The Business of Being Creative

Here we are at the precipice in the United States.  Despite rising cases and lockdowns in Europe, Americans are ever hopeful that we will be largely through the COVID crisis by Summer.  Vaccines work, they are effective, prevent infection and are safe for kids and therapies are getting ever more powerful.

For creative business, we can feel it.  Restoration Hardware — to me a bellwether for the power of high end interior design is booming, according to Gary Friedman, RH’s CEO, only Tesla has outperformed RH’s stock in the last 24 months.  Venues are filling with events and we all stand ready to express ourselves again in ways that have been largely denied during COVID.

Then again, supply chain issues are very very real.  Good luck getting anything from Europe and, as I predicted in Apriland what is playing out right now, suppliers are focusing on their core products to those that made sure they did everything when times were awful to stay on the top of the list.  The difference in access and deliverability is staggering and will only get worse for the foreseeable future.

Here we are.  The temptation to extrapolate the future with the burst of energy is the stuff of bubbles and fool’s gold.  How to evaluate all that is in front of you?  Will you chase the money?  Will you reach for a new level?

My advice: double down on your culture and make sure that it is deeply entrenched in everything that you do. It boils down to three to five idiosyncratic words that mean everything to you, your art and your business.  My favorite example: an interior designer in Michigan that grew up in a traditional Italian family where Sunday dinner was everything.  Her three words — Family, Community and Love.  She requires that she attend at least one family get together with her clients as part of her intake process.  All of her employees are free to talk about their families and how they gather with clients, colleagues and partners alike.  Literally, everything she does as a designer and a business can be related back to one or all of her three words.  These three words are how she judges performance and acceptability. Oh she is enormously profitable but that is the side effect for her. Culture drives profits not the other way around.

All of which brings me to a conversation about TheExpert.com.  Have a listen to this awesome podcast from Business At Home with the founders and Dennis Scully to get a feel for the business and what it is all about.  Basically, it is talk to an ultra high end interior designer about your project for an hour, no strings attached.  It is a very simple model, Zoom and a calendar app with a payment function grouping elite designers together for consumers to schedule.  Hourly rates range from $500 to $2,500 an hour.  The Expert takes a 20% fee.  And no, there is nothing stopping any interior designer from doing the service on their own, and some have. But, according to the owners, there is a wait list of 600 designers trying to be on the site.  Clearly, The Expert has struck a nerve and even though it only recently launched and was formed in April 2020 because of COVID, they have already raised $3 million (Gwyneth Paltrow is one of the investors).

What I love about the idea is that it absolutely validates the value of the mind of a designer.  So long as it remains limited in scope — one or two sessions where clients take away the security of the professional opinion, we are all good.  It will not stay there though, one session will become five and value pricing will ensue.  Before you know it there will be a bunch of no man’s land where the difference between advice and the true journey of design will be blurred.  And there is no leverage here.  We are talking about Zoom and one-on-one interactions, not junior designers taking care of e-design.  Of course, The Expert says they do not want to flood the site with designers and want to maintain the luxurious standard.  Instead, the strategy is to focus on product selection and affiliate type relationships with providers.  We will see.

To be plain, I am all for what The Expert is doing as a business.  If they make it go, fantastic.  They found lightining in a bottle and why not?  My focus is on the designer who chooses to opt in as a path for her business.  Does it fit culture? Does it offer opportunity to serve those who care the most?  Is it sustainable? 

I think that if the integrity of basically being a design therapist on The Expert can be sustained, then sure.  But greed is a cruel mistress and session packages await.  If this is the future for luxury designers, hard pass.  There are better ways to be glorified product salespeople.  Because it is so new, no designer has reached the confusion point where a core client can say, “what about me?”.  That time is coming though and I am also confident that these designers will not have a great answer. Uh oh for them and the rest of the industry.

Please do not think that The Expert is limited to interior design.  The success of The Expert means that you can count on it coming to your creative industry and it is not new.  Everyone would love access to those who epitomize excellence.  There will always be a market for it. And the real question is whether the consumer has earned the right to the expertise.  If you flip the keys of a Ferrari to any enthusiastic teenager, they will jump at the chance to drive.  Does not mean they should be able to.

The question is whether or not the culture behind you, your art and your creative business will bloom or erode in the effort.  Let that be your barometer and not whether or not it is easy money, big money and/or a breeze to your ego. History has shown over and over again that vanity is its own folly.  Learn the lesson and do better.

You are a wedding designer.  When a bride and a groom contact you, you instantly know everything they have posted in their social media feeds for the last decade — where they vacation, what their pets are, where they like to eat, who their friends are, their politics, their family.  You also know what every wedding designer has ever done and posted about for the last decade.  So when the couple talks to you about their wedding you match the two universes (theirs and the history of all wedding design), sort by production budget and, voila, you have the perfect wedding design for the couple.  Sound far fetched?  Wait six months.  This is what Michael Beneville and I were talking about on my podcast a few weeks back.  The promise of artificial intelligence is to mine known data sets in profound, previously unimaginable ways.  If it can be known about anyone given a history of preference, it can be mined and matched.  I will not go as far to say that if you are a creative business that mainly mines history, you are lost, but I will say you are about to be marginalized by technology in a very big way very soon.

Reading the above might make you nervous, sad, skeptical. Or it might make you hopeful.  Hopeful?  You see, what the machine can never do is to be, well, human.  The machine cannot interpret preference and desires that are not rational, yet wholly right.  In a word, the machine cannot be truly creative as to discover other when there is no path to get to other.  You can and you do and it is why you and your creative business are paid what you are.  So my premise is this: if you want to thrive tomorrow, you have to believe in Wonderland today and be the Hatter.  Madness is up to you.

If logic can not solve or define an outcome, then it is irrational.  Meaning if two paths yield the same result and are simply a function of preference as to which you choose then the choice is idiosyncratic.  When you try to apply logic to the choice you always fall down as the other choice is equally (un)supportable.  How then to get someone to jump into your rabbit hole?  And what will you do when they are there?  Will it be an exercise in climbing back out as fast as possible, create the illusion that you are not in Wonderland, or revel in the idea of Wonderland and try to stay there as long as you can?

The future is Wonderland and if you cannot learn to revel there and know that it is your world, the world your clients most want to journey through with you, you will forsake the magic of trust.  Trust lives in fulfilled promises but it thrives in resolution of the unexpected.  The beauty of artistry is the power of art.  Your world.

When you are convicted as to the path your artistry must take, you can construct the container for creation and find all that you need there. The real world awaits and it lives within the context of the container and when you leave Wonderland you will never go back.  However, you will take with you the memory, the connection, the trust so that the real world can forgive your inevitable frailty.  It really is never the falling down, it is only the getting back up. Having the permission to get back up will be what you have earned from Wonderland if you have taught your client to savor their time there with you.

To be specific, everyone — clients, employees, production partners — all need to understand your process to get to “it”.  They need not have to agree with you or ever be you, they need only respect that it is what you need to manifest your best idea(s) and allow you to do you.  Yes, you need to define the container for improv so that you can then create within the container.  Wonderland.  Your world where every emotional sinew lives. The ties that bind. The story is given meaning and transcendence beyond the direction and through the looking glass.

Once out of the rabbit hole, there can be no more hole.  You see, the real world, where logic applies is your client’s world. They are better at living in that world than you are since they mostly spend all of their time there.  There is no room for Wonderland because logic applies and you must defend the logic.  The milk, eggs, flour and sugar only cost so much and you will be paid only so much to actually bake the cake.  Inventing the cake in the first place (Wonderland) is worth what you say it is.

Wonderland is why I love creative business so very much.  It is the heart of human relationship.  To listen and be heard, to be seen in a light you yourself cannot yet understand about yourself, client and artist alike.  From there the truly unexpected is revealed and we are all better for the uniquely and singular human experience.  Logic has no place in Wonderland as the freedom of what will be will be.  A delicious cake it is if you only choose to eat it.  There will be time enough to bake it later.

As we move ever closer to living in a post-COVID world, the question everyone should be asking is what will you take with you?

If you have not yet listened to my conversation with Michael Beneville on this week’s podcast, I hope you can find the time.  During our conversation and the multiple times I have listened back, I have become more convinced than ever that COVID has permanently shifted our culture and been an unbelievable accelerant in just so many ways.  In a sea of awfulness, the silver lining exists.  So let’s talk about four areas that deserve consideration: digital communication, project management, cash flow and marketing (but only from the perspective of messaging — not attracting eyeballs).

Digital Communication – Yes, this one is here to stay.  Grandma learned Zoom.  The comfort we all have with communicating digitally is not going anywhere. There most certainly is a tremendous value in actual human interaction but the power of digital connectivity offers unparalleled ways to communicate ideas and thereby engender powerfully effective decision-making that simply cannot exist in the physical realm.  For instance, what if you can render out what you imagine and walk through it in real time with your client?  What if you can use these rooms to effectively manage production?  Will you make the investment?  Will there be a Zoom room as a permanent part of your business?  The days of — I sent a text, dropped an email or left a voice mail are done when the expectation is that I can know my 3Ws 24/7 no matter how busy I am or where I might be in the world.

Project Management – Following on digital communication, the notion of how “it” (whatever it is) moves from your brain to manifestation has exploded during COVID.  The ability to use digital tools to ensure that production is moving as expected is not going anywhere, nor should it.  See the idea of using renderings to denote production progress. The fuel of effective decision making in design will necessarily require more efficient production. No, this does not mean there will not be FUBAR moments, it just means the ability to recover and keep going should be manifestly better.  It is never the falling down, it is always the getting back up.  Post-COVID, you will be expected to get back up with more resilience then when you fell down.  Every time.

Cash Flow – Digital payment systems have really come to the fore in COVID — touch less and peer-to-peer payments are valuable when you want to pay your friend for whatever you might want to pay them for.  What it means for your creative business is that the idea that you should wait for payment today by paper check is antiquated.  Value delivery needs to be honored and if you deliver value you should be paid for it.  I loathe random payments (i.e., 50% up front 50% two weeks before delivery) and want to tie value paid for value delivered.  When billing and payment is analog, it can be exhausting to send bills and receive payments on anything other than a bulk basis.  Pre-COVID, I could hear this excuse (lame as I always thought it to be), post-COVID, not a chance.  If you deliver an idea (i.e., design), that your client loves and approves of, you need to be paid almost instantly.  Yes, that means within three days.  Why not?  Paying your creative business is as easy as hitting a button. To get paid appropriately however, means you have to bill appropriately.  If you presented an idea on the first of the month, it is no longer acceptable to bill for that idea on the thirtieth.  Pairing cash flow with value delivery has a huge impact on any business, creative business most of all.  Oh, and the better you are at managing cash flow is a direct reflection on how well you are managing digital communications and, ultimately, project management.  Just saying.

Marketing – In no way do I know how to get eyeballs to your creative business.  If that is what you believe you need to move forward post-COVID, I get it and can see the value of being know in the market(s) you wish to serve.  BUT BUT BUT, at a certain point I have to be able to know what you stand for, what the experience is going to be like working with you and your creative business.  When I look through everyone’s social media feeds I see incredible images of awesome work, but, for the most part, I have no idea about what you care about and almost certainly no idea why.  If you appreciate the growth in emotionality — the need for your art, your creative business to provide hope to its clients — is here to stay (and it is), then you have to be willing to give a window into the underneath that drives the experience.  Else how will we know the joy that awaits in the journey? 

Before you jump to me being too woo woo, how about the notion I hinted at last time — your ability to get better at the art you create is marginal at best.  Your cake might look and taste a little better, your photograph a touch more impactful, your musicality slightly improved. However, you were already awesome and now you are just a little more awesome.  Why does that merit a dramatic shift in anything — your fee, your production budget, etc.?  It does not.  On the other hand, using all that COVID has given you, your art and your creative business to create an exponentially better experience, that is a real opportunity and yours for the taking if you dare.  Creative businesses sell strategy, not product.  If I have no ability to know why your strategy matters, I will default to product and there good enough great, is not.

I just finished recording my first ever conversation for my podcast.  I usually just riff on what I am thinking about for creative business.  I decided that, as we approach the end of COVID, I needed to bring in someone far wiser than I when it comes to what tomorrow might be.  Enter Michael Beneville — my dear friend and intellectual soul mate about what we both think awaits us in the not-to-distant future.  Here is a post I wrote after a serendipitous trip back to California where Michael just happened to be on the plane.  Michael and I can go down the rabbit hole gleefully for a very very long time.  I very much hope you enjoy our conversation next week on the podcast.

In the meantime, one of the most salient things we talked about and worth a deeper dive here is the idea that old paradigms played out to their logical conclusions have the potential to undermine all of the potential for human connectivity that awaits us.

Let us just get down on the ground. If you have used Zoom for your creative business in the last year, I am so sure that you are beyond sick of it mostly because you have tried to morph what you did in the physical world into the digital. Basically, you took the factory model — show up, do your work, go home and supplanted it onto the computer.  For my kids school, it meant having them stay on camera for an entire day.  Now that we are (hopefully) nearing the end of COVID, so many are yearning to return to the office and get back at it. Except.

For those that broke the factory model, you have micro-entrepreneurs within an organization serving internal clients in heretofore unheard of ways.  Expectations ratchet so that interactions are intense and results oriented.  The pyramid structure is broken into atoms in a molecule.  The result is stronger process with deeper buy-in from everyone as celebrating micro-ownership intensifies the macro-ownership.  If I can see the value of my piece of the puzzle and how it fits, then we all will celebrate the entire puzzle.  And yes the pieces will come together better — it might be faster, but will definitely be with more conviction (though never a guarantee). 

It happens because these creative businesses started by breaking the factory paradigm. Possible pre-COVID, sure, just harder to own the value.  Remarkable post.  What would be the point of yearning for the factory in real time when you can rethink it given all that has been achieved now that it has been broken?  If someone can change the world with an 18 minute TED talk why should ANY meeting (other than creative brainstorming) take longer? Or better said, be allowed to take longer.

I hope you can see though that if you play out the old paradigm (i.e., factory model) to its logical conclusion you will see that the only way it survives is if you give in to the product idea of art as opposed to the strategy (i.e., story) of creation.  You wind up selling products and relying on the ultimate deliverable.  This is the road to commodification because that is the essence of what the factory model was built on — interchangeable parts built by interchangeable people with ever-growing intolerance for slack — all at the cheapest price.  No doubt, the factory model has produced remarkable changes to our daily lives and will certainly continue to do so. Just not for creative business.

At base, all creative business is about story and the celebration of the journey to the unknown.  We have arrived at the time when those who persist in the old paradigms — factory, gatekeeper, percentage of budget — will be challenged simply because they do not honor the storytellers they are trying to embody. 

Jules Verne imagined a world that was a century away from manifesting. Sometimes the tools are not there to support the vision you imagine.  The world has to catch up and the spoils go to those daring enough to get us there.  We are here now though and there is just no room to let anything be included in the price.  If we do not know what we are paying for, we will default to our perception of value with the firepower to prove that our worldview is the right one.  Yes, if you persist with your old paradigm you will be bringing a knife to a gunfight.  However, if enough people bring knives to a gun fight we will be relegated to a role that will never let us put down our weapons in the first place.  That idea that what could be is prevented because of being stuck with the limits of yesterday is what keeps me up at night.

There is also no part of me that does not understand the immense challenge in front of all creative businesses.  How do you simultaneously embrace the beauty of history and let it go for what is to come?  Nothing new about evolution, but when it happens in an explosion we can all feel lost, or worse, left behind.  My hope is only to know the opportunity that comes in the embrace of testing a new strategy far in front of a better product.  Your work is already incredible. Improvement will be marginal, at best. The journey though? That can be upended by all things yet to come.  Opportunity lives there as does imagination.

What Michael and I both agree on is that sacrifices to humanity and human connection need not be made any more in the name of innovation and progress.  The days of Office Space can be over if we choose them to be.  The beauty of what is to come is the power to simultaneously create global community, micro community, digital AND analog all at once.  Anyone who texts with their family when everyone is at home knows exactly what I mean. The real question in front of all of us is whether or not you will own this new paradigm for all that it can bring us or see it as folly in the time of COVID.  Pretty sure you know where I stand.  Where do you, and, most importantly, your art and your creative business?

So I saw a fascinating thread where someone posted, “Doing work you hate will not lead to work you love.”  The responses ranged from YES! to but you have to pay your dues to get your shot.  My response, all of the responses are right and all are wrong.

First, no one is going to flip you the keys to their Ferrari without some kind of knowledge that you actually know how to drive it.  For consumers of creative business, I am always blown away by the very lack of understanding they have before they do in fact flip the keys.  I have known many, many creative businesses that were on the brink of financial ruin but received a seven figure project nonetheless.  A project, by the way, that was going to take the better part of a year to complete.  A second’s worth of due diligence would have revealed the financial situation.  And yet.  So, please, do not tell me that you have to pay your dues to get on the stage when those that are on the stage are teetering on the edge of falling off.  Yeah, this is pre-COVID.  I can only imagine what it is now.

Then there are those that say that they have to do what they have to do to pay the bills by way of a day job.  That is not the same conversation.  If you are data processor by day, wedding planner by night, had the good fortune to become a full-time wedding planner but now, with COVID, have to go back to some data processing, that is fundamentally different from doing work for the exact wrong client. 

This is the truth of the statement doing work you hate will not lead to work you love — only people who care about what you do will pay you and people who care the most pay the most.  If you kid yourself (and the wrong client) that you are able to do great work for them, you are completely lost.  No matter where you are in your career or the arc of your creative business, you have to have a soul.  Period.  If you love the beauty of color, living in monochrome serves no one.  While you may not yet be able to paint the whole rainbow, you can require that you have your moment of color, however small.  If it means that you will have to keep your day job for a little longer, so be it.  Otherwise, you are building your business on a lie.

What it all requires though is a look in the mirror.  How much do you really care about what it is that you want to share?  What is driving you?  Why?  You need talent and skill and experience, sure, but you absolutely need conviction. Conviction is your DNA and it is beyond the medium, it is why you are compelled to create. Conviction to your perspective is not enough though.  What underlies it all is your conviction to the practice of your craft; quite literally how you are to get from here to there.  It matters since it is your journey that we are all sharing. 

Your idiosyncrasy is not that you love to do purple weddings, it how you go about creating purple weddings for those that care deeply about not just purple weddings but about how you would create their purple wedding for them. The how you do things is lost on those who would erase themselves in the hope of a better future.  You marginalize yourself to the myopia of the hopeful fear of the unknown.  We all default to our understanding and try to live in our own comfort.  The essence of what you do as an artist and creative business is to take us outside of that comfort zone so that our hopes can be realized in transformation. There is simply no way to do that if you are trying to keep everyone comfortable.  There is just no such thing as easy and stress-free when it comes to creative business.  There is only resolution to necessary stress — this might not work but let us try the best we can for what it might become.

Which then gets to the last point.  Integrity.  If you are doing the work you hate, it might not be the work that you hate as much as that you have no voice in doing the work.  You feel like you have to be in service instead of of service to keep the work. So you wait and wait until you get the chance to have a voice.  Maybe that is your reasoning.  Then again, a closed mouth never gets fed. What I know to be true is that the frustration of being voiceless builds until you choose to risk opening your mouth and then opportunity comes. 

We all get there when we get there but do not let hindsight change the memory.  If you are looking back on the top of the mountain saying that you got here because you were willing to eat dirt for as long as it took, you do you.  I choose not to believe your narrative. 

You started your climb the second you decided that your voice mattered and lived there no matter what, not a moment earlier.  Before that time you were just building to whatever it took for you to have your voice in the first place.  Some people are born with the compulsion to have their voice heard, others take a little longer to get there.  And no, it has nothing to do with confidence, it has everything to do with integrity and the desire to share.  Confidence is personal, the desire to share is universal.  There is a huge difference. 

Does it mean you do not have to do the work every day to be better as an artist, a business, a human?  Of course not, that is the price of admission.  Talent, wisdom and experience are verbs not nouns.  The DNA though, that lives within every artist, every creative business — you cannot hide from it and if you do work that rejects your very DNA, what is the point?  What you stand for matters and the roots have to grow ever deeper to continually discover purpose. It is why seeds grow roots first, otherwise they are just weeds.

It is no secret that I believe all creative business get paid for three things: design, production, reveal (installation). The price of design is what you say it is while the price of production and, often, reveal is market driven.  In other words, there is a huge difference between coming up with what IT is and then making IT a reality.  And since making IT a reality is a known entity then the number for what it takes to do the work is also known.

This post is my shot at blowing up the canard that percentage pricing is in any way doing what you want it to do for your creative business.

If you are in an industry that gets 15% of a production budget to produce your design and that production budget is $100,000, you get $15,000.  If it takes three months to produce your design, then $5,000/month is equivalent to 15%.  Easy enough (I hope).

Now if you want to be in the “what we charge is what we charge” camp, you want to separate your price from the cost of production.  In the above example, if the production work is the same, truly you are indifferent between say a $100,000 budget and a $110,000 budget, meaning you really do not need the extra $1,500.  So you would be happy to make $5,000/month for three months even if the production budget slightly changed.  Your client should love the idea of a flat monthly production fee.  And yet they do not trust the change because they know you love your percentages and believe somehow they are worse off with a flat production fee (they are not).

Why?  As a business you have told the story for so long that if they change their mind you, your art and your creative business need to be covered. Which, of course, is ass-backwards.  It is your job to know the level to which you design and to communicate that.  If the scope of the project radically changes, then you are starting over and the price of design (i.e., what it takes to come up with IT in the first place) explodes.  

The price of design explodes because you now have less time to come up with a much bigger design (project risk) and you have to take care of your other clients that did not change their mind (systemic risk).  Last, you don’t want them to change their mind (penalty) because your timeframes exist for a reason.  Greed is such an allure though.…

By the way, your production fee also has to explode since you have less time to do a much larger project.  

So tell me again how your percentage “protects” you, your art and your creative business?  Let’s not even talk about when the production budget plummets.

Back to the example, if your client decides to double the budget and you just get your 15%, how does that work out for you?  Yes, you are now receiving $30,000 but you are getting nothing for redesign (presuming you had a design fee in the first place, if not, why not?) and have to twice the work in half the time.  If someone came to you and said produce this $200,000 project in three months versus six, the percentage would have to go up since you would charge 15% if you had six months. Hmmm…

A caveat.  If your industry has notoriously undercharged and percentage pricing moved the needle closer to value, I am down.  Just like a booster rocket is necessary to leave orbit, no booster rocket, no space flight.  Once in orbit however, the booster rocket is dead weight.  So too percentage pricing today, at least the way it is currently constructed.  If you do not have an exploding percentage if there is a radical change in scope post design, you are kidding yourself in believing that percentage pricing is doing its job.  Same goes for charging hourly to hedge against scope creep.  Something is NOT better than nothing when it comes to getting paid for risk as it just creates confusion.

So what to do? Know where you are and what is expected of you, your art and your creative business.  If situations change (and they always do), then be forthright in what it will take to make your business indifferent to the situation.

Which brings me to my last thought — your business is neither positive or negative in its delivery, it just is as it needs to be to ensure your best work.  If someone comes to you a year out to do a project, your price is $x.  If they come four months out, presuming your best is possible (sometimes there literally is not the time), the price might be $5x.  Your business does not care which one shows up as both will give you what you need to create and manifest your best art.  This concept of indifference is lost on so many as you feel like you are being negative by establishing great guardrails.  You are not, you are just allowing your business to do its job to nurture the art that drives it, never the other way around.

It leads to counter-intuitive results that, for me, anyway are always better.  If you get $5,000/month for production but are in a creative business where it is possible for you to finish early, I would always trade the $5,000 monthly fee for finishing a month earlier.  Finishing early would mean that all went beyond according to your vision and your best was fully supported.  It would set the stage for the next great project and the ones after that. 

Oh, but greed is so cruel.  Most would choose that extra scope and a delayed project where your best is in jeopardy every day all day as it would mean more dollars to you and your creative business.  The dollars might be a lot (in my example an extra $15,000 is not small potatoes).  I hear P.T. Barnum….

If you take anything away from this post, I hope (i.e., pray, plead, beg) you ask yourself: “At what price?”  If you do, you might just find that it really is not worth it.  Get what you need, no more no less no matter the circumstance and without apology.  Then, let your work speak for itself, over and over (and over) again.

I am reading Adam Grant’s new book, Think Again.  It is all about challenging ourselves to act more like scientists and actively question our beliefs as much as possible.  I love it and am loving the book.  Huge fan of Adam Grant and his way of re-thinking organizational psychology.

I find the paradox of creative business profound in the context of Think Again.  Literally, the bedrock of creativity, of creative business, is that what “it” is did not exist before you, the artist, thought of it.  While there might be close proximities from previous work, the entire idea is that what is done is done for the moment at hand.  In its purest form, creative business is a perpetual exercise in re-thinking.  How can we do it better today for what we are seeking to create?  And yet.

The beautiful grace of humility, the desire to search, to be still, to contemplate and to come from a place of wonder is what makes great artists great.  Their businesses, on the other hand, are in a race to the pre-digested and the test is more about tools than structure.  Any tool will work if gerry rigged enough.  Percentage pricing?  Most creative business owners go there because they want to communicate a sense of value delivered relative to spend.  And for a moment, that works.  “I get that you are worth x% of what I spend.”  But then the tool becomes the crutch and the logic breaks.  What if I spend less?  What if I do some of the work myself?  You respond with, well there is a minimum. On and on it goes.

Ultimately, the battle to commodification of your business versus the desire to create better art tilts towards commodification.  It is just easier to use the tool that gets you close enough.  Hourly fees, percentage pricing, keystone mark-up. I would never say that using these tools is not appropriate, what I am saying is whether or not there might be better tools available today.  Just as you would not hand draw everything today, so too challenging whether the tools you use to tell your business story really do the work you need of them.

Ask yourself then, what is really your DNA?  In the end, it is how much do you want to work and how much do you want to make?  Once you know, you know and you can set about using tools and methods that extract, define and legitimize the value you seek.  Perhaps percentage is the only way for you to get there, though I really, really do not think so.  The future asks you to do the hard thing.

Most often, this means reinforcing the foundation you have built.  This is challenging, mostly unheralded and a long term investment.  It is not nearly as gratifying as raising your prices 10% because the calendar turned the page.  Sometimes you have to tear the whole house down and that is a whole other conversation.  Today though ask what will make you strong in the face of those who would seek to turn the irrational, rational.  There really are no short cuts and just because somebody throws out a trope that works for them, does not mean you have to engage in myopic conversations.  You are all better than that.  If you are talking about how you charge before talking about why, we are doomed to oblivion.  Why means that if you can be shown that there is misalignment between your intended why and how it is received, you need to change it, even if (well, especially if) it is “working” for you, your art and your creative business at the moment.

It brings me to my core philosophy: dig in, fight with all you have to be right about what you believe, ask those around you to do the same.  Always be willing to be wrong.  It is not personal, it is information.  Appreciate the uncertainty of art is a necessity for your business most of all.  Better tomorrow than today requires you to move perpetually towards why, fully knowing there will always be another why.

If the aim is to be as you intend, then all things based on derivative value will shrivel the more we know about the object.  In the end, you are going to have to defend your value as it is.  The thing is that COVID just brought the end forward a generation.  Time to stand in your own light or be overshadowed by those that do.  

Fear does not only mean there is a gun pointed at your head or some similar threat.  In fact, physical threats are not the deepest fear we all face for the simple reason it will be over one way or another.  No, the deepest fear is being seen, or worse, ignored for the essence of who we are even if the very reason the relationship exists is BECAUSE of this essence.  This fear is pervasive and all too often never ending.  For me, this is the genesis of most “isms” when it comes to creative business, the biggest being sexism (gender and/or sexual identity/orientation) and racism.

Intimidation and bias is baked in and becoming sensitive to that fact in an effort to improve the business of creation is always a worthwhile endeavor.  We have to challenge what exists, sometimes (ok, often) break it down before we can rebuild it more strongly in an artist’s image.  We have to move through “I am doing it wrong” to the place where we can definitively say the voice of the art is stronger because of the path paved by the business behind the art.

There is no emotion here and our humanity into the overlay of culture and its impact on all of us leads to consequences that force compromise.  If you do not want to be perceived as “difficult” or “rigid” or “pedantic”, you shave off the edges.  And the risk of you not being able to do your best grows.  Literally, you silence the voice of your business that exists solely to be your champion. Like throwing down the shield to hope that the arrows will not hurt.  No, no and no.

The wisdom of universal creation — faith that your ability to transcend the knowable with your art — is behind every single creative business I can think of.  It must be honored if you are to find lasting success, both for you and your client. The fight today is to compel the intrinsic value that lies within universal creation so that it might become manifest.  Today though, more than ever, we swim in the sea of creation with those who do not appreciate either the depth of the water or its ability to transcend.  These are intimidating people and is a powerful basis for fear and a reason to hide in the “easy to understand”.  COVID has forced our hand here though and demanded that we call out these bullies for what they are.  “Getting to yes” sucked pre-COVID and is a disaster now.  In the context of creative business, it means that, regardless of who you are as a person, your business needs to speak loudest of the truth it represents.

How we go about getting to the essence of why you and your creative business exist, ironically, is to honor the humanity in the relationship — the power within each of us to touch another with our gifts.  To transcend the known. No doubt, some may not get there and that will just have to be.  For the rest of us, be present to the relationship in front of you, frailty and strength all at once and hold the center for where it might bring us all.  To be clear, this relationship is, by definition, imbalanced, you must earn the right to hold all the power, to extinguish authentic voice of your client beyond the idea stage and to move unimpeded in the journey’s path that your creative business alone has set.

Hard, mindful work is its own reward.  My naïveté is that we can level the playing field to give all creative businesses a chance at finding those who care most about their work and vice-versa.  If a black heterosexual female wedding planner is the best artist to handle the wedding of two white men, then my hope, my deep unbinding prayer, is that that is exactly what will happen. We have a long long way to go, no doubt.  This is the work though and how we can do better tomorrow.  Clients will have their own biases and that is on them, it is just that great work finds its own audience, most often bigger and broader than imagined.

Practically, though, it means that every creative business owner needs to do the deep, intrinsic analysis on their businesses first.  Why should I entrust the essence of my very life — my home, my wedding, my building, my image — to your business if you do not know your own narrative, how to take me on the journey that I need to go on with you for me to experience the world as you would have me?  I might be the subject of the story, but you are the story teller.  It is not hard to do good business if you have the courage to own the story of your creative business as only you would tell it.  And if you do not have that courage, please forgive yourself, ask to find it and, if not possible, just get out of the way for those that do.

As we tear down the biases and seek to heal the gashes at the fabric of our society, we will all want the placebo of saying look at what we are doing.  That just is not good enough.  No one needs a gift, we need authentic connection and real opportunity to express that connection across all platforms.  This will take time and conviction.

There is no part of me that does not understand millennia of indoctrination of other as being superior and the systemic, powerfully cultural underpinning to perpetuate the imbalance of power and its awful consequence.  As a people, I pray we move to find a way to dismantle this construct and will support anyone who works to achieve this goal.

However, when it comes to your creative business, you must let your business speak for you, plainly and true.  It boils down to this: you and your art change the world when you are given the stage to do your best work. No client ever pays for your best under the circumstances.  As you know your art is bigger than you, so to your business.  If it is beautiful is when it is done, how you get to done is entirely up to you.  That is your truth, your reality.  Your clients have the choice to live there or not, they do not have the ability to change it.  Let that be your North Star.