one thing that you just have nothing if you do not have.  Write it down and then figure out how many places you can insert this absolute need into the fabric of your business — website, social media, contract, client conversations, etc.  Let’s say no less than five places and then do it.  Today.  Standing for something is what matters when it comes to getting through your fear only if it is front and center for everyone to see.