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Bet On Black

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In the life of a creative business, you will have a choice: you can keep doors open to all possibilities or bet on black.  For non-gamblers, bet on black refers to going to a roulette table and choosing to bet on the little ball to end up on a black number not a red (or green) one.  Notice I did not say you had to bet on a particular black number, just black.  Betting on a single number is like hoping the one perfect client shows up every time.  Not going to happen often enough to build a business.  Keep reading.  You can be an icon and still be flexible.  You just have to start with the knowledge that you are actually an icon.

When you open your business, you want to do great work specific to what you stand for but there is a breaking in process.  You break in by laying it out there for all to see, sometimes in not the best (understatement) circumstance.  You take opportunity where you can to find your way and your reputation.  So long as you do great work, opportunities will beget other opportunities and, if you are fortunate, you will find yourself and your clients will find you.  No rocket science here, but this is usually four to seven years into your creative business’ life.  Some more, some less.

At this point, you have to decide if you are going to be the most important part of your clients’ lives or a nice accent.  You cannot be both.  An accent is the interior designer that does smorgasbord.  No real presentation, a feeling that it is the clients’ choice to decide how things go and the designer’s role is just to lay out options. Volume game, accessibility, work for work’s sake.  I have no problem if you decide this route, just know that you are treading into some fierce competition.  For interior designers, it is every big box higher-end retailer (West Elm, Restoration Hardware, William-Sonoma etc.) that offers design services as part of its selling effort. Same for any other creative business where piece product is available at retail.  You will be forever capped by way of price, project and clientele.  Sure, there might be outliers but they will remain there because you are an accent – important and nice, but not critical to the success of the project.

Or you can bet on black.

This is where you take a position, express your thoughts specifically and refuse to go the smorgasbord route.  Your process is honed and honed so that you are willing to put your money where your mouth is.  Presentation is everything and make sure your clients are focused on the subjective value you offer.  This is what separates you.  You drive value, not your clients, and come from a place of authority.  By definition, you close the door to those that see you as an accent.

Can you keep an accent business?  Sure, just not as part of your core creative business.  For the event world, think about Todd Events and how he approaches decor.  Todd has his core in Todd Events and his accent in Avant Garden.  Perfect – brand halo over everything with a completely different value proposition in each of Todd Events and Avant Garden.

And that becomes the hardest part of the transition to betting on black: there will, by definition be a “no fly zone”.  If you wish to maintain an accent business, you have to create a distinction between accent and bet on black and it has to be big enough that anyone can see that the two value propositions are completely different.  No matter the temptation, you cannot take business in the “no fly zone” as it kills value in both accent and bet on black.  Example, a stationer has a custom line of paper that starts at $100 and a pre-made set at $40. A clients comes in and says they want the pre-made with a few tweeks and will pay $75.  No, nope and nada.  Either buy the $40 or step up to the $100.  Two different experiences, two separate value points.  Doing the work at $75 cheapens the $100 offering and stretches past what the $40 is meant for.  Heads your client wins, tails you lose.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, just necessary.  You deserve nothing and you have earned it all.  If your aim and that of your art and your creative business is to be the most important part of your client’s project, at some point, you will have to refuse to do anything other than bet on black.

Your Core

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I have just finished rereading Good To Great, Jim Collins’ awesome five-year study of companies that went from good to great.  He studied what made these companies great relative to their peers (and the market in general — the rock stars of business) and how they stayed that way.  Much too much to talk about in a single blog post, but I highly suggest (re)reading it, if only to glean the insight that having a core and a purpose matter.  A lot.  What was most instructive for me though is not that great businesses share successful core values (i.e., we are all about service, relationship, value, etc.), it is simply that great businesses have core values and never ever deviate from them.  What do you stand for?  What is your purpose?  Businesses evolve every day but the core is immutable.

For creative businesses, this is such a slippery slope.  You are all in the happy business so it cannot just be about creating joy.  That is the price of admission.  No, it has to be about creating meaning, transformation that envelops joy and takes it further.  What does further mean?  Further means you can be the best in the world at the transformation.  Note, the world is not the universe, it is just your corner of the sky.  Here is my take on Good To Great for creative businesses: if your core does not support you being the best in the world at the transformation you seek, stop now.  We do not need another florist, interior designer, architect or stationer to rise to the level of their client’s incompetence.  No, we need artists who strive to create businesses that mean something more to their clients than the art they are selling.  A centerpiece is never just a centerpiece unless you allow it to be.  And how sad it is when you do.

The words “core” and “package” cannot coexist in a creative business.  What you stand for has to be iconic, indelible, eternal.  Fashion brands have been able to build their empires because they did not have a choice on whether to stand for something.  Clothes are never just clothes.  Clothes represent the designer’s vision and, because they do, we trust that vision far beyond clothes.  Event designers and interior designers are the absolute experts in what a table should look like and how it should be adorned.  And yet, with incredibly rare exceptions, fashion houses are whom we trust when we buy the items that we use to actually adorn the table.  Why?  Not because of money, marketing, etc., but because fashion houses are better at living their core.  We know who they are and they never forsake that trust.  It is not that fashion houses are any more evolved than other creative businesses, it is just that do not have a choice if they want to remain relevant.

Ah, the rub.  Your core, the transformation you most believe in, what you know you can be the best in the world (your world) at, demands sacrifice.  If the opportunity does not fit or cannot be made to fit your core, you need to turn it down.  Turn it down even if the money would likely be better in the short term than what your core would offer, even if there is no core business on the horizon, even if you might have to shut the business.  The brutal fact might be that your core, your transformation is unwanted in its current form, at least at the level necessary to support your creative business.  You will then have the opportunity to move on to find out where it might be not only wanted but be a necessity.  Yours is the business of meaning after all.  If you cannot make enough meaning where you are, then you have to be relentless to find out where you can.  Paradoxically, it could be that you take yourself too seriously.  There is as much a place for silly comedies that will never win any “serious” awards as there is a need for compelling drama.  Great design has no defined price tag.  Your core has to be what compels you first, your art second, your clients third.  All three have to exist, sure, the order though is what separates good from great, craft to scalable business, money to mission.

Here is a practical exercise:  finish the following sentences – “We believe in [not more than 5 words].  When our work is done, you will see [not more than 5 words] in a way you cannot imagine today.”  What would life be like if everything you and your creative business did reflected the truth of those two sentences?  And if the truth could not be reflected, you would not do them?  The simplicity and challenge of living your core.  The best part of Good To Great is knowing that if you want to make meaning, if you want to be great, there really is no choice but to do the work.  No better day than today.

Your Clients Want What You Want

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We all evolve.  Me too.  When I first started working with creative businesses, Preston and Vicente very much included, I thought that the work had to be to reach into the mind of a client and translate their vision into your art.  Focus on listening, then presenting, and ultimately creating for clients. While this framework is still true, it is not enough.  What is left out is the underneath.  Why do clients want what they want?

Nobody goes to a creative business to get a product.  Certainly, not in the same way you would go to a store for a product.  If you are going to buy toothpaste, you go to a retailer and pick.  Price matters, brand matters, so does the story you tell yourself when you pick – “I will have fresher breath, whiter teeth, fewer cavities”.  We do not really know if the product will work, but we want to be believers so we try.  If we are wrong, we just go test another product in the category, sometimes even if we are right – “used to want fresh breath, now more important I get whiter teeth.”  Not the same for creative business.  Your final art is supposed to validate a client’s story, with the process to get there an ever-evolving movement into the story.  The custom dress makes a woman feel sublime the way an off-the-rack never could.  The dress is, in every respect, the culmination of the journey.  The dress represents the story you, your art and your creative business tell to your client.  It alone is not the story.  The better you narrate along the way the more success you will find.  Thank you Bill Baker.

My evolution is to take it a step further.  Without ego, arrogance, or hyperbole: your clients want what you want.  Your story and that of your art and artistry IS the underneath that clients buy. They want to touch that magic, what drives you to do what you do.  All creative business owners have talent and passion (or they should not be creative business owners). The desire to manifest that talent and passion for someone else is your story.  Define the desire.  What does it mean to you?  How do you feel about what drives you?  What is it all about?  This is layers deeper than because it is beautiful or I like color.  Creating has to make you feel more alive, otherwise you would do something else for a living. The act of creating, its impetus, compulsion really, is what is so intoxicating to clients.  You have to be able to put it into words, to make it a mantra you will never deviate from.  It has to be some form of “I want to make you feel”.  What your clients will feel, that part is up to you.  This is your story and the deeper you know it, the more you know what your client wants.  They want what you want.

Here is where it takes me:  how can I help you belongs at McDonald’s, not in creative business.  Since you already know the answer to the question, you start with a statement.  Here is how I am going to help you.  If you are courageous enough to build your business around the statement, not the question, you will find immediate resonance with your client or not.  In the resonance, you will share stories and make your clients ever richer for the experience.  You will be paid (handsomely) to share your story through their eyes, not the other way around.

Empowerment and Process

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I had the great pleasure to finally talk in person with Bill Baker last week after being social media friends for the last three or so years.  Ostensibly, we were talking about how I might offer advice on broadening Bill’s speaking engagements.  Sure.  As Bill is much further along in that endeavor than me, I can only offer this – Bill is a ridiculous authority on storytelling – both to your client and within your organization.  He is a wonderful speaker (check out his YouTube page).  And if you are in the position to hire him to talk to your group of creative professionals about how to improve their ability to tell their story, deliver their message to their clients and themselves, definitely no better choice.

The conversation veered to my blog and to the interior design business his husband runs with his sister-in-law, Good Space Design Group (a very interesting and long running take on on-line interior design for design-hungry, budget conscious consumers).  I, of course, welcomed the opportunity to talk about both and learn more about Bill and his journey into corporate storytelling.  Read about Bill on his site and blog, know that his clients are the who’s who of Fortune 50 companies, and you will understand how fun it was for me to talk to him.

Bill asked me what I talk about when I speak.  I told him that I focus on the difference between subjective and objective value and business process.  Bill did a big hmmmm.  He said, “Your blog is all about empowerment, how come you do not talk about that?”  I said that I do, it is just that empowerment (passion, hunger to create, desire to share, willingness to take a stand), never happens without process.  Process is the pillar of empowerment.  Bill was not necessarily convinced.  He loves the idea of the power of creativity, the faith in the ability of a creative business to translate a client’s vision into a remarkable moment.  I do too.  It’s just that I know it is not enough if the art is meant to be a business.  A defined, iconic process is there to create sustainability, stability, confidence in both the art and artistry of a creative business.

What I love so very much about what Bill does is that he knows the power of the story and how to tell it.  Marketing, sure, but depth of relating and relationship much more so.  My take is that the business of creative business itself tells a story.  For instance, how and when you earn (take?) your money, why your contract reads as it does, the strength (weakness?) of your presentation, how you reveal your work, all speak volumes to your clients, peers, and even your employees as much as your final product does.  Sadly, all too often the story the business tells is not the same as the story coming out of creative business’ site, social media or even its employees.  Quite literally the story the business tells competes (and overwhelms) the creative story.  My job is to eliminate the disconnects.

The easy part of process is simply knowing what comes next.  The hard part is knowing why and being able to defend it with more than “because this is the way we do it.”  Every creative business is a guide.  Yours is to transport your clients to the mountaintop as only you can.  Your unwavering determination to say to everyone, “I know the way, follow me” is everything.  Others may offer their opinion, even try to persuade you that your way sucks.  So be it.  Let them walk alone or with the one who they think knows better.

Yes, this blog is about empowerment.  Art is what changes the world.

I had the good fortune this week to talk to event professionals first at Event Solutions/Catersource in Las Vegas and then to amazing wedding professionals at Bliss and Bespoke in Charleston.  I did some back of the napkin math.  There were roughly seventy professionals combined.  Say average events were $100,000 more or less and average ten events per professional per year.  Answer: professionals that collectively spend over $70 million dollars of their clients money per year, every year.  Hmmm.  If art is meant to define our culture, even transform it, creative businesses responsible for spending $70 million dollars can, in fact, own that responsibility and wear it well if only they believe in the power they possess.

Nobody needs creative businesses.  Nobody.  They exist because we all seek to live a better life, to be enriched by the completely impractical until it becomes a necessity.  Knowing how you are to share your gift, believing in your responsibility means that you own your role as a guide. Then, and only then, will you never doubt that you can do it again and again.  Your way as not just the only way you know how, but the very best way for you.  Your businesses story will match your creative story.  To answer Bill’s question: empowerment is process, process empowerment.  They are the same thing.  The better you know where your feet are, the better you can go where your clients need you to take them, the better you embrace the necessity of sharing your gift with all of us.

Into The Sun

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The time to risk it all is when you have everything to lose, not when you have nothing.  When you have nothing, only one place to go – up.  There is a safety in that.  If you are wrong, who cares, you are at rock-bottom anyway.  But if you are right, there is the way out.  If things are going well or even okay though, being wrong costs you something – money, reputation, maybe even a little of both.  Edsel, New Coke, Google Glass anyone?  Do it anyway.

Into the Sun means fully absorbing the brightness of the day.  The fearlessness it took to start your creative business is the very fear that prevents you from risking its very existence.  We often define success through money and it is a useful metric although certainly not the only measure.  Fulfilled work, happy clients, expanding art come to mind as alternatives.  But let us go with money for a baseline.

Is your goal to increase by a percentage every year – maybe grow 20%, 30%, 50%?  To make a hundred thousand dollars?  A million?  What if you were to make your goal exquisitely unobtainable?  Not ridiculous, just exquisitely unobtainable?  If you make $250,000 in revenue now, what would $600,000 next year look like?  What would you have to do to get there?  Would there be compromises? Structural changes?  Would it be worth it?

Incremental change is an oxymoron and you will never walk into the Sun if that is the goal you seek.  Doing something a little better every year gets you run over by those that are out to redefine the game.  If you are fortunate enough to be doing well at the game you currently play – at the top of your market or even finding lots of clients coming your way, you can live there if you choose.  Incremental change means doing what you currently do better.  Nothing wrong with it at all.  Just do not say you want to get to the next level.  The next level is not a flight of stairs up, it is another building entirely.  Why the cliché is so silly.  You can maximize the level you are on and that is a wonderful vision with a lot to it.  Going to another level though, that asks you to believe in a reality you cannot yet comprehend.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am a Seth Godin fanatic.  His mantra is that the connection economy, where making meaning, being an artist, is the new world order.  Underneath the message is that change is the new normal.  Resistance to change, the desire for predictability is its own undoing.  Mass is dead, the Long Tail firmly ensconced.  Delight your fans, forget the rest.  Seth’s basic premise is that human relationship requires evolution, so too with creative business.  Art transcends it medium precisely because trust is its economy.  The foundation of trust is what allows change.

Your fans will trust you as you risk what is next so long as you never forsake that trust.  So give yourself permission to imagine a world just this side of impossible.  Then walk into the Sun to consider leaping into that world.  That is what the next level looks like. Change lives there as a compulsion to discover the possibility of what could happen.  For those that want a tangible idea of what I am talking about, here goes.

To date, most design businesses other than fashion (graphic, interior, event) are buyer driven businesses.  Demand is created with previous work and maybe some marginally interesting ideas (here is how you too can spruce up your bedroom), but mostly it is a reactive business.  You wait for the phone to ring when the client has a project for you and your creative business.  Nobody is thinking about how to reach into a client’s life to generate demand — to be in the business of generating ideas that compel demand.  I could imagine a day when design businesses look like production houses for movie studios who are voraciously seeking fantastic ideas that they WILL execute on.  I am not for a second saying that designers should set out creating idea after idea for nothing.  I am saying that designers can become so inextricably linked to how their clients live their lives that they are paid to generate ideas for how their clients can live those lives better.  Profound intimacy and trust in a designer’s vision will be paid for first by the client, then the creative business will be paid again to make it happen.  Turn a reactive industry into a proactive one.  Radical change would mean radical rewards and opportunity for you, your art and your creative business.

When you walk into the Sun you might find the other building was there all along.

Integrity 101

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When life is good, the tank full, bank account brimming over, integrity is easy.  Why?  You can tell yourself your creative business does not need to compromise.  So you do not.  Sure, you can become a diva or, worse, an a—hole, but mostly you can create the art you and your creative business were meant to create, the best way you know how.  Even more, if you had compromised in the past, a full belly gives you courage to say no now.

Sounds great doesn’t it?  Get busy and you will be able to have your creative business finally, finally act as you intend.  Except it does not work that way.

The path to success for any creative business is through intention, a series of purposeful steps, with deep awareness of each step’s message and meaning.  We all have to stake our claim to the truth that resonates with us, our art and our creative business.  If you need $10 to do the work, $5 will not cut it.  Period.  Then again, if you cannot articulate why you need $10, why should anyone pay you?  Defining value means you have to live (and die) there.  If the idea is everything, what does it cost?  If your contract says your client has ten days to pay, what do you do on the eleventh?  If you need a contract to get started, will you actually start without it?  Simple if money does not flow, but what if it does?

Compromise is not flexibility.  Compromise is a willingness to do what you do not.  It is a non-starter if there ever was one.  Flexibility, on the other hand, is a willingness to adapt what you do to a situation without ever changing the underlying value you offer.  If it takes you typically a year to go from initial conversation to finished project, you can definitely complete one in 30 days.  An accordion may look different stretched as compacted but the instrument is the same regardless.  You creative business is no different.  Your process, your value, your choice.

Integrity does not mean blinders on, stay the course no matter the circumstance.  That is delusional.  No, integrity means believing in your gift and those who most desire for you to share it.  If you have been fortunate enough to have found those clients, build your creative business around them.  Ignore the rest.  And if those clients have not yet appeared, consider that you are hiding from them.  Getting rejected by those who do not value what you do is your escape hatch.  They do not get you or your creative business anyway so no need to care.  Rejection from the client that matters though, that beyond sucks and it should.  However, facing the pain that could come the right client’s rejection is what should drive you to risk everything.  Success is a wholehearted embrace for the art you and your creative business want to create, not just an okay, let’s do it.

So before Spring has sprung, when the bank account is low, when the phone has not yet rung, ask yourself what will happen when it does.  Who will you be then?  Will you be willing to say yes, but only on your terms?  Expansive to those that matter, intolerant of those that do not?  Does it really matter where you are in your creative business, feast or famine?  Will you stay true to yourself, your art, your artistry?

Believe every step is purposeful.  There is no, “when I get there, I will….”  There is here no matter the circumstance.  If your compass and that of your creative business will be your own, the rest will be easy.  Integrity 101.

Power

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What if you were the only one?  And customers had to have (or really really needed) what you were selling.  Say cold water at the beach where there was no other water allowed.  With limited supplies.  The ultimate monopolist.  How would you behave?

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely says John Dalberg-Acton.  Would you look to soak everyone you can.  Charge $50 for each bottle of water at the beach?  Or would you be fair?  Maybe not the $1 when water is everywhere, but a premium to reflect what it took to be the only one, say $5.  What does that look like?  Will you sell more water, less water?  Do you care if you are going to sell out anyway?

Now imagine that there was one more competitor.  Each of you has limited supply as in the first case, but now more than enough to fill the need (i.e., you will NOT both sell out).  How do you go about your business?  Still reach for the nosebleed prices?  No matter what, even if you had some product left over, you would still make a tidy profit at nosebleed prices.  If you charged a fair price, you would probably sell everything but maybe make less money depending on how many you sold at nosebleed.

Third scenario – there are many competitors and much more product than buyers.  Now what do you do?  If you price at nosebleed, no one will buy anything from you.  Price too low though and you will not make enough to survive.  Likely is you will price to eke out a living, no more no less.

Here is the thing.  EVERY creative business lives in the first scenario.  You are in the company of one.  Period.  Your actions, however, can make scenarios two and three become your reality.  Think about that – whether you live in a hyper-competitive or non-competitive market is YOUR choice.  Make it about process and what your creative business needs to do the work it does and you will find connection and relevance to your art and your clients.  Translation:  you will live in scenario one for a long, long time.

Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.  If you think you are just that good or that you have to do everything relative to your competition (by definition living in an external shadow), you will experience the pain of the market.  The best way to delude yourself here is to keep on focusing on the end result.  Your art is a function of your creative business’ artistry, not the other way around.  Unless you wholeheartedly believe that only you and your creative business do what you do, someone will always be willing to do what you do cheaper.  You get paid for what is between your ears and earn a living with what is between your hands.

It costs $35 to get a marriage license in New York City. Add a few dollars for a rose or two and you can go get married.  Hmmmm. The average cost of a wedding in NYC is $86,916.  That is $86,879 DISCRETIONARY dollars.  Nobody needs what you do.  Nobody.

When all that you do is a want, you have to understand the power you wield.  Yours is about base expression – to reach in to your client and fulfill their vision for moments they yearn for.  Pretty is nice, emotion and connection the point.  So live there.  Own your category of one with fairness defined only by your own integrity.  Faith that receiving what you need to do the work will be its own upward spiraling and long-lasting cycle.  Or you can just try to beat the next guy.  Up to you.

Pricing 2015

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Tis the season.  The question I get over and over is, how do I price my work?  Here is the real answer, more than any number, concept (i.e., percentage, hourly, flat fee, etc.) or market convention (i.e., here is what we get for being florists in Chicago): value and process define price, not the other way around.

Think about that for a second.  When you get asked your price and you give one number, you are defining your entire worth to your client.  What you are not doing when you give the number is telling your client what each component of the price is worth.  How much for your reputation, your design, your production?  Nope, it is just one number.  So you leave it to your client to define the components, a job for which they are uniquely unqualified.

Instead, what if you came at it the other way and answered the price question with:  “Well, here is how we are going to get from here to there.  First we are going to understand what we are to create, then we will show you the art we would like to create, then we will tell you what it will cost to create the art, and then we will go ahead and create it.”  Each stage has a price and that price is relative to what you believe is most valuable about you, your art and your creative business.  Some prices you can give right away, others not until you know what you will be creating.  Value and process drive price, not the other way around.

Why is this so important?  A fool’s paradise makes it all about price.  Any client that tells you are too expensive does not value what you are going to create for them enough to hire you.  Ironically, getting cheaper just reinforces the idea and does not solve the problem.  What if you tried to hear the statement as a compliment instead of a criticism?  You might focus on what it is that you do that is so valuable to those that will pay you appropriately.  Yes, we all have to eat, but compromise is its own rabbit hole.  Knowing you are too expensive is a definition of what a client really values and does not.  That is priceless information.  Then again if you are unwilling to define value, you do not really know why you are too expensive.  $500,000 for a sofa is absurd. $490,000 for the idea of the sofa as it will exist in a client’s space and $10,000 for the sofa, not as crazy.

It all goes back to the very notion underlying ALL creative businesses.  NOBODY needs what you do.  NOBODY.  In a world defined by subjective wants, yours is to create the need simply by being the only one that can provide the subjective want.  For that you have to be willing to define yourself, not only by what you, your art and your creative business do, more importantly by how and primarily by why.  Your clients have to believe in you before they will pay you.  Hiding behind a single number or a pretty portfolio will never make that happen, not really. You might get business, sure, but the ever-elusive right clients will be few and far between.

Go the other way.  Lay out your value for all to see.  Put your money where your mouth is — say what each part of your creative business is worth and live in that truth.  Give your clients a chance to find their own faith in you without being a chameleon.  From there you will get what you need.  Promise.  Value and process define price.

It Has Been A Year

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2014 has been a year of, let’s say, transition for me.  Heard this quote from Hazrat Inayat Khan recently, “God breaks the heart again and again until it stays open.”  I have so much to be grateful for and the end of the year is ending as sweetly as the beginning (and middle) was sour.  The lesson I have learned is to find wisdom in the experience, sweet or sour.  As much as I would like to believe otherwise, people reveal themselves to be as they are.  And I have learned that inhumanity comes mostly when there is no interior voice, just a desire to see the world as we see it.  If we can glimpse another’s pain, empathize with their experience, touch their joy, then we have the hope of community.

Creative business is the vehicle to community.  You can believe that your picture, your event, your interior, your music, your clothing is ephemeral, nice but not seriously transforming.  Not like heart surgery.  You would be wrong.  Not only wrong, but dismissive of the very patrons who believe otherwise.  You and your creative business are paid to create feelings, to move people.  The simplest moment can be done well.  Opulence requires money, sure, but art requires genius, the willingness to make a statement.  There is no budget for that.

2015 will be remarkable.  My prayer for everyone is for 2015 to be much more sweet than sour.  I wish for creative businesses to continue to honor the role they are meant to play: to allow everyone to share in the tapestry of the other; to see beauty from another’s eyes and be richer for it.  Start there and I will be here to help you build the rest.

The Right Kind Of Business

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Ideally, every creative business should only take on projects that befit the stage the art is meant to be seen on.  Translation: only do good business.  Juxtapose this idea with the very notion that mouths need to be fed, bills paid and lights kept on.  Throw in the mix seasonality which almost every creative business I can think of has and the path to the summit is very narrow indeed.

Here’s the thing: a mouse on wheel, at some point, has to stop running.  Do you slow to a trot, then a walk and then hop off? Or just hop off?  My enormous preference is that if you are doing bad business, stop.  Today.  Endure the pain and come out the other side.  However, methadone exists for a reason.  Quitting cold turkey for some is impossible, too painful and could even kill you.  Then again, methadone itself is addicting.  It all comes down to the same question in the end – are you committed to change or not?  Weaning only works if you are willing to be weaned.  There is just no way around it, bad business causes pain, both in the undertaking and the stopping.

So what is bad business?  Generally, one of two things (or, disastrously, both):  taking on the wrong work or making less than you need to feel good about your next project.

Harder one first: doing what you do not do is such a slippery slope.  You talk yourself into working on the small project because it is good money when you need it most.  Except you do not do small projects.  Or the opposite, you take on a whale, stretch beyond yourself because the dollar signs look so good (an illusion if there ever was one).  Inevitably, you fall down if only because it is just not what you do and the clients receiving this work will NEVER appreciate what it is that you actually do.  You and your creative business have almost no chance for success and even if you do well, what is it that you are actually succeeding at?  The very business you do not want.

Margin integrity.  You have to get paid what you need to feel good about the next project.  If you are filling the gaps in your seasonality by discounting, what does that say about the work you take in season?  Are you that disciplined to make sure a project that is discounted 15% in the off-season is priced at a premium in-season?  Hotels and fixed providers (i.e., companies that have a product to sell that is capped as to volume) have it easy.  They have the benefit of a finite resource.  How about an interior designer, a florist, a musician, anyone that can take on that next job?  What about when your calendar is not yet booked for the high season and you get nervous?  Still have that discipline to price at a premium?

I get the criticism all the time.  If I price appropriately, no one will hire me.  Hmmm.  I hear it this way:  if I ask for the money I really need to run my creative business, I will not have a business.  You might be right and if you are, you do not have a business today.  Running on the wheel will not make it any less true tomorrow.  Time in business does not justify charging what you are worth.  Talent, process, integrity and conviction in what you stand for and provide does.  So take the methadone if you need to, keep the filler business.  Do not lie to yourself though.  Seasonal or no, if you make the money you are supposed to make (i.e., do good business) with clients who respect, even admire, your art and artistry, you will be able to stop doing bad business.  Period.  Believing otherwise is not only what keeps you in the rut, it is the rut itself.

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