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Transition

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There comes a time when we all have to shift, to transform into something other.  Like it or not, we all mature.  Now, whether we learn a few things along the way, that one is totally up to us.  For creative business owners, however, refusing to learn is the surest road to obsolescence and an inevitable demise.

At around the five to ten year mark, you, your art and your creative business will no longer be the new new thing nor yet be the icon you aspire to be.  At the same time, there will be new new things nipping at your heels while the icons remain, not quite ready to hang it up.  So you will have to choose who you are going to be – either perpetually youthful like you were at the beginning or a more sophisticated, focused you, on a new, clearer path to becoming the icon you seek to be.

Choosing is never easy.  We all so much want to just keep going as if there is a there there.  We also hate saying no, especially if yes was your answer yesterday.  The only thing you owe those that got you where you are is acknowledgment that you would not have gotten where you are without them, no more, no less.  Eventually, the best, highest praise you can give your patrons (clients, employees, colleagues, partners) is to let them go if you are meant for something else.  Just as you would never dress your six year old in a onesie, neither should your biggest fans want to see you stay where they are in the name of loyalty.  The whole point of a creative business is to share your art, your artistry, your vision with as many fans, existing and new as possible.

Your next act is everything.  Inevitably, it is about finding your own truth.  Five to ten years as a creative business owner should be measured in dog years. And at thirty-five to seventy, you should have the wisdom to know that change is necessary and the wherewithal to live with your own new set of yeses and noes.

Examples abound.  For wedding planners (tis the season after all), when will you give up the day of service that feeds the kitty and drains the soul?  Interior designers, where is the premium for your time?  Thirty percent over three months is not the same as thirty percent over two years, even if the budget is bigger.  Photographer – at what point will you value the disc of digital images?  Would you ask Picasso to make originals for someone else to sign?  Graphic designers – when will every project be all encompassing – about the ethos of a brand far more than the stuff behind it (i.e., logo, website, social media, etc.)?  Event designers – when will you charge for, ahem, design instead of the result of that design (i.e., the items that make up the design).  Florists, same thing.

No one is ever going to tell you when you, your art and your creative business crosses over, when you have earned the right to say no.  In fact, quite the opposite.  Then again, getting to the next level is as much embracing the idea that you belong as it is actually being there.  It is one thing to share the stage with an icon, it is quite another to know you will be the one everyone will remember.  Such is the difference between technicians and artists.   Great technicians exceed expectations with their talent, even their experience; artists define them.

Better Is Always About Tomorrow

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Nobody wants to believe that the way you do things is actually better than the way it has always been done.  The status quo sticks for a reason – inertia of the known is crazy powerful.  Raised eyebrow, too good to be true is the default mindset, especially for creative businesses.  As far and fast as we have all come, many of the business models and practices are still dinosaurs.  Price first, art second.  When you come along thinking of ways to offer better, more focused value, it just feels strange.  Art first, price second.  For any of you who have practiced anything for a long time (yoga, sports, crafting), when you are shown proper alignment or technique it does not feel right.  Dysfunction over function.  The familiar over the not-yet-understood.  Your creative business is no different, both to you and your customers, especially when everyone else is working in the same old dysfunction.

Think about the RFP process many of you face for just about any project – event, graphic, interior design, etc.  Many times those asking for the proposal are not really educated about what they want and so they make it about stuff not art, price not concept, technical over emotional.  Simply, because they see scarcity (i.e., value) in stuff not good ideas, they do not know the right questions to ask.

Today, “How much will you give me for my money?” is absolutely the wrong question.  The far more relevant question is: “What will you create for my money?  What is your vision?” and the even better question is: “How will you move me and my audience with my money?”  Yet the old guard is the old guard, they still control the proverbial keys (for now) and changing their mindset is like moving an iceberg.  So rather than fighting the tide you play the price/line item game in the name of getting the business and the bar remains lower than it ought to be – for everyone.

However, the point today is not to meet the needs of your clients, it is to make them look like superstars.  Anyone can meet their needs.  Therefore, you have to be in it for the long-haul, working harder to climb into your client’s minds than their wallets.   Along the way, you just have to accept that many, many people will be actively rooting for you to fail, ahem, even if your success will be theirs.  Such is the nature of fear and shifting value propositions underlying all creative business.

If you want to be known as the artist that can envision the desires of your clients and bring them to life, then you have to charge for that vision.  When the price for design has always been zero or next to zero, saying it is everything can be a head scratcher.  Also, telling a client you are willing to put your money where your mouth is by taking a small deposit until you can demonstrate how good your ideas are is something your 50% deposit brethren will laugh at.  Everyone wants to say they are that good, few are willing to prove it, to be judged before the client has no other choice but to keep going.

Believe in your art, your artistry, your process.  Your victories will be one at a time, to those that matter.  Your model may never scale, even be noticed as a viable alternative to the old guard.  Until it does.  Creative business is about relationship, celebrating a shared vision and moving people to another place.  Technology has made all the rest – being the cheapest, the most efficient, the biggest – irrelevant, noise even.  This, to me, is a fundamental truth that is only going to become more obvious.  Better is always about tomorrow no matter what happened yesterday.

You Just Know

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“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” 
A memo at Western Union, 1878 (or 1876).

At the time, Western Union was the one of the world’s largest corporations and Alexander Graham Bell was having issues with his patent for the telephone.  He wanted to sell it to Western Union for $100,000.  The above quote was their response.  A few years later, Western Union’s president said he would consider the patent for the telephone a bargain at $25 million.

World history is littered with these examples — where someone says that they just know the answer for the future.  Except they do not and their vision is clouded, ironically, by the size of their own (mis)perceptions.  In some form, we all suffer from the same myopia.  Our worldviews, our history, our bias, our neurosis, all blind us from what is other even while we swear up and down that it does not.

There is no such thing as a straight line in creative business.  Any investment you make – website, new office, new computer, new promo video, new employee, new anything offers you absolutely no guarantee of success.  The past might help you go one way or another, but it too is no arbiter of success.  So dispel yourself of the magic bullet.  There is none.  What there is instead is the willingness to be wrong, to put out your best work without expectation and stand tall for what you believe in.  If you view success and failure by the number of projects you book, you just lost.  Instead, view success with how many people get it (i.e., you, your art and your creative business).  Everything else will follow.  And if they (clients, media, employees, colleagues, etc.) do not get it, that is on you, not them.  Work harder to communicate the underneath, the meaning between the words, what is not plain to see.  Ethos is never obvious.

The beauty of not knowing the future is that you actually do not know.  That said, a car with no brakes at the top of the mountain is not one you want to be in.  The right car is the one that comes from your core and that of your art and creative business.  I say it over and over and can never say it enough – be relentless and uncompromising in what you stand for and apply it everywhere.  If there is even a sliver of a disconnect in how you operate and what you stand for, fix it.  Designers design, producers produce, artists can be both but never at the same time.  Question everything in the context of today, what matters to you now, not so much for the right answer but for happy.  Such is the difference for creative business: if there is no happy, you will die.  Value happy at zero at your own peril.

The future unfolds of its own accord.  We will all be wrong at some point.  Focus on what you really care about, who matters today and the outcome will satisfy you.  When you set a vision of what you want your future to be it is almost always too small.  A million dollar client? Twenty projects?  Five employees?  Even though you cannot imagine it does not make its possibility any less so.  Just ask Western Union.

A Changing World

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Living through an era of transformation is remarkable.  We shatter long held prejudices, biases, any kind of “isms” daily.  There will always always be a long way to go, but the road traveled so far is crazy.  A quick observation from news of the past several days.

Today, the celebrity press is all over Michael Jordan’s wedding to Yvette Prieto this past weekend.  In other basketball news, Jason Collins just came out as the first openly gay NBA player.  France legalized gay marriage last week.  We will see what the U.S. Supreme Court rules on gay marriage in the coming weeks.  Why compare Michael Jordan’s marriage to gay marriage?  Easy, forty-six years ago, his lavish affair in Florida would arguably have been entirely illegal.  And without Loving v. Virginia, who knows how much longer Florida’s anti-miscegenation law would have remained.  Yes, Ms. Prieto is Cuban born, but pre-Castro, many white Cuban immigrants were considered white when they came to the United States. Just guessing, but I am sure no one will be quoted in People as saying how cool (or crazy) it is that Michael Jordan can actually marry Ms. Prieto.  His marriage is as legitimate and deeply within the fabric of our society as any other.  We are getting there with gay marriage where legal, but are definitely not there yet.

What to do with creative business?  Or, more specifically, what is creative business’ role in our evolving (exploding?) society?  Activism and revolution brings change of which art is certainly a part.  However, acceptance, deeper understanding of a new world order and evolution not from place of rebellion, rather unity is the fuel of humanity’s growth.  When the fight is over, the real work of creative business begins.

No matter what art you create, your creative business sells meaning.  You are tasked with looking beyond what is plainly in front of you and to reach for something more.  A picture is never just a picture, a flower a flower, a couch a couch.  To those that hire you to create, these are just expressions, the tools of the story you are telling for them.  In the context of our society, your art is to celebrate your client’s kind of weird in a way that even those who do not subscribe can appreciate and, dare I say, savor.  A cup of tea is a cup of tea whether it is yours or not.

In a very real sense, being an artist during the time of revolution is the easy part.  The purpose is to foist change on the unwilling or less than willing.  When acceptance happens, homogeneity cannot.  The beauty of what is happening today is that self-expression is being honored for what it is.  Creative businesses have to move us all to what comes next.  Maybe the days of the pretty party are over.  However, if the world is to be orchestrated chaos, then it still has to be chaos.

You can dismiss your role any way you want to if you so choose and say all you, your art and your creative business are here to do is to serve the needs of your clients.  News flash: if your clients just need you to do what they say, they do not really need you.  What they actually need is for you to go further then they ever could.  Yes, bring meaning to their lives, even if only for three minutes.  In that role, your expression of your and your client’s meaning is transformative.  An awesome responsibility no doubt, but one that you signed up for the moment you decided to make art for a living.

Don’t Stay Lost Too Long Revisited

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Tis the season.  Almost every creative business owner I talk to is either incredibly busy or is about to be.  Spring has sprung.  You are in it, projects are in full swing and you are struggling to keep up with it all.   As much as you would like to think about strategy, what you next step is, you cannot.  It is all you can do to make it through the day.  I wrote about not staying lost too long a few years ago and the post is still totally relevant and applicable.  What I said then and stand by today is that now is the time for dancing, doing, not thinking.  But tomorrow will be a time to think again and you must commit to coming back lest you think that dancing and doing is actually thinking.

Today, I would like to raise a few additional thoughts about being in the soup.  The first: no project is THE project.  The second: too busy to be still even for a moment is hiding.  And the third: worrying about whether there will be enough tomorrow in the middle of today is useless and destructive.

No Project Is The Project – It is easy to get lost in a project; to be all consumed by every little detail given the enormity of what is about to happen – finish the design on your dream house, do your first shoot for Conde Nast, launch the site, put up the event, etc.  Except the whole point of the project(s) at hand is to get the next one(s).  Simultaneously, you and your creative business have to be a thousand percent focused on getting the job done AND know you are auditioning for your next client.  How do you do it?  Perspective.  Every creative business has four stages: reputation, potential and kinetic energy, execution and halo.  Reputation — third-party (referrals, press, etc.) or self-generated (website, social media, etc.) — gets your clients to your door.  Potential and kinetic energy is everything that gets the client to sign up and allows you to get ready to produce art for them.  Execution is show time.  Halo is what gets done or said after show time.  The closer you get to show time, the more you forget about the other three stages.  But if you do, so will your client, which is why you just cannot.  “You really pulled it off”, “I love it!”, “So amazing/beautiful/wonderful” are nice platitudes from your clients, but they are not compliments to your creative business.  Unless your process is validated – “I loved every moment with you and your creative business, from beginning to end” – your future is uncertain.  In a very fluid, non-salesy way, you have to draw attention to the entirety of the relationship.  The final product is simply the culmination of the relationship and not the end all be all.  And you have to do it in the moment when it is all about getting done.  Why? Process is iconic and sustainable, great art is fleeting.

Too Busy To Be Still – You will never get everything done.  Not possible.  You can prioritize your time based on getting the most done or by trying to honor that no project is the project and doing what you can to draw attention to the totality of your creative business.  Your choice.  If you cannot give yourself an hour or two a week to take a walk, a drive, exercise, go to a museum, you will never ever see the proverbial forest for the trees.  You will just get sh-t done and then kick yourself for why you did not shoot that great set up.  Video the prep of the fashion show.  Take notes of how you felt when you saw the finished design.  No, you do not have to plot the next step for you, your art and your creative business now.  You do, however, have to step away from the cacophony around you to hear the notes.  The notes are the lessons you are meant to take away from the chaos. So so much more than we just cannot/will not/are not going to do this or that again.  You step away to see opportunity, not run from it.

Worrying About Tomorrow – If you hope to get to a better tomorrow, the surest way to do it is to be grateful for today.  Honor the work in front of you.  Show your clients the totality of what you, your art and your creative business are all about.  Be invested in being present, committed and hyper-focused on your relationship not just with your client, but with everyone’s (employees, colleagues, vendors AND clients) relationship to you, your art and your creative business.  Believe that you are each in this endeavor to serve each other with all humility and confidence.  On the other hand, the surest way to ensure tomorrow is darker than today is to be ungrateful.  If you think that your book for the Fall is not what it is supposed to be, how can you help but send the message that the work right in front of you is not enough.  You can say the two are not the same and I would say you are a better actor than Brad Pitt.  Tomorrow takes care of itself only if you are the best you can be today.  Worrying about tomorrow today makes doing your best awfully hard.  Faith is knowing talent and vision with an iconic business process to match will always be enough.  The work right in front of you should be the validation of the notion, not its undoing

2013 Top Ten Tips For Creative Business

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Next month I will be attending and speaking at Tendencias 2013 in Cartagena, Colombia.  I could not be more excited.  Having participated in several events in Mexico, I can only say that I am amazed at the depth and significance of the event market in Latin and South America.  We in the United States have much to learn and, given the success of Tendencias 2012, the honor and privilege will be all mine.  Simone Lejour, the organizer of Tendencias, asked me what my top ten tips for creative business would be for 2013.  So I thought I would take the opportunity to provide them here together with relevant blog posts.  The tips will appear in her magazine and I will be writing a few new thoughts on each topic.  Of course, I consider these my top ten of the moment and they will certainly change (probably tomorrow), but these ten will always rank very high on my list. Without further adieu, my top ten of the moment:

1.    Stand For Something – “Honoring Your Core”

2.    Be Outrageous With What You Stand For  — “Going Radical”

3.    Be Transparent – “Transparency” and “More on Transparency”

4.    Sell Trust and Relationship First and Always “What Do You Sell” and “Trust”

5.    Get Paid For What Is Between Your Ears More Than What Is Between Your Hands – “The Importance of Presentation”

6.    Be Engaged In Your Process —  “Process” and “More on Process”

7.    Do Only Your Best, Not Your Best Under The Circumstances – “Only The Best”

8.    Create Joy More Than Pretty  — “The Three Pillars of Creative Business”

9.    Align How You Get Paid With What You Most Value In Your Creative Business – “Making The Intangible Tangible”

10.  Focus On What Is Going Right Much More Than Fixing Things – “Focus on What Is Going Right Part 1 and Part 2”

 

The Long Burn

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Creative business demands relationship.  The telephone is your second best sales tool, face-to-face is best.  You build to the end not just to yes.  Working on how this interaction goes from the first moment all through to the finish is everything.  I do will always be a subset of this day forward.

Seth Godin had a wonderful post today (The Easy Trap) about the difference between the focusing on the first sales or the ones that will last.  His point is that creating the shiny nickel will attract those that want your shiny nickel until the next shiny nickel shows up.  Creating something of substance underneath the shiny will take longer but will endure.

For creative business, endurance is relationship, the ability to connect your vision, your art with the dreams of your client.  Relationship is about the journey, conscious ebbs and flows from the spark of an idea to its ultimate manifestation.  What it is not is a discussion of price, what your services are or the stuff a client will get for their money.  No website, pricing guide, written proposal or anything of the like will ever replace your mouth.

So before you build your website, create the fancy video or make sure you have the “it” thing, ask yourself what you hope to get from it.  Too often, the answer is so that you do not have to spend your time interacting.  You want the “thing” to sell your business, directly convert into clients.  Will not happen.  Tools are tools, never panaceas.  Shortcuts might get you to “yes” more quickly, but they make your road a very long and painful one.

When the phone is ringing and (wrong) clients are signing up, easy to say that you are willing to go deeper, to build relationship, expose yourself, your art and your creative business; be judged for what you are and what you are not.  How about when twenty calls a week goes to three?  When people who truly get what you do and value what you value about you, your art and your creative business still go away because you are too expensive?

Success arrives a client at a time.  Yes, you may have to ask if there will ever be enough of the good ones, just not when you are actually with the good one.  Gratefulness is about being present to fortune, not its size.  How deep will your conviction to meaning be then?

This is far beyond Seth’s Dip.  You are already on the other side if you, your art and your creative business are seen and validated by clients, colleagues and employees.  It is just that your metric of success cannot be simply whether or not you land the client.  If it is, your transition to meaning is going to implode.

Getting to yes is the easy part if all you care about is yes.  If you care about relationship and meaning first, yes second, yes will become more precious.  A better metric then will be whether your potential client understands what you, your art and your creative business stands for, if they value your process, how and why you charge what you do, and, most important, if they sing your praises even if their answer is no.  Lest you  think I am ignoring money, right clients pay exponentially more than wrong ones, they also beget more right clients.

The long burn is about focus, the calm in your belly when you know you are on your path, comfortable in relationship, grateful for what is right in front of you, confident that you, your art and your creative business are seen and esteemed.  The future unfolds from integrity, talent and vision and the courage to stay there despite the temptation to make it all about yes.

Decisions

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The hardest thing in the world is to decide, to commit, to risk being dead wrong.  Most of us want to have some sense that what we are choosing for ourselves, our art and our creative businesses is going to work out.

It is why change is so hard.  Usually, something has to be either horribly broken or the opportunity beyond huge to make change the only solution.  Everything in the middle drives us back to deciding by not deciding (which, of course, is a decision, but that is the subject of another post).  Inertia is a great way to convince yourself that the path you are on will get you to where you want to go in the end.  The known kicking the ass of the unknown.  You fill in the cliché – devil you know, bird in the hand, etc.

I would make a terrible farmer.  Chop wood, carry water, do your chores, rinse and repeat every day.  My life is questioning, well, everything.  I do not do well with blinders narrowing my vision.  I would rather see the possibility in front of me than the reality of what is behind me.  While I am apt to over think things, I refuse to be constrained by anything related to the status quo.  I do what I do because I am very good at imagining a different reality, another way of doing things, possibilities of what could be.  And yet I still suck at making decisions.  Inertia is a powerful mistress.

No one has any great insight into decisions.  The only thing anyone can offer is perspective on the choices you are considering and how they may or may not affect you, your art and your creative business.  There is no such thing as a perfect decision, just one more right than not.  EVERY decision has consequences.  The point is to accept those consequences for what they are and ask yourself if you can live with them.  If you were offered a project that would pay you two million dollars in nine months, is the answer an automatic yes?  If you had to leave your family and travel across the world?  If it meant passing on your passion project that you fervently believe in?  If the client is not necessarily the right client but the project just that good?

Decisions change the trajectory of your creative business much more than they define the moment.  Sounds ass-backwards right?  Sure, there are humiliations, world-class boners and homers, but they are few and far between.  Most often it is the accumulation of daily movements towards your vision.  Each decision builds on the next in an ever (upward) spiral.  A decision is right or wrong only in the sense of intention, intuition and a willingness to search inward.

The sweetest irony is that decisions require patience, stillness and reflection.  Whatever you are confronted with, impulse awakens you to your intuition, stillness allows intuition to marinate, wisdom reflects the road you are meant to travel down.  Gravitas belongs to the tremors, the ripples.  Only ego takes you away from the import of subtlety and allows the delusion that the big decision stands on its own without context.  Decisions are never easy or for the faint of heart.  They are the stuff of integrity and faith that the result is ultimately irrelevant to the conviction of your next decision.

Understanding Risk

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For creative business, risk abounds and, to the extent you are asked to absorb it, you need to get paid appropriately.  What is risk?  Not odds of success (like rolling the dice in Las Vegas), neither a safe or chancy bet.  Rather, risk is the acknowledgement and categorization of factors outside of your control that affect your ability to succeed.  Without question, there exists (persists?) a fundamental misperception/misunderstanding/mispricing of risk in many, if not most, creative businesses.  I cannot hope to solve the issue here, but instead intend just to open the dialogue so that you can see your creative business in another light, work to reduce your risk (or at least understand it a little better) and give yourself a better chance to succeed.

The old axiom is true.  Time is money.  The more time you have to do just about anything the less risk that exists.  Add in market power (i.e., volume) to the equation and the axiom becomes even truer.  A quick example: you are a stationer and you have to buy special paper.  Presuming your business is big enough to really matter to either your wholesaler or paper mill, the earlier you order, the cheaper your price should be.  Why?  Because your order represents a risk-reduction to your wholesaler and/or paper mill.  You have removed the risk of your paper sitting on the wholesaler’s shelf and/or factory floor.  In other words, the factory and wholesaler can go ahead and make more paper than you ordered because you took away the risk of them not selling what they needed to produce the paper in the first place.  Your early order increased their chance of long-term success.

Now, the factory and wholesaler have absolutely no incentive to explain how you are helping them reduce risk and will probably tell you all day long that it does not matter if you order six months in advance or six weeks, same price.  Better for them if you overpay.  But it does matter, risk is risk.  If you do not get paid for the reduction of risk you offer when you buy early from your suppliers, your clients lose.

For those of you who do not sell stuff as part of your creative business, the above example still applies.  It just applies to the timing and certainty of decisions.  For instance, a project can take six weeks to get done if you have full cooperation of a client, but ten if they are wishy-washy.  Arguably, the responsive client should reap the benefits of being, well, a responsive client far more than just getting their project done more quickly.  You can say that the same $10,000 project, six weeks or ten weeks, is the same and you would be wrong.  Risk has to be paid for, either by you or your client.  And, in this example, the wishy washy client is supported by the responsive client (i.e., they pay for the risk), when it most definitely should be the other way around.  If you do not acknowledge risk, the squeaky wheel will get the grease when it should be left to rust.

As the $10,000 project above shows, if you do not have a mechanism to compensate for the risk you take, you will always be gambling.  Yes, there is no such thing as certainty, but your creative business is not a roulette wheel in Vegas either.  When you know where risks exist, timing of decisions, having to start over, last minute changes, etc., you have to account for them up front.  To do that, you have to understand what is critical to your and your creative business’ success and be ever vigilant about protecting this value.  And the best way to protect the value is to price for it.  In the $10,000 project example, you can say if decisions are not made timely, you will either be able to stop or charge more money to the client.

Yes, you can take the foregoing to the draconian and say that if a client steps a millimeter out of line they will pay pay pay.  So not what I am talking about.  Instead, what I am talking about is taking risk where you should and doing your best to avoid it where you should not.  Take risk where you are in the best position to identify and control the risk.  If you cannot control it, you should not be taking the risk.

It is why I advise working so hard to stand for what you and you alone believe in, seeking only clients that most value your art and the artistry of your creative business.  Then you will be evaluated only on your ability to understand this client and not on your ability to ignore risk and survive.   This should truly be the only risk you take.  Better to stand behind your art than to watch your business suffer while you wait around for someone else to decide your fate.

Redefining Success

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Businesses evolve.  Clients change.  Strategies shift.  What was yesterday is gone, today is a new day and tomorrow is unknowable.  It is the nature of things.  In a perfect world, we would all let go of the past instantly, embrace today’s reality fully and allow the future to unfold in its own accord.  The multi-billion dollar pharma/psychological industry is a lovely reminder of just how far we are away from the perfect world.  Letting go is far more a process than a choice, a daily call to consciousness, mindfulness of where you are and intend to head more than anything else.

So in the vein of letting go, cut yourself a break when you find yourself in a tailspin because the old measures of success no longer validate your new business model/strategy.  When you say it out loud, it is obvious – you cannot ask the old to define the new.  Yet, we all do it to find some reassurance that the new version of ourselves, our art, our creative business is the right one.  As if there is such a thing.

Here is an example:  An interior designer wants higher-end clients.  She redoes her website to show off her highest end projects. Instead of a percentage, she decides to charge a (very large) flat fee so that she actually gets cheaper the larger the project.  Hers is a retro/vintage/Steampunk style and that is the only client she seeks.  In the past, she cast a very wide net, had a cutesy/shabby chic site with no prices and a blog to match.  She used to get ten inquiries a week with one right client (maybe).  Her projects used to range from one room to a whole house.  She was doing forty projects a year and frying.  Her stated goal now is ten projects a year with these projects being the entirety of a space (i.e., whole house).  Few months go by.  Only five inquiries.  Three clients.  Panic.  This time last year she had thirty inquiries and ten clients.  Few more months go by.  Another five inquiries.  Four clients.  Sheer terror.  By this time last year she was almost fully booked with tons of inquiries piling up.  Now, seven projects?!?

By almost any definition, the changes the interior designer made are successful.  She is getting meaningful inquiries by clients who understand and value her art and her creative business.  These clients provide her with the right projects and the money she needs to sustain herself.  No doubt, she is not all the way there (she needs ten clients), but everything indicates she will get there and beyond.  Why the panic?  Because she is swimming in an entirely new ocean of her own making, cannot yet see the land ahead, so looks back to reassure herself that there is, in fact, land, no matter how irrelevant that land is to her journey.

Regardless of how much outward change you make to your creative business, your work has to be to commit to a new definition of success.  You must embrace that there may be no discernable answer to your new strategy, no absolute measure of success.  Gary Vaynerchuk is a vocal leader of the power of social media despite there being (still) very few external indicators of that power.  While I might say, “Awesome, seven right clients in just a few months.  A seventy percent conversion rate, crazy!”  You might say, but it is not close to what it was.  Such is the nature of faith.

You must seek validation of change with different eyes looking in a different direction.  See trends instead of facts.  Movements instead of statistics.  Just because you cannot see the land ahead does not mean it is not there.   If you can work to redefine success then you might also be able to have a little more faith in the changes you have made and are making.  You can believe in your own evolution and can know in your belly (and your head) that the land is in fact there.  You can then set about enjoying the mystery of when and where it will appear.  You will, of course, be tickled when the land looks nothing like what you thought it would, but thrilling just the same.

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