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Breathe Deep and Say Yes

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Art transcends its medium.  No creative business sells a product or service.  Not really.  They sell meaning, emotion, desire, fulfillment.  If your creative business understands the depth of connection formed, you will inevitably be asked to move beyond yourself and the current state of your art and creative business.

Breathe deep and say yes.

Of course, there is someone out there that could do an excellent job at what you are being asked to do (i.e., for events, a designer asked to plan; an architect asked to do interior design, a still photographer asked to direct a movie, etc.). You might even have relationships with a lot of them.   Call the artisans and have them help.  Redefine your vision of how your client sees you.  Sure, you can stay true to what you do and, for many of you, that might be enough.  Just for a second though, contemplate what is keeping you from saying yes.  Fear?  Yes, you will be terrified of falling down in an area you do not focus on.  And, no, you will not catch up to the masters of that area in a moment or even a lifetime.  Worry about alienating the artisans whose art you are asked to provide.  Hmmm.  Still missing the point.

Trust.  The confidence your client has in your creative business’ ability to understand her vision, to “get” her, is transformative.  If what you can do is to be the defender of that vision, an advocate of the story to be told, why shouldn’t you be responsible for all of it?  You are being seen as the gatekeeper.  Honor that.

What I am ABSOLUTELY not saying is to do it by yourself.  You have no right to practice what you are not expert at, certainly not at your client’s expense.  Bringing artists and artisans you know will respect what is to be delivered – the meaning, relationship and value – into the fold is entirely appropriate.  The beauty of the Internet age is the abundance of talent and our ability to communicate with each other.  Resources are truly global, conversations intimate.

Reconsider your role.  Today you might be the gatekeeper.  Tomorrow another artisan.  What would the world look like if collaboration were the norm, resources fungible? Trust created by another to be valued for the opportunity it creates for everyone?  Today we see trust in another as a threat to our own validity, especially if ours does not rise to that level with the client.  Such a shame.

Invest in trust everywhere – yours first and supporting those around you.  The pie is beyond big enough.  Allow for the possibility of what could be as you focus on building the trust generated by another as much as you do on your own.  It is the essence of the digital age – wealth created is based on integration.  Most certainly your value remains as the artist you are.  Trust and a spirit of expansion though makes your art the seed, far more than the tree.  Know where and how to turn to manifest expansion.  Your community will take you as far as you want to go.

Finding Yourself

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The best part of any business, creative business in particular, is that it is a journey of self-discovery.  Yes, you get to have your artistry and art front and center.  You share your vision of what is beautiful in the hope (knowledge?) that your vision will resonate with your clients.  Making your art and your creative business the purest version of how you choose to share your gift is, at base, the foundation of every creative business.  Such is not the topic of today’s post though.  Today’s post is about blind spots and their consequences.

More often than not, your clients have more money than you do and certainly more than your employees who are responsible for communicating with these clients.  How does it color the conversation?  Intimidation?  Resentment?  A feeling of, “They have so much, why are they arguing with me over $1,000?”  I have watched, in horror, as an employee at an interior design firm told a client, who just happened to be a self-made multi-billionaire, “not to get all business” with him.  When I asked why he would ever say such a thing, his response was, “He’s rich, he should not care about what we charge, it is small potatoes to him.”  Yeah, no.

Or the idea that someone who asks a million questions is a pain in the butt client, while the one who lets you alone until they do not is a dream (and then a nightmare).  Fear is pervasive in all creative businesses.  You are tasked with (a) creating something new and (b) creating it for someone who cannot or does not want to do it themselves.  Everyone wants awesome and are terrified that it will not turn out that way.  Your role is to be the guide, focused not on success (which must be inevitable) but instead on the road there.  How you perceive a client’s fear (or lack thereof) is its own statement about you, not them.

Speaking of fear, what about your own?  If you are worried about failing or competition or success, does it bring you out of yourself, your art, your artistry?  How fast do you talk about money?  How do you really talk about what you and your creative business are worth?  What you really stand for (note, it is not to create pretty things)?  Do you want to look like a better option or be the only option?

We all stand in the way of ourselves.  We are loved in spite of ourselves as much as we are because of ourselves.  Creative business is about forgiveness, humility and desire to bring to life what has heretofore never existed.  Too often, ego prevents a fluid response.  Rather than antagonize a wealthy patron, explain why you charge what you do and why it is important to the project.  See the beauty in the client willing to ask questions and encourage those with absolute faith to not be so absolute.  Acknowledge your fear, live in it, then put it aside.  Your creative business has intrinsic value or it does not.  Harnessing and displaying the value front and center is its own reward.

The point of blind spots is to recognize that you are, in fact, blind to them.  Give yourself the opportunity to have a different conversation, with yourself most of all.  You will shift, moving deeper into yourself, the essence of your art and your creative business.  This work, this change is the true seed of growth — the foundation for your next level.

What Will They Say About You When You Are Gone?

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Beyond the platitudes, projected ideas of who you were to them, what will people say about you when you are gone?  Do you know?  Do you care?  For each of us who have lost significant people in our lives, the idea is a profound one.  If only we can shape ourselves  by how we would want to be remembered.  Not so much for what we have done, the things created, but mostly for how we touched people.

So too then your creative business.  The vast majority of you are in the happy business, sure, the memory business most of all though.  If your clients are not forever touched by what you do for them, even if only a whimsical smile, then you have not done your job. Such is the nature of a corporate story, a defined set of core values and a commitment to an iconic process reflective of both.

Bill Baker wrote a fantastic blog post last week about the difference between corporate messaging and a corporate story.  My favorite thought is, “Importantly, corporate messages tend to be more temporary, responding to changing circumstances and new situations. A corporate story is more timeless; it’s the ether that continually permeates and floats around those messages. Stories are not opportunistic, they don’t change when the conditions change. The messages conveyed in the spirit of that story may adjust, but the story endures.”  Bill talks to larger corporations, creative and not, so his is a broader concept.  Drill down to creative business though and you have it all:  get caught in the flavor of the day, the latest idea and trend, or, most importantly, following along (or worse, looking like) your competition and you are sunk.  Being the moon instead of the sun belies the idea that the story of your sun is all that matters.

And yet.  The focus is on the sale, the money, closing the deal.  The beauty of holding uncertainty, building relationship, sharing your, your art and your creative business’ story is lost, sacrificed to the fear of not being memorable enough.  Not memorable enough to be the client’s only choice.  It is where core values come in, what Tony Hsieh spoke so well about in Delivering Happiness way back when.  Who are you?  What do your art and your creative business stand for?  And how do you live the values every day?  Where can I see them in every aspect of your business?

That is the yin and yang.  Your story drives your core values.  Living your core values deepens your story.

Taking my own spin on what Bill wrote – if your creative business does not invest in telling its story, living its core values and operating in a way that profoundly embraces both, you will become forgettable, or worse, interchangeable.  Art exists to shape our lives, move us to another place, to bring awareness of a life yet unlived.  For most creative businesses, that awareness is a deeper sense of joy than existed before you came on the scene.  What would keep me up at night as a creative business owner is not where the next project will come from, rather it would be that no one would remember my art and my creative business if it were gone.  Tell your story.  Choose to live it, passionately, fervently, faithfully.  The rest will take care of itself.

What Matters

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Life is a choice.  We decide it all.  Yes, things happen to us, horrible, wonderful and everything in between.  Our reaction, our pro-action, however, is all ours.  Integrity is staying true to the choice and respecting the choice of another.  We take people as they are, not as we wish them to be.  Light on the shadows no matter how painful is always a good thing.  And we all bring our shadows to dinner, myself very much included.

Creative businesses are in the happy business.  Be it a dress, an event, a home, a meal, a picture, or a drawing (virtual or actual), the point is to celebrate a moment.  Your art and your creative business exist to serve your client’s celebration of the life they have chosen.  Moments that matter to them enough to hire you to make it magical.  If the moment did not matter, you would not be there.  Period.

That then is YOUR choice – to honor your role in what matters.  Do you honor it with ego?  “I am a fabulous so and so, don’t you know, and you are lucky to have me.”  False humility?  “I cannot believe how lucky I am to be working with you, little old interior designer me.”  Or do you bring yourself, your art and your creative business to the party.  “This is who I am, this is what my art represents, here is how my creative business does it.”  Not like it or lump it, rather I do it this way because I am convicted in the notion that this is the best way for me and my creative business to do what we do.  If you have done your work, you can defend every scintilla of your process as a reflection of your core.  Clients know it when you use “just because” as your reasoning and it never comes free.

Truth just is.  You can judge it however you want to – ugly, beautiful, ironic, painful – does not change it.  So too with how you and your creative business do things.  This is your truth, your choice, your conviction.  No, clients may not like it and wish it were not so.  If you built that truth on arrogance, ego or, worse, illusion, you deserve the pain you will get.  However, if you have taken the time to understand what matters, why your clients would choose you and your creative business as a reflection of what matters to them, then you can align the stars. The alignment may never be linear but you will have earned the right to make it true nonetheless.

Do the work then on why you do what you do.  What would the world look like if you spoke only to those that chose you?  If you did everything in your power to make sure you understood their choice, what they most want to celebrate?  What matters to your clients lives underneath your art, between the words and beyond any one thing.  Honor that you and your art are uniquely capable of giving their choice to them.  Then set out to make your creative business a vessel of the journey and never a means to an end.

Trying To Find Your Feet

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I am fascinated by the parallel of my and my family’s move from New York City to Northern California and the feelings so many creative business owners deal with every day.  A story my friend and amazing interior designer Danielle Colding told me recently comes to mind.

Danielle and a friend were vacationing in the Caribbean and decided to take a day trip to a neighboring island by small boat.  On the way, in the middle of the sea, there was a puppy swimming.  All alone and just swimming.  Not panicking, swimming.  Land was not visible where the dog was found.  And yet there he was in the boat’s path.  The owner of the boat picked up the dog and decided to keep him.  A sign of great fortune he said.  The dog was happy to be out of the water, sure, but he did not go crazy according to Danielle.  Quiet gratitude was closer.

Were that I could be the dog.  Were that we all could be the dog.  Swim just to swim because there is nothing else you can do.  Faith that what will be will be.  Not that it will all work out in the end.  Better chance the dog found its way as an appetizer for a shark as it did the boat.  No, lose the notion that the future can be controlled and just do the work.

Creative business owners convince themselves that they can manifest the future.  New website, social media efforts.  Thinking about how they can stand apart; how they can appeal to the widest possible audience.  It is all about being desperate to see the shore and to say “Aha, there it is, we have to go that way.”  Who cares if there is fifty miles away and you will never make it.  Mostly, the panic and unwillingness to just swim means you, your art and your creative business become in service instead of service.  The conversation bases around “What can I do for you?” instead of “Here is what I do.”  Question instead of a statement.  Chameleon instead of champion.  Of course, you need input from your clients, but they came to you to be guided, not the other way around.

I suppose the question is – is swimming enough?  When there is nothing else to do but swim, the answer is easy.  Swim or die.  Except the reality (illusion?) is that there are always places to go, plans to be made, strategies to implement.  We convince ourselves that swimming with the goal in mind will get us out of the water faster.  It will not and, thankfully, cannot.

Swimming purposefully, with integrity, doing what only you, you art and your creative business can do is truly the only option.  Empowerment is in the intention.  The determination not to so much find joy as to live it.  Yes, you have to delight your clients.  You do it with commitment, quiet gratitude, confidence that you have some incredible to offer.  Just by swimming.

Stress and The High Season

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This is the time when most creative businesses are right in the middle of it or coming to the end of the peak season.  Late Spring/Early Summer is just that time of year when creative things happen.  Homes get designed and completed.  Weddings happen.  Photographs are in peak demand.   Regardless of whether it is going to be a good or great year, tis the season.

So how do you handle it? Are you trying to plot the course for the future?  Or are you in head down, get the work done mode?  Somewhere in between?

And what happens when the rush ends?  Do you collapse?  Start to worry about what is coming next (i.e., if there is enough business coming up)?  Obsess over what went wrong in the rush?  Fix everything (or nothing) before the next one comes?

Add to this the stress of our personal lives – for parents of school age children out there – it is end of school madness.  For me, throw in a move to Northern California after a lifetime in NYC and the stress factor goes to the moon.

Four thoughts then on what stress, high season and its effects can mean for your creative business.

1.  It is all bigger than you.  I have had to learn this one the very hard way, control freak that I am.  Sometimes it really is just about chopping wood and carrying water.  Doing great work for the sake of the work and the work alone.  Along the way, note the details – how clients felt, reacted, shared as they moved through your creative process with them.  Sure, what did they not like, but far far more important is what they did.  Under a to-do list that is beyond you, do what matters to you.  Either allow the rest to fade away or have faith that those who desire it most will fill the void.  Nature abhors a vacuum (one of my favorite ideas).  If you simultaneously create the vacuum by knowing your own limitations and refuse to fill it, others will step forward one way or another.  Yeah, so much easier said than done, worth the effort nonetheless.  There is tremendous freedom in acknowledging you need help.  Not just help to do what you no longer have time to do, but help to lift you higher than you ever could on your own.

2.  Create game film.  Nothing gets changed in the middle of a performance.  Tweaks sure.  Substantial change? Never.  Add to it most creative business owner’s memory of what went wrong dwarfing what went right.  The recipe is then to only fix the problems, not celebrate the successes.  Of course, problems need fixing, but only AFTER successes are celebrated.  Not a hint of woo-woo (or, in this case, rah rah) here.  Your creative business gets paid for its successes.  For the most part, clients are rooting for you and are heavily biased to say you did really well.  Who really wants to say that the house you designed sucks? You are in the create happy business after all.  If you truly did create happy for your clients, your work should be to figure out how to do more of THAT first, minimizing the bugaboos second.  We are all really terrible at having a memory if we do not write it down.  The look back filter almost always starts with what could have gone better.  Use your IPad, carry a clipboard, a notebook, hire an assistant, just take notes.  Notice the minutiae, what went right.  When you look back you will be able to see it and work from there.

3.  Strategy matters.  Even if you are in the middle of it all, you always have to come from a place of self-awareness.  You have to know the why of your art and your creative business.  Never forget what you, your art and your creative business stand for.  You can always hone it later, but you can never ever abandon the ethos of your creative business for the sake of getting the job done.  Being overwhelmed is what it is; what it never is is an excuse to do anything other than act with integrity to your art and creative business.

4.  Take a breath.  Perspective demands distance.  You have to leave it alone and shut it down.  I can obsess about the head of a pin and get trapped there too.  We all have to take a proverbial walk to find the road ahead.  Get yourself there however you have to – “I need a break”, “I am exhausted”, “I have earned it.”, “I need time to think.”  When you are there though, leave it all behind.  Just like change never happens during performance, it does not happen during stillness either.  Stillness entertains possibility, not the other way around.  From possibility, you can manifest something other.  To get there though, you have to allow for stillness, a quiet mind that can absorb it all.

Expansion and Innovation

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I am in Bachelor’s Gulch Colorado awaiting the start of Engage! 14 Bachelor’s Gulch.  Engage! is the brilliant brainchild of Rebecca Grinnals and you need know that it is the only conference for luxury wedding professionals that matters.  While the information and speakers are terrific, the point is community.  A time to come together without ego and allow the future to unfold, letting ideas flow and energies merge in a way that cannot help but create opportunity to move the industry forward.

Circumstance is always my friend.  Engage! starts today and the lead story in The New York Times’ Business Section is “Business School, Disrupted” discussing Harvard Business School’s venture into online education with HBX, the program.  HBS has decided to create a pre-HBS if you will with three core classes that will be available so that graduates will be accredited with being able to speak the language of business.  Credential of Readiness they are calling it.  There will be an exam and a paper certificate upon completion.  The cost is $1,500 with the three classes to be done in nine weeks.

Compare that with Coursera where similar content from other amazing business schools is available for free.  The philosophy of those business schools is to put as much information as possible out there and reap rewards of massive access ala Ted.

HBX is a wonderful example of A Perfect Egg – a new business derived from the core business but with a unique value proposition of its own.  Coursera and free access is more of a diffusion, there to support the core without necessarily creating another business.

Underlying both models though is one thought.  Online education is here to stay.  Opportunity awaits and those who sit still or, worse, do not delve deeply into what can be done will get run over.  More to the point, if you do not have the legacy of Harvard, Penn or Stanford, you are going to have to figure out how to be more nimble, niched to find your place.  Three points then.  If you are the known player in your market, you must stay true to who you are while thinking about what “who you are” actually means.  If you are up and coming, own your niche and only your niche; be known for being the absolute best at one thing, not twelve.  Last, what makes no sense today is tomorrow’s no-brainer.

If there is a bandwagon, please do not jump on it just to jump on it.  There will always be another one.  The best line in the whole NYT article is from Professor Michael Porter, “I think the big risk in any new technology is to believe technology is the strategy.  Just because 200,000 people sign up doesn’t mean it is a good idea.”  Creative business is about NOT being a sheep, going along with the herd.  By definition, creative business is about charting your own path, creating for a living. The business underlying the art demands innovation given a new platform.  Better said, when the new platform finds adoption and acceptance, more opportunity is created.  Harvard was not the first into online education, Apple not the first into cellphones, or Facebook into social networks.  Sometimes being first is all that matters, more often though, it is about seizing what the new road presents.  For luxury wedding professionals, no better place to explore the new road than Engage!.

Pain and Change

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Painless change is an oxymoron.  All change in business is painful.  You are giving up the known for the unknown.  No matter how hard your current situation (save the extremes of abuse/unethical/criminal etc.), moving to another reality is always fraught with uncertainty.  For creative business, the uncertainty is a double force for inertia.

Why?  Because no one needs a creative business.  Every creative business is a want.  I want fabulous flowers for my wedding.  I want my new house to be ridiculously modern.  I want my new website to be amazing.  When you have figured out how to have clients get what they want from you, even if that want is not really what you do, moving away from that has to give you the willies.  Compare this with businesses that sell a product, a thing.  You either sell enough of those things or you do not.

Take toilet paper.  Yes, we could live without it, but let’s go with it as a necessity relative to flowers for your wedding.  The goal of those in the business of selling toilet paper is to sell more toilet paper.  So if you are not selling enough toilet paper, you change to see if you can sell enough.  All the unemotional business metrics apply.

Here is the radical statement for creative business – if your only reason to change is to make more money, you will fail.  Unemotional switches in strategy (marketing, financial, structural, etc.) are irrelevant.  The paradox of creative business is that real change is not about telling a better story, it is about telling a deeper story.  Less shining the apple and more peeling the onion.  In peeling the onion, there will necessarily be those who do not fit — employees, clients, colleagues, even friends.  Letting go of the fiction that they do fit always sucks, especially when you are not sure those who you are reaching for are the ones who actually matter.  We call it faith – in yourself, the breadth of your art and the stage your creative business belongs on.

Of course, everyone likes a winner.  If your strategy to sell more toilet paper works, you make more money.  And maybe that is enough.  For artists though, who cares?  It is still toilet paper.  The satisfaction comes from creating; doing the work you are meant to share with us all.  Being in full bloom.  Yours is to move us, to make us feel, to inspire us.  You create joy and your creation is joy.  You might think the concept of working towards joy too woo-woo, but ask yourself what your clients really pay for.  I can get the thing you create cheaper.  Period.  What I cannot get for any price other than the one you are willing to accept is your desire to create for me.

Yes, change is painful.  However, it is a move towards joy.  Not a smiling nod, a giggle at a romantic comedy kind of thing.  Instead, a deep belly feeling that you are giving meaning to those who most want it from you.  Live happy.  The money will follow your willingness to move further into your truth and that of your art and creative business.  If you knew the fulfillment would be there, enduring the pain of transition would be a breeze.  Such is not anyone’s reality.  Then again, leaping towards yourself, having your creative business jump with you is, and will always be, its own reward.  You might just find that making awesome toilet paper covers is a whole lot better than pretending you make toilet paper.

Identifying Wrong Clients

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I have a client that was asked to present for a potential engagement for a corporate event (for sake of confidentiality, type of artist has been omitted).  Rather than put together a standard capabilities response with canned “here is why we are good” examples, she decided to ask some questions that were bigger than the usual who, what, when.  A few examples of the questions my client asked: why is the event happening, who do you want to impress and why, what are the moments you want, how do want guests to feel during the event, what do you want them thinking about when they arrive and/or when they leave.

Yes, my client wanted the potential client to actually do some work before coming in so she could prepare a presentation that would demonstrate how she would attack the problem (a pre-design if you will).  The response:  “With the utmost respect this is ridiculous…[generic portfolio] rarely does the job but if that is our only option without filling in a life questionnaire than am happy to look at [it].”

Buh-bye.  Instead of anger though, my client responded with a note saying that she understood what she was asking was a lot, but that it was the only way she and her creative business could create meaningful art.  She then went on to talk about the “why” of her creative business – “Our clients hire us because they want that special attention to their event, and they know we will create a tapestry of moods, feelings and modulating energy which takes the experience to a deeper level.”  She then offered to recommend artists that she felt would meet the requirements of the client.  A client is a client from the moment they contact you.  Even if your creative business will not be producing art for them, all potential clients are your responsibility.

Of course, my client’s response will fall on deaf ears.  If a potential client is in the market to buy simple transportation (say an entry level Hyundai), unlikely they will see the value of a top-of-the-line Mercedes.  However, you never know what their best friend (or boss) values and treating the wrong client well is both unexpected and always appreciated.  If you can see wrong clients as doing you a favor, you will be in the business of thanking them.

The favor is that it is much, much easier to define who you, your art and your creative business are by what you are not, than what you actually are.  Take my client.  By getting to say that she does not do plain vanilla, only highly custom, she gets to take it further by saying what is necessary to achieve the highly custom.  The wrong client will say that is ridiculous, the right one will say “ahhhhh, exactly what I want and I am ready to give you what you need.”

Ending the exchange with a wrong client with an authentic desire to help is a sign of strength.  It tells everyone that you know who you, your art and creative business are and who you are not.  Moreover, it reflects a desire to have all client’s only get the best artist for them.  If you put the energy out there that you only do your best for those that want what your best is, what do you think will come back?

Wrong clients are a blessing.  Thank them.  Help them. Embrace them.  Work hard to identify who they are.  Just do not create art for them.  Ever.

Alignment

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I have seen it time and again.  You say one thing about your art and creative business but the underneath tells a different story.  We are all about relationship with a ruthless contract to follow.  We only care about providing you with the best value (i.e., least expensive option) and charge a percentage.  Or, my fave, customer service is our priority, except the answer is do not worry, it will all work out.

There will ALWAYS be disconnects between your professed truth and the reality of you, your art and your creative business.  Such is the nature of the beast in an ever-evolving world.  However, the work has to be to constantly identify the disconnects if only to hone the value your creative business delivers.  The very idea that you do what you say, act as you imagine yourself to be, deliver the why of what you do first and foremost is exactly what clients pay for.

So how to go about the process of alignment?  Easy to say, crazy hard to do.  Ask yourself why you do what you do?  No platitudes – because I love to create/design/photograph/plan – only how you want to change the world.  That is what artists do after all.  Then look for the why everywhere in your creative business – how you answer the phone, in your contract, in your production process, and, obviously, in your final product.  One of my favorite examples, interior designer, Vicente Wolf.

Vicente is an intrepid global traveler.  His philosophy is to cross boundaries and bring the world into his designs.  His designs mix culture, eras and styles to make a unique statement.  Vicente wants to change the world by making his clients aware of all that he has seen in his travels.  Seeing globally in your environment (the one Vicente creates for you) is Vicente’s why.  I have written about how Vicente lives his why and how his entire business is structured around it.  As with all of us, his is a work in progress, but he is very far down the road.  Here is the link to my post on Vicente’s blog.  I wrote it three years ago but it is as true and relevant today as it was then.

I am a stickler for process, details and alignment because your creative business tells a story.  Too often that story is not the same as the story you are trying to tell with your art.  No one can tell two stories and hope to build trust.  By definition, one of the two stories is not true no matter how much you would like it to be.  Clients, vendors, employees and colleagues can smell it when you tell two stories.  It breeds distrust and distrust is the cancer of all creative business.

Creative businesses sell a leap of faith.  Finding alignment is an investment in trust.   With it, your creative business can take your art anywhere.  Without alignment and trust, your creative business will forever be the tether to your art’s balloon.

Tell one story and see where that takes you.

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