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Time Pressure

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When I was a kid, if I did not do my homework, I would not be able to watch my favorite show that night.  M.A.S.H., Man From Atlantis, even C.H.I.P.s are responsible for my ability to manage my time well.  With no VCR, DVD, DVR or Video-on-Demand, if you missed the episode, it was gone until summer, when you would not want to watch it anyway.  So there was real pressure for me to get done what I had to so that I did not miss the moment.

I had this conversation with my six year old and it just did not register.  “Well, you could just watch it on ITunes/Netflix/On-Demand later.”  He will grow up not knowing the pressure of missing the moment.  Sporting events are about all I can think of today that might come close to what I (and I am sure tons of kids) lived with every day.

The Internet, of course, takes this much further than just entertainment.  If you have to go to the library to get information, you have to be prepared to get the information you need when it is actually open.  Imagine if Google/Wikipedia only operated from ten to six.

So what happens when you remove the finiteness of resources and assets?  When fleeting becomes whenever you need it?  No, I do not think we all become lazy.  We just have to work harder to manage time, create time pressure and value the moment.

The implications for creative business are enormous.  Why?  Because ALL creative business is about the finite, the fleeting, the moment.  You are either creating the idea for the moment, building towards it or actually delivering it for your clients.  Your success is wholly dependent on moving through your process with requisite pressure on each step so that you can move easily and effectively to the next.  For example, if an interior designer/architect does not get sign off on the design in the time frame they need, delivering the final product when it is due gets increasingly more difficult.  But we do not live in that culture any more.  Everyone’s time frame is his or her own and flexibility is how we all live.  We decide when we want to do just about anything without worrying we will miss, well, anything.

All of which is to say you, your art and your creative business have to go the other way.  You have to deliver the finite, the fleeting, the moment and impress upon your clients, employees, colleagues, etc. its value in the very face of infinite flexibility.  Hey, no one said it was going to be easy.  Then again, there is increasingly diminished satisfaction in knowing that you will never miss anything if you do not want to.  So showing the value of the finite, the fleeting, the moment, can and should be its own reward.

And here is the biggest thought of all: if you set up your creative business to deliver in the end with a huge gulf/wasteland/blackout in between engagement and delivery, you are in deep deep trouble.  All artists need answers along the way to deliver their best work.  Without being able to communicate the finite value the question, each question, encompasses, you jeopardize your ability to control your own process.  Sure, you will get done in the end, but getting there will become increasingly more painful.  Our “decide when we want” culture is not going away any time soon.

Instead, why not work on impressing on your clients, employees and colleagues the value of each step in the journey and just how fleeting, finite and wonderful each step is?  My guess, you will make the destination inevitable and far more enjoyable along the way for everyone – you, your art and creative business most of all.

What Remains To Be Said

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There are times when I feel like I have said all that needs to be said here.  I have written about my philosophy, ideas, passion for creative businesses and their success pretty thoroughly over the past three years.  And yet, as I now come back to the blog after a longer-than-anticipated break, I realize there is so much more to say, even if only to reiterate all that has been said before.  The value of the work for me is exactly that – the work.  If it were all a straight line, we could learn lessons once and be forever on the right path. How boring life would be then.  Nope, the work is to keep peeling the onion and if that means working through it all again, so be it.

In this vein, I would like to talk about three things – process is everything, change sucks and your commitment to process and change is the absolute arbiter of the success of both your art and your creative business.

Process Is Everything – What you do from the moment a client contacts you until the project is finished matters.  Everything from how you answer the phone, to what your contract says, to how you set your deliverable schedule.  Details, details, details.  Why?  To identify each moment for what it is and to let your client know the value they are receiving for that moment.  Too many creative business owners think process is about figuring out how to get to the end.  It is not.

Here is the thing:  clients only know what to value when you tell them.  Otherwise, it will be up to them.  So if your contract reads 50% deposit, here is the stuff you will get, see you at the end, how are they supposed to know what matters.  Your presentation?  Your production?  Your transition from idea to execution?  From the 50% deposit, it would seem that what matters is your reputation and salesmanship to get them to say yes in the first place.  But are you really laying yourself on the line?  Saying to your client, here is what matters in my creative business – where you can judge me (and pay me)?  Your creative business is risky as are all businesses and you will be judged.  The point is to be judged where you want to be, and to do the work to make sure that those judging are more than likely to love what they see, hear, taste or touch.  Process is about identifying fans, working with them to share in your creativity so that the ultimate creation is an inevitable byproduct of your time together.  Not the other way around.

Change Sucks – There is nothing harder to do in this world than change.  Whether you are at the bottom looking up, treading water, flying high, or anywhere in between, shifting from that place is beyond difficult.  We are all creatures of habit and, no matter what, we are all comfortable where we are; even in the ultimate dysfunction.  Giving up the known, convincing others that your new way is a better way for both you and them, is a gargantuan task.  Why?  Three reasons – 1) it might not work, 2) there is no proof, and 3) you need buy-in from people predisposed to 1) and 2).  Just because you believe that your new way is a better way does not mean others will, even if you can prove it to them.  Whether we are talking about your clients, employees, colleagues, friends, etc., creating change for you, your art and your creative business is going to elicit a response.  Only the bravest will jump in with you, the rest will need your faith and desire to evolve your art and creative business to come with you, if at all.

Commitment To Process and Change – This one should be pretty obvious.  Your commitment to your process – to identifying all that is valuable about you, your art and your creative business, and, more importantly, when it is valuable is everything.   If you wish to evolve, you have to evolve your process.  You are going to have to change when everyone else is going to tell you no.  And, as with everything, the first time you implement the new process will look completely different from the twentieth.  You cannot get anything into your bones unless you allow yourself to live it.  That means you are going to fail and flop and flub until you do not.  By definition, you will eat humble pie.  My good friend, Rebecca Grinnals, is fond of Will Rodger’s quote:  “Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”  To which, I would add, if you are going to move, you have to have the courage, fortitude and faith to know that when you are on the right track, falling down never means falling off.

Spiritual, Physical, Financial

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When creative business owners stop and think about where they want to go with their art and their creative businesses most do it exactly backwards.  They start with money – what they should charge, how much they want to make, what things cost, etc. Then what work is necessary to generate the money they seek.  Finally, if at all, most creative business owners ask themselves what exactly it is that they want to share with the world.  If that vision fits the money and the physical, then most creative business owners are good; and if it does not, usually the vision gets adjusted (or chucked).

Perhaps this thought process is from classic SWOT Analysis and all that, but I cannot see how it can work for creative businesses.

The spiritual is everything.  Your seeds as an artist, social commentator, communications expert, visionary are based in your ideas and what you feel you need to deliver.  It is beyond ego and into the realm of giving.  Yes, it is woo woo and meant to be.  Why you are here and doing what you are asked to do is the only place from which you can begin.  To be even more aggresive: without this foundation, your creative business will crumble.  Why?  Authenticity.  Truth.  Art.  Those that resonate in these three words with you will pay you and your creative business anything to share your version of the words with them.  In a world that tries to objectify and rationalize the value of everything, you must know your intrinsic value separate and apart from THE thing.  Lots of people like to make pretty, does not make them artists or effective creative business owners.  Art and creative business is what is behind the pretty.  The why, the ethos of who you, your art and your creative business are and intend to be.  Start there.

Then, what is your bandwidth?  Do you want to do one hundred projects a year or four?  Do you want to be a manager or a lone wolf?  Or somewhere in between?  What will it take for you to do your best work? Always?  Where will there be idle hands and where will the creative light go out from overuse (literally, burnout)?  The place is different for all of us.  No, you may not be able to proscribe it for yourself.  Maybe you want fifteen projects and get five or twenty, but to not think about what volume of work you need is ostrich time (i.e., head in the sand).  You cannot adjust the value of what you offer if you are letting what is offered to you determine your value.

Last is financial.  Once you have worked through the spiritual and physical side of things you will know what you need financially.  From there you price, not based on the market, or what the value of the project is, or other objective mental masturbation game you might want to play to come up with a number.  Nope, just what you need to do what you do as often as you need to do it for the people that have to have you and your creative business do it for them.  Your number is your number.  If it is one million dollars and you want to do ten projects, price is one hundred thousand dollars per projecct.

Yes, yes, maybe the market will not support what you need.  Too often though, that is the symptom of doing it backwards.  Starting with money is almost a sure bet to creating the ceiling you believe is actually real.  “No way would someone pay me $x for my design/idea/plan.  I mean the most expensive so and so only charges half of $x.  Just not what designers/planners/florists/photographers/caterers here in Kalamazoo are paid.”  Except Kalamazonians do not define your value, you do.  Without knowing the spiritual and the physical that makes you and your creative business tick, your default will be about the thing you create in the end and those things will always, always be capped and forever getting cheaper.  The better you understand the spiritual and the physical, the better you can define (and get paid for) your intrinsic value to those that crave it.  That is what creative business is all about — getting paid to create.  Creation has no definition and neither should price.  It is just what you need to create, no more, no less.

Learning To Say Goodbye

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Fair warning, this one is a little out there.  I wrote it late one night a few days ago to myself.  I did not intend to share.  But when I re-read it, I realized that it does apply to creative business owners and their art.  How the move within is so painful given the idea that you create for other people for a living.  And yet, move inside you must, if only to find the kernel, the shard of what you are meant to share, your truth.  So I decided to post.  I changed “I” to “we” but left most everything as I originally wrote it.  Felt like I should not edit too much.

Learning To Say Goodbye

How is it that we can ever be ready to say goodbye?  We hold so tightly, believe so fervently in the life we are living that when things change, as they must, we find ourselves steadfast in our refusal.

We can only discover ourselves alone.  It is the inevitable place for us all.  We come to this earth that way and we leave it that way too.  And yet there are those souls we are meant to touch in between and they ours.  We are forever shaped by the experience and find ourselves at home in the notion that all we find was meant to be.  Except it was not.  There is no grand plan, only the joy of a place to be grateful.  To inspire and be inspired.  To love and to feel and to learn and to un-learn.

We come to our awareness in our own time.  Connection is in our awareness, the freedom to dream, a place to be found.  From there our own spirit emerges.  We are all guides and we are all meant to be lead.  From within there is hope, connection, solace of other.

Family is what can bind us, support us, cripple us, free us from and to our sense of purpose.  If we are willing to call to peace, to look inside, we might realize our own.  The search is an active endeavor.  The proof of what this life might be lies only in our desire for peace.  To see what is and will be is irrelevant and from there we must leap.  Leap into our own feeling of place, our own desire for family.  We must free ourselves from reflection; looking only in the dark for our own light.

We all seek connection, crave the touch of another.  However, living in reflection of other isolates us, keeps us from intimacy with our own love, our own divine right to create.  Desire for connection has to be to ourselves first and foremost.  Joy within us, our own sense of self, our own move to the inner wisdom that exists in all of us, the interior truth that will set us free; the desire to simply be.

We are flawed, ashamed, disgraced as much as we are brilliant and graceful. The reflection of other must die and we along with it.  In its place is contentment, freedom to allow others their path, their pain, their joy as we savor ours along side them.  Immersion to self manifests deep loneliness, longing for connection.  A transformation into manhood.  The freedom to say goodbye.

Kill Hope

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Hope this works.  Hope you have a great day.  Hope you are right.  Hope you know what you are doing.

When you think about it, the statement “I hope…” is almost always about something external happening that may or may not directly affect you, but is certainly in your universe.  You have no control over “I hope”.  The results of “I hope” are as random as a flip of the coin.  In the context of your art and your creative business, please, pretty please, kill hope and find your faith.

Faith knows that you have a gift you intend to honor.  You are an artist asked to see the world the way most of us simply do not and to share your vision with us.  The truer you are to your gift, the better off we will all be.  Ignore what works for someone else if it does not work for you.

When was the last time you actually said thank you to someone who you know is devouring your art, especially if it was paid for by someone else?  The guest at a party dancing their face off as you play.  The person who sits in your lobby just because of the way it makes them feel.  The viewer who cannot stop coming back to your site to see your images.  The diner who is literally licking the plate.  Thank you without an agenda.  No hope (since it is dead anyway) that they will one day be a client or tell your client how cool you are so your client will recommend you.  Just an expression of gratefulness to those who got the story you wanted to tell.  What would that do for you?

My suspicion is that it would give you confidence.  You would know why you and your creative business are here and would want to have the opportunity to do it again.  And again.  From that place, you will know what it takes to get there.  You will charge what you need to feel good about sharing your vision (and yourself).  You will dare to be outrageous in what things you need (money and otherwise) to create.  You will not compromise your integrity not so much because you are any better than the rest of us, but because the ability to be grateful, to be able to see another’s joy, will be lost without it.  Being blind to another’s joy is a price you will never be willing to pay once you have embodied it.  You would know that if you could be blind, you should probably find another profession.

No one knows if it will all work out.  All any of us can do is to live in our own effort today.  It is the way of the world that some things are just not meant to be, no matter how much you wish otherwise.  Yes, that completely sucks.  However, the effort is its own reward if you can see what it offers you, your art, your creative business and anyone and everything they touch.  When you judge the value of the endeavor by the ultimate success or failure (financial or otherwise) you give your power to hope.  Why not instead define it with gratefulness for and from those who have received your work?  What exactly were they grateful for?  What were you?  Can you get what you need just by doing what creates gratefulness on both sides?  If you can, go do that.  If you cannot, then let it be and move on until you can.

Gay Marriage And The Supreme Court

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Today is a landmark day for gay marriage.  The Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act that prohibited the Federal Government from accepting gay marriage and denied standing those opposed to the California lower’s court ruling overturning Proposition 8 as unconstitutional.  The result: States are free to allow gay marriage (or not) and the Federal Government will recognize these marriages as they would any other (provided President Obama removes heterosexual marriage as the definition in so many provisions of Federal statutes, rules and regulations – something he has said he is committed to doing if the Supreme Court struck down DOMA, which it now has).

I have written several times about how important an issue this is for creative business (“Gay Marriage in New York” and, more recently, “A Changing World“) and I would just like to reiterate some of the points I made then and maybe add a few more.

Now is the time for creative businesses to step forward and shape culture.  You will never convert the haters.  There will forever be bigots, racists, sexists, us vs. thems.  You can, however, shape those who can come to know better.  You can teach that just because you are not that, because you cannot understand that, does not make you any better because of what you actually are or what you actually do understand.  Such is the force beyond tolerance to acceptance of another’s path to joy.

As Jules Verne shaped our path to the moon, so too does every artist associated with gay weddings shape our path to a different reality.  Battles might be won, but revelation is what happens when the fight is over.  It takes time to release preconceptions of the permanence of what is.

I have empathy for those who believe marriage is between a man and woman, who are convicted that this is the nature of things.  I no more doubt their faith and commitment to their worldview than I would my own.  I do just hope that they can come to see those, like me, who believe the opposite as not intrinsically evil or, in fact, their enemy.  The responsibility here lies with creative businesses and their work not to change long-held beliefs, but only soften them to the humanity of other.

The opposite of love is not hate; it is apathy.  Intolerance, indifference and disdain is what underlies most of man’s inhumanity to man.  We have arrived at the moment when we as a people and artists through their creative businesses specifically can continue to spur us, challenge everything in the face of apathy and, to paraphrase Seth Godin, not just to act differently but to be entirely and forever remarkable.

Musings and Speculation — To What End Social Media?

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Ernest Hemingway would fit right in with our social media world.  Storytelling in 140 characters would be right up his alley.  Although debated whether he actually wrote it, Hemingway is credited with a six word story: “For sale: Baby shoes.  Never worn.”  (34 characters).  More to the point, Hemingway would probably love to create an arc of a story using social media the way Dickens did with serial literature.

To me, that is where social media is heading – storytelling in its most profound state.  Kind of like the kids game telephone where the person at the end of the line is supposed to repeat the message whispered to everyone before her.  Making sure each person hears the story exactly as it was meant to be told is the challenge of social media.  Yes, we can all follow a celebrity and hear the story that way, but, much more likely we are going to follow our friends and see the story through their eyes.  Awesome stuff for creative businesses.

The name of the game used to be — get the press’ attention and you will be good – there would be newspaper and magazine articles and maybe even a TV spot.  Control the direct audience and it is enough.  Now the audience you want to reach is the audience of your audience at the time your audience is consuming your art.  How do you craft an experience such that those who directly experience your work will relay it in a way that honors the experience you and your creative business intended in the first place?

Specifically, how do you create an arc so that the social media you receive in the moment actually takes on a life of its own as you would intend it to?  Where the consumers of the social media are as engrossed in the experience as those who are actually there.  How do you make your clients and their guests/employees/attendees/users better storytellers?

I think of it like a fantastic fashion show or an awesomely curated shop.  We see what they want us to see and even though it is for us to form our own impressions, we are being gently directed to the experience the designer or the shopkeeper most wants for us.

Right now, social media is mostly just a series of moments, not a cohesive story.  See something you like and it gets posted until the next thing you like shows up.  But being guided into and through the experience – helping you become a better storyteller because you are part of the experience – we are not quite there yet.  How we are going to get there I leave to the marketing/commercial storytelling geniuses out there — Rebecca Grinnals and Bill Baker coming most to mind.  That is their world and I cannot wait to see where they take us.  I just believe this is where we are headed and the opportunity, if it is where we are going, will be to measure success in a whole other way.

Gary Vaynerchuk is right.  Even though we could not measure social media well at first, did not mean that it was not pervasive and incredibly valuable.  Once we figured out how to measure eyeballs, the value of social media companies exploded, just as he said they would.  Now, the future might be flow as much as volume.  If that is so, we are just at the infancy of being able to measure it, which means, as Gary says, many will absolutely discount its value or ignore the opportunity right in front of us because measurement (i.e., proof) is not quite there yet.  If we start to quantify the value of having the audience tweeting/Instagramming/Pinning/Facebooking/YouTubing at the right moments, building the story right along with the actual creator, what will that be worth?  Ultimately, the long-term value of social media will be how well you play telephone, not how loud the phone is.  Capturing a secondary, even tertiary audience, through your art and keeping them captivated is today’s challenge and, I think, the monster opportunity available to so many creative businesses.

So here it is: what happens when you make the audience the active narrator and how does it affect your art and your creative business?

The Problem With Flexibility

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The seeds of demise for your creative business are almost always borne in the generosity of compromise.  Harsh right?  You come from a kind, open place.  You just want to get/do the work, have the project go well and let your art stand for itself.  If you have to wait a little bit for that payment, give more than you said you would, lower your price a teensy weensy bit just this once, so what.  Were it no big deal, but it is.

Like spider cracks in your windshield you can barely see, gather enough of them and eventually the glass shatters.  Integrity is easy in theory or in the text of your contract.  What matters is whether you are willing to walk the walk as much as you are willing to talk the talk.  Would you stop work on a wedding two weeks before if you were not paid?  Sue a client for stealing one of your ideas?  Refuse a potential six figure client who wants it for less, even if infinitesimally so?  If you have a million dollars in the bank, your answers might be, of course.  What if you needed (or were desperate) for the money?

The value of your process is directly proportional to your commitment to it.  Sometimes flexibility is warranted and necessary.  The wedding, site design, interior design, photography session has to be rescheduled/cancelled because of major illness or a hurricane.  When instances of humanity are called for, we should all rise to the occasion.  However, when someone decides to challenge your process, well, just because they can, yours is to say no, never, not going to happen no matter how seemingly insignificant.

In the end, all creative businesses are trivial, which, of course, makes them integrally important to the value of the lives they touch.  We would all have survived if the Beatles never existed, War and Peace never written, Gone With The Wind never made.  However, we are all indelibly changed because they did.  Such is the value of art.  It is this seeming conundrum that too many creative business owners get caught in.  To your clients, it IS actually brain surgery, vital that they are moved by what it is that you do.  Otherwise, why do they need you?  Do not get lost that no one needs what you do, the very fact that clients WANT it is enough to make your dignity and that of your creative business paramount.

If you are willing to send the message that says, “Do not worry about it, it is okay, we can work around it”, you invite risk into your business and disrespect right along with it.  The only way it would not is if it were abundantly clear that you are going to be paid (outrageously) for your flexibility.  I rarely, if ever, see that happen.  Most often it is an exercise in sucking it up.

Integrity matters when it is hard, when you have to fight for it, when you just might look like an a__hole for sticking to it.  You are tasked with creation, to go beyond expectations and to tap into the underneath of relationship and emotion.  You have to do what you do, how you do it if it is ever going to work.  The only player that can change the game in this situation is you.

Creative business owners, as a rule, are people pleasers.  We want to be liked, to be perceived as nice, kind, giving.  Guilty as charged.  However, when the people pleaser part of us gets in the way of the gift we are meant to share, we need to tell the people pleaser to sit down and let the alpha dog roll.  Yes, much easier said than done.  However, if someone told you that the future of your creative business depends on your ability to stand tall in the moment, maybe not so hard.  The irony is, the more and earlier you stand tall, the less you will actually have to.

The Unexplainable

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The other day my six year old son said, “Since God is everything, he is as much death as life, happy as sad.  It is all one to him.”  A) We are not religious in any traditional sense; B) this is not the first time he has blown me away– an earlier fave of mine: “You don’t have to really worry about the love, it’s forever.  Time you do though, so don’t waste it..“; C) even at six, he already knows he is part of something bigger than himself; and D) I hope he never loses C.

C cannot be explained.  C truly makes no sense, it just is.  The spirit of creative business is C – the very notion that you are here to share what the collective gives you.  If you ever had the feeling that you just knew, that the words just came out of you and was almost as if you were watching someone else speak them, then you can go with the idea that the world, your world, is bigger than you.  Your gift as a creative business owner is to be able to share your world with others that want to taste it, see it, touch it.

In the classic sense, I am a terrible businessman.  Buy low, sell high, focus on efficiency, control everything, not my natural strength.  I can do it and have learned to do it very well.  My inclination though is to pay what I need to get what I want when I want it and trust if I make every step count (i.e., ensure that everything I do is profitable – financially or otherwise), the long-term will take care of itself.  I am so not the guy you want to hire if you want to save your way to success.

I have been graced though to really come of age in a time when classic business skills in business generally, creative business specifically, while still valuable, are certainly getting more and more marginal every day.  You see, my strength lies in putting a value on the unexplainable.  Better said, my strength is in uncapping the value of the unexplainable, putting structure around it and process underneath it.  Celebrating the crazy.  Yes, brilliance is just crazy in hindsight.  Classic business skills can never justify a million dollar design fee where the cost to produce the design is negligible.  Because there is no tangible thing to validate the cost of design — not time or materials, etc., those who live and breathe in classic business skills are lost.  I love being in that place.  So should every creative business owner.

The outrageousness that exists in your art, especially the unexplainable part, the part that comes from a place beyond you is what your creative business is all about.  Most of you can easily go with respect to your art.  The whole point though is that you have to go there with your creative business or else you will never get the chance to go there with your art.  You belong on the stage you wish to play on, no matter what anyone says.  You just have to do the work to put yourself there.

The work is not about digging a ditch.  I wish it was.  Then you would be hot and sweaty and see the big hole in the ground as the fruits of your labor.  No, the work is about being willing to risk being judged for the totality of you art, the feeling you were paid to create, the relationship you were meant to honor.  If you make it about the couch, the flower, the invitation, the website, any one thing, you have hidden, run away from the essence of your art and yourself most of all.  The work is to remove the training wheels, take away the moments that let you say, well I do not really care about so and so anyway.  Acknowledge when you say you don’t care about the little thing that you set yourself up to be judged ONLY on the little thing to avoid being judged on the big thing.  Did your client really get it?  Do they know how deeply you see them?  What would it mean if you bet your whole business on that idea and not whether they liked the couch?

Getting to a million dollar design fee is not the goal, knowing that it is cheap for the price is.  You need what you need to share what you are meant to.  You must embody the knowledge that those who receive your art will be far better off for having gotten it.  The irony is is that if you make it about ego, you have lost no matter what comes your way.  Giving the gift you were meant to share is its own reward.  This much I have learned from my son this week.  I cannot even imagine what next week will bring.

Engage!13: Biltmore Estate, Tendencias 2013 and Perception

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For the past several weeks, I have been travelling – first to Cartagena, Colombia for Tendencias 2013 and then to Asheville, North Carolina for Engage! 13: Biltmore Estate.

Engage! first.  As I have spoken of many times before, Engage! is a bi-annual summit for luxury wedding professionals.  It just keeps getting better.  So much wonderful takeaways – from the state of the state when it comes to technology from Carley Roney and Abby and Tait Larson – folks who know more than a thing or two about the subject – to solid business and structural advice from the likes of Todd Fiscus and Colin Cowie to name but two of the awesome wedding pros I had the privilege of listening and speaking to.  I hosted a panel with Harmony Walton, Anne Chertoff and Xochitl Gonzalez – three women who have each been in the wedding business for about ten years – and we spoke about transition ala my last blog post.

At Tendencias, I spoke about the importance of presentation and how the world is fundamentally shifting away from the value of production to the value of the idea.  I first discussed my ideas with the wedding professionals who attended Tendencias, but then had the awesome opportunity to talk to small business owners in Cartagena on behalf of Camara Oficial de Comercio, the Chamber of Commerce for Cartagena.  Each business owner grasped how much it is about honoring a future where effective, meaningful communication is the only thing that matters.  I could see the shift happening as each group contemplated what that meant.

For me though, the most profound moments come in relating each to the other and the very notion of what it means and will mean to live in a global economy.  As much as we like to contemplate it in the United States, creative business is not yet confronted daily with the consequences of a fully integrated global economy.  South America is.

The resources in South America are vast, skilled labor is still quite inexpensive (although I hope less so in the near future) and quality of production stellar.  And yet, as borders open, perception problems remain.  Brazil knows what Brazilians can do, but have not yet come to fully value what Colombians can.  The work going on now is solving that problem so that the best artist is the one that wins the work.  In almost every sense, the essence of the art, the culture, the fabric of the message meant to be delivered is what is being sold, far more than the cost of the item.  The perversity is the cheaper the cost of production, the larger the perception problem.

Think about it.  If you could buy the exact same Hermes Birkin Bag for a third the price, but without the Hermes logo, you probably would not.  More to the point, even if the bag was better made than the Hermes bag, you probably would not buy it.  Such is the power of a brand and perception of value.  This is what South America faces as borders start to blur and they are, in so many ways, better at it than their counter-parts in the United States.  Simply, if you solve the perception problem the world opens to you.  Easier said than done, of course, but inevitably where we are all heading.

Social considerations aside, think about what Apple has done to shift the perception of quality coming from China.  Chinese technology is now not just cheap, but cheap and equally as good, if not better.

So go with me here.  If all that separates South American countries from each other is perception, then it is just a matter of time until that perception is blown up and the best provider of the art will be the one who wins, regardless of whether it is a third the price.  With the perception problem solved, the cost of production will continue to decrease – exponentially.  I say it all the time, but it will entirely stop being about the stuff and only about the art and artistry.  Quite an issue if you have built your whole creative business on the notion of marking up your cost of production.  Why?  You still need to make absolute dollars to sustain your business.

Say you are a florist/rental company/lighting company/caterer and you charge a typical 100% mark-up to make your money.  If your cost is $50, you charge $100 and make $50 in profit.  What happens when your costs go to $16.67?  How are you going to make $50 now?  To get to a price of $66.67, you would have to mark up your stuff by 400%.  Do you really think your clients are going to let you do that?  Not a chance.  You are going to have to figure out how to make your money another way.  That way has to be about subjective value and the intrinsic value of your artistry separate and apart from the stuff you provide.  In a very real way, South America (and Latin America too) understands this and is moving further and faster to make the shift than those in the United States.

Rebecca Grinnals (founder of Engage! and all-around brilliant) is very fond of saying that your competition is no longer next door, but on the next continent.  I do not think even she contemplates how deep that goes for creative businesses.

The choice is profound.  Creative businesses in the United States can ignore the pressure on cost of production as the world and technology advances.  Ask any photographer how that has worked out.  Creative business owners can also live in the idea that their clients will always value their stuff over the cheaper foreign stuff (i.e., consider the misperception problem to be permanent).  They might be right, but I would not want to be wrong if I were them.

Or U.S. creative businesses can see the largest opportunity of all – solving the misperception problem.  Teaching your clients that, so long as you are the generator of the idea, the steward of the process, the Colombian lighting company is the best you have ever seen and a no brainer to have at your event for a third of the cost.

Better to be the leader at bringing the world to your client’s doorstep than the other way around.  Just ask Duncan Hines how powerful the first position can be.

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