The Business of Being Creative – Page 34 – Practical business advice for those in the business of being creative.

The Real You

Strategy

seanlow

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August 6, 2012

Nobody cares about where you came from, your education, your source, even your art, unless you lie. Whoppers (Milli Vanilli, Brian Corman), scratch your head as to why (Jonah Lehrer), irrelevancies (Scott Thompson), criminal (Martha Stewart). The price of faking it is huge. Despite all of our own individual failings and skeletons, public fraud is unacceptable and erases the credible, even amazing work you may have done or are doing.

I am sure psychologists, sociologists, and pundits galore can give you their version of why someone would fabricate a version of themselves or their work rather than accept their own reality. My thought here is only to recognize that the risk is enormous, quite literally a career killer. The path back from almost anyplace is easier than the path back from fraud. Drugs, rape, dog-fighting have shorter shelf lives than fraud. Once you break trust with clients, employees, vendors, colleagues, and the public at large we are more than reluctant to give it back. Not fair, just true.

Okay. So do not lie about anything. No great insight there. But how about do not describe yourself as derivative of anyone or anything? How many of you in your “elevator pitch”, effectively say, “I’m just like so and so, only different”. You can kid yourself to think that it is the easiest way for someone to understand who and what you, your art and creative business are all about. You would be wrong. As you describe yourself as derivative, you allow the receiver’s perception to be defined by how they think of who you are derivative of. If you say that you are the next Michael Kors, only hipper, the hipper part is lost to how whom you are talking to feels about Michael Kors.. Oh, and heaven forbid, the person is in the same room (or table). You would have just legitimized their creative business while throwing yours under the bus.

And if you are willing to go down the derivative path, you will lie. You have to. You will have set up expectations to meet those that would hire the artist you compare yourself to. Except you are not them and the value you deliver has to be intrinsic to who you, your art and creative business actually are. Ultimately, you are going to have to have your clients walk with you on your path or you are both in for a very rough road. To do so, you are going to have to undo the half-truths, innuendos and mistaken presumptions that got them to work with you in the first place. Yeah, just not a place I want to be. The price of a short-cut to yes is an eternity of explanations that will never be good enough.

Leaving the short-cut means you have to close the door to illusion. Everyone’s perception of you has to be based on what you are willing to lay open for everyone to judge. You have to be grateful for not being for everyone. Generic has no place in creative business. You will have to accept that it is only arrogance that allows you to work with the wrong client or the client that believes you to be something you are not. You must know that saying no is just as important as saying yes, even if you (desperately) need the money. In your no will be responsibility to find the yes for your client. Integrity is respect for you, your art and your creative business most of all, above and beyond respect for your clients, employees, vendors and colleagues. Little fibs turn the order of respect upside down. And upside down respect leads to death by a thousand cuts, most often because it becomes almost impossible to go right side up. Go the other way and perhaps you will see the little lies as not so little after all.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

seanlow

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July 30, 2012

1

I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi this weekend. Fascinating and should be mandatory viewing for creative business owners and their employees. For those that do not know about David Gelb’s documentary, it is the story of Jiro Ono who owns the only 3 star Michelin rated sushi restaurant in the world. The restaurant itself is ten seats and is in a subway station in Tokyo. The meal costs an average of 30,000 yen (@$380) per person and consists of about 22 pieces of sushi depending on what is at the market that day (no, you do not get to choose). It takes a month to get a reservation. Jiro is in his mid eighties now and his eldest son is his heir apparent. Yoshikazu has worked with his father for over thirty years and it was he, not Jiro, who prepared all of the sushi for the Michelin critics. Jiro’s youngest son runs his own sushi restaurant. Jiro himself still works 70-80 hours per week.

The lessons from Jiro are legion and I leave it to you to discover your own, but I take away three principal ones: 1) Know who you are. 2) The work is what matters. 3) The pursuit of perfection bears a heavy price.

Know Who You Are Jiro came from a broken home and was basically on his own from a young age. As he described himself, he was a bully, a bad kid. Making sushi saved his life. The work provided discipline, focus and a relentless pursuit of the perfect technique. Along the way, he broke the rules, created technique and honed a purity and consistency that will define him as likely the greatest sushi master ever. As much as Jiro has honed the preparation of his sushi, the most interesting part of the documentary was the last bit – watching him serve customers, how he watches them and perfects his delivery (serving left handed people on the left, making sushi smaller for women so that they will be able to eat their meal at the same pace as the men). The title of the documentary comes from Jiro himself – he dreams of sushi — how to make it, serve it and do it even better the next day. His life and love are sushi. It is all that he is, without apology. Who are you in your creative business?

The Work Is What Matters There is a scene where the senior apprentice describes making egg sushi. He made it every day for six months (about 200 times) before Yoshikazu deemed it acceptable. The apprentice cried. Jiro does not work for money or fame. His sons will always be in his shadow. Yet they all are in pursuit of perfecting their craft, giving honor to being a shokunin (artisan). The work is its own pursuit and its own reward. Monastic maybe (ok, definitely), but exemplary in the art of the possible based on untold hours of practice ala Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

The Heavy Price of Perfection At a certain point you have to choose between being the creator or the craftsman. Jiro started as a craftsman with the eye to being a creator but has long since returned to being the craftsman (albeit of his own techniques). His sons will never move into their own light no matter their talent. Yoshikazu was the chef for the Michelin critics after all. Yet, by culture, commitment or a little of both, Yoshikazu is content to maintain the tradition of his father. Would you be? What price are you willing to pay for the pursuit of perfection? If your essence is creation, to scale your art to a wide audience, to perpetually break the rules, then constantly seeing how well you can follow them is soul sucking. Some of the apprentices at Jiro’s do not last a morning. Nobody would consider Nobu Matsuhisa a slouch in the sushi department, but one look at his empire and you know that he and Jiro could not co-exist under one roof for day. How you choose to share your gift is your choice. However, choosing perfection is its own isolation. There is a huge price to ignore all things beyond the craft, to conciously look away from the opportunity that might await when amazing (not perfect) is good enough. Perfection does not scale, creation does. You can find your glory, your love, your satisfaction in either place, but never both.

What Are You Worth?

seanlow

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July 24, 2012

2

Here is a fascinating article in the New York Times about Ken Perenyi who once made a fortune selling forgeries of 18^th and 19^th century artists such as Martin Johnson Heade, Gilbert Stuart and Charles Bird King and is now selling the same forgeries as “authentic reproductions” for a fraction of the cost. And that is the thing – the real deal is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the very best copy in the world (so good the very best experts have a hard time telling the difference) just a few thousand.

So what are you worth? If you believe yourself and your creative business to be creators and not copiers, then why does it matter what those who do similar work to you charge for their work? For objective things, okay, a rose is a rose is a rose. But, for subjective – what you intend to do with the rose? That is only bounded by what you need to feel good about sharing that intention with your client.

Because you are swimming in a boundless ocean, asking for that number should make you sweat, tingle with excitement and force you to move beyond what is definable. When you make the number too small, you are giving yourself an out. You can always point to how much work you are going to have to do to conceptualize all that needs to be done. Who cares? That is not the value. Time, stuff, things are not part of your boundless ocean, only your creativity and the process of translating your client’s vision beyond what they themselves could ever imagine for themselves. Time, stuff and things are not a life-raft in the ocean, they are icebergs.

When you force yourself to push beyond the boundaries of what you think you are worth, you also force yourself to define all that is valuable about you, your art and creative business on a deeper more connected level. You can then become more and more unapologetic for doing what you do, how you do it and for what price. The haters will never show up. More important, neither will the take it or leave its. And this is the thing about all creative businesses – it is never about price. Within the very very far bounds of reason, the cost of your creativity (i.e., what is between your ears, not between your hands) is a yes no question. Your clients will either pay it or they will not. If, say, the cost for you to come up with a design is $10, the right client will gladly pay the $10, the wrong one will not pay a cent. Going beyond your comfort zone makes you work harder for the right client because the more you can sell the very ethos of you, your art and your creative business (as opposed to the stuff), the easier it will be for them to connect with you and, ironically, the easier for you to collect your fee. The wrong clients will just shake their heads and leave, to which, you should be enormously grateful.

If I had a dollar for every time I have heard, “I could never charge that, no one would ever pay me that much just for my ideas” only to have it come to pass, I would be writing this blog from my Maui estate. The courage it takes to put your art out there in the first place is the same courage it takes to get paid what you are truly worth, not the self-limiting value you have placed on you, your art and your creative business. To do that though, your client has to know what they are paying for beyond time, stuff and things.

What I am talking about here is absolutely NOT about greed. It is about demanding to be acknowledged for the art you are about to create, earning what is necessary for you to feel good about it. Moreover, it is about defining you, your art and your creative business for those that care the most. When you live there, you live in the possible. I, for one, would rather see where that takes me than where “an authentic reproduction” does.

The Perfect Egg

Strategy

seanlow

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July 16, 2012

0

Great chefs all cook wonderfully complex dishes using amazing ingredients, but they are rock stars because they can cook the perfect egg. Watch Alice Waters cooking an egg on 60 Minutes to get an idea of what I mean.

So what does cooking the perfect egg have to do with creative business? More than you think.

What would you pay for an egg cooked perfectly by Alice Waters? $10? What would you pay for the egg cooked the same way at your local diner? $3? $5? Presuming you are an Alice Waters fan, you will pay the massive premium for her egg because it is worth it to you AND you can afford it.

As you look to take your creative business to the next level, may I suggest that that level is not creative business lite to the masses. Watering down what your creative business does to make it more “accessible” almost always removes all that is valuable (read: unique, special, creative) about the business in the first place. Day-of coordination, interior design room “consultations”, instant editing by videographers and photographers are examples that leap to mind. Each of these businesses is a good business on its own, just not as part of your overall creative business.

Instead, just like cooking the perfect egg, your goal has to be to find those new business lines that celebrate your creative business and offer distinct value in the narrow range they are assigned.

An example is the growing trend of blow out only hair salons. My favorite is The Drybar. Brilliant in what it offers as value to its customers: “No cuts. No Color. Just Blowouts. Only $40.” I am certain every hair salon on the planet offers blowouts and the concept is not new. It is just how The Drybar is doing it that is so smart. Specific value based on premium talent beyond what is offered. Every stylist at The Drybar is more than capable of cutting and coloring. It generates trust and creates value for the $40 blowout. The perfect egg.

Nothing is ever ideal in this world. Starting the perfect egg business requires commitment. Not commitment to get started – ironically, that is the easy part. It is the commitment to scale, to critical mass. Who wants to start a business just to get even? Take The Drybar – if the average sale at a typical salon is $100 and their blowouts are $40, they have to do 2.5 times the volume of the average salon just to get even. Seeing your way through until you get to the scale you need will not be easy, but then momentum will take you the rest of the way. The Drybar 3 customers to every one of an average salon, likely is growth will compound on itself.

Here is my favorite part about starting a perfect egg business – you have to be unyielding about the premium your core creative business offers. You have to stand for something, know your market and ignore the rest. You have to create a community waiting for even a taste of the meal they know is not accessible to them. Not leftovers, not crumbs, a true taste. The more focused you, your art and creative business is, the more valuable the taste.

The First Meeting

seanlow

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June 18, 2012

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In the moments before your potential client contacts you for the first time, their perception of you is all they have. This is marketing. Everything from your website and all things social media to your reputation among past clients and vendors alike makes up what your potential client knows about you, your art and your creative business.

Except they cannot possibly know you. The actual you (including your art and creative business) is vastly more diverse, nuanced and, hopefully, interesting than the illusion you have worked so diligently to craft. So why is your first conversation almost always about the details of what you will do for your potential client rather than talking about who you are and, more important, listening to who they are? You do not sell things, you sell creation.

Creative business is fundamentally about the construction and maintenance of meaningful, trusting, intimate relationship. Your past art is not a short cut to that relationship. If you are to be successful, you are going to have to reveal yourself to your potential client and have them find comfort in the revelation. It makes no difference whether you design hotels or weddings, photograph a product or babies, style flowers or chocolates, your art is meant to transcend the vision and ability of your client. Why else would they need you? So the first step has to be to move beyond the objective “here is what I will do for you” and into the subjective “I understand you, see you and am the one to bring your vision to reality”.

Practically then, how about working to ask questions that shake your potential client’s understanding of who you they know you and your creative business to be? For instance, if you are a florist, instead of first asking your potential client’s budget, favorite flowers and colors, what if you started your conversation with a discussion about her nail polish or shoes? Can you disrupt your potential client’s perception of you so that the actual you can have the opportunity to come through? Real conversation allows you to show (i.e., not tell) your client everything about you, your art and your creative business. Or you can rely on the illusion your marketing effort has generated. Live by your resume or die by it.

Every artist I have ever known lights up when they start talking about what drives their art and what they hope to create. Past work is a point of pride, but the future is infectious. It makes ultimate sense to me that you would start your conversation in a manner that draws upon your enthusiasm, your bubbling passion for your next project. If your potential client engages your enthusiasm, then the logistics will take care of themselves. Yes, your willingness to start with the implicit truth, the fabric of who you are and what drives your impulse to create will open the door for iconic process. The wrong client will reject your enthusiasm out of hand no matter how much they like your work. The right one will be inspired and will inspire you to do your best work. Such is the foundation of trust.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether you want to allow your clients to see beyond the illusion you present to the world. Trust has to be based on faith in the relationship, not that you will deliver in the end. Start there.

Innovation

Strategy

seanlow

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June 11, 2012

3

I have just returned from Engage!12: Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas. The brainchild of Rebecca Grinnals and Kathryn Arce, Engage! is a remarkable conference for remarkable wedding professionals to talk about doing remarkable things. After attending each of the previous eight Engage!s, it is, well, remarkable to me how it just keeps getting better. I will not summarize the experience other than to say that every other wedding conference that tries to do what Engage! does is a poor man’s substitute. Engage! inspires you to make your creative (not just wedding) business the best version of itself.

All of which brings me to the idea of innovation. Jonathan Fields wrote a brilliant post on the subject today. To Jonathan (and me), innovation is about sawing off the limb of all that you know, daring to really walk another way. Incremental change is not innovation. When you tweak what is already in place to create the new and improved model you wind up with the same old same old, only shinier. What I spoke about at Engage!, and to anyone who will listen, is the idea that this moment in time is an inflection point. Today, innovation is not just an opportunity to expand your creative business, but a prerequisite to your long-term success. When Google Sketchup costs @$500, video production available on all things Apple and wonderful renderers a click away on Design Taxi, making the intangible tangible for your client has never been easier.

To be clear, I am talking about your business model, the way you do things (the why, the how and the how much) that supports your art. The actual art (whether film or digital, virtual or actual) and its evolution, I leave to you, the artists of the world. What I said at Engage! some of you might find outrageous. So be it. If you are not willing to focus on making the intangible tangible, getting paid for your ideas and their presentation first and foremost, you are going to get run over by those that do. Our very state of being today begs that you profit from ideas and make only a comfortable living from their production. In five years, I just cannot see how any creative business will look remotely close to what it does today. FYI, the first IPhone was released June 29, 2007. Yes, the world is moving that fast.

In the spirit of Jonathan’s post, using Pinterest to show your ideas is an example of incremental change, lipservice to innovation. Inspiration and examples are wonderful tools. However, inspiration boards are not design and are not an effective means of telling your client’s story back to them. Then again, if you have not challenged yourself to truly innovate, you might feel inspiration boards are enough.

If you are photographer and I asked you to figure out how to solve projecting your image onto, say, the Eiffel Tower, you might be daunted and then set out trying to solve the challenge. A graphic designer redesigning the Apple logo? A florist covering Central Park in a floral mosaic? Now what if I asked the same photographer, graphic designer and florist to charge ten times what they do now? One hundred? Most would say not possible. Why? Because, to do so, requires innovation and an offer of new value to clients. Presumably (bad assumption I know, but just go with me), if the photographer, graphic designer and florist charges $100 for their work today, then that is fair value. Raising prices to $1,000 without any change in value offered would mean seriously overcharging their clients. I do not believe in simply raising rates as it is more a reflection of insecurity and greed than anything else. Developing a better mouse trap on the other hand, and charging appropriately for it is the stuff of business legend. Can anyone say IPhone/IPad/ITunes? Keurig Coffee Machine? Netflix?

To paraphrase Cindy Novotny (to me, THE rock star speaker from Engage!), challenge yourself to have your creative business be outrageous in its business model. If you have never charged for your design, what would it mean to charge a $100,000 design fee? What if $100,000 were not enough? How about asking for a three-year commitment if you are used to going from gig to gig? Set out to solve the challenge of your business model with a fresh mind unencumbered by your own preconceptions of the possible. If you start with the idea that no client needs your creative business, then you can honor how deep his want goes. As the world is transformed by the magic of your artistic imagination, so too your creative business. Please always remember, brilliance is just crazy in hindsight.

A Global Perspective

Strategy

seanlow

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May 30, 2012

3

Last week I had the opportunity to present at Expectations 2012 in Acapulco – a wedding conference for professionals in Mexico and Latin America at large. Certainly, I was inspired by the ever-brilliant design and business mind of Todd Fiscus and the hyper-creative Ed Libby. But I was equally moved by the size and breadth of talent most of us in the United States have never heard of, like Susanna Palazuelos and Eduardo Kohlmann. Ligia Cortes and Gabriel Garza ought to be ever commended for organizing Expectations and allowing me to learn as much from them as they do from me.

However, the most profound part of the experience was sitting next to Ricardo Suarez, the General Manager of the Banyan Tree Cabo Marques at the final dinner on Tuesday evening. Yes, the hotel is beyond amazing – each villa with a private pool — sitting on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. What sets the hotel apart though is Ricardo’s attitude about service. Ricardo came in last year to help the new hotel find its sea legs. I was fascinated to know that, other than Engineering, no one at the hotel had any significant hotel experience before joining the Banyan Tree. Ricardo hires based on attitude and intrinsic characteristics rather than experience and education. For example, one of Ricardo’s stars at the front desk he found at Burger King. The way she attended to diners – the genuine care she showed to everyone who walked in the door (including Ricardo and his two young sons) – is why Ricardo handed her his card and begged her to call him. For Ricardo, it is about culture first, perfection second. Is the hotel perfect? Of course not. Did I forgive them because of the attitude of every employee? Always. And, for those in the wedding business, the hotel has a Director of Romance, but Ricardo personally meets with each bride and groom to make sure that he knows all details for the wedding and offers his personal assurance that the hotel will exceed their expectations.

Ricardo only reinforced to me that culture matters more than perfection. Something we so often forget in the United States. Process supports culture, not the other way around.

And then there was Eduardo and Susanna. Both of them run enormous catering operations. For instance, Eduardo did 820 events last year and hopes to do 900 this year. Susanna is the largest caterer in Acapulco by far. From a business perspective, they show what happens when the cost of production is so low. It becomes a bubble gum problem. You might make 75% on a piece of gum (as Wrigley’s does) but you can only charge five cents. So you have to sell A LOT of gum to make enough money to survive. This creates an environment that is ripe for monopoly (or at least significant oligopoly). So, like the U.S. candy market, the Mexican wedding market is dominated by a few key huge players in each segment (floral, catering, rentals, etc.). Fringe players surround them and inroads are made with ideas and creativity far more than they are with making something for less. Simply, there is a zero bound to the cost of production. Charging four cents instead of five does not make much of a difference. Ironically, the environment in Mexico supports collaboration among vendors far more than it does in the United States.

Take the dessert table for instance. With all due deference to Amy Atlas, whose work is wonderfully amazing, we are talking about something else entirely when we talk about a dessert table for a traditional Mexican (or more broadly Latin American) wedding. The dessert table represents the sweetness wedded life will bring to a couple. I saw images of tables literally 100 feet long with structures at least 6 feet tall. Equal parts catering and event design. In the U.S., the collaboration is difficult – who is responsible – the Caterer? Designer? Planner? In Mexico, it is much easier so that there are those who, like Amy, design, but do not necessarily produce the table. So, in the sense of being able to stretch further through collaboration, the Mexican/Latin wedding market I believe is actually ahead of the United States. Still shocking to me that, given the size of the Latin American market in the U.S., no one has figured out how to offer what is so common in Mexico.

Where Mexico and Latin America lag significantly behind is in the sophistication of marketing/social media and all things technology. Yes, everyone has a smartphone and IPad, but I was handed only CDs of work as marketing pieces. The Style Me Pretty of Mexico/Latin America does not exist yet. I am sure they will get there and maybe those reading this post might see the opportunity that awaits them in Mexico.

Our world is indeed a global village and I am most grateful to those like Ricardo, Susanna and Eduardo who have allowed me to see the world as they do. More than anything, they have all reinforced the idea that innovation only matters if the community uses it to go forward. In all ways, the goal has to be to turn competition into collaborators. We might be a ways off until that ethos is in the fabric of our creative business mindset, but hopefully closer than we think.

Your Gift

Structure

seanlow

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May 16, 2012

6

People ask me all the time about what I was most proud of while I was with Preston. Most expect me to talk about the money earned, deals made, international exposure, even the business model we crafted. Do not get me wrong. All of those things are wonderful and were really fun to work on and be a part of. But when I get right down to it, the thing I am most proud of is that the world got to see Preston’s gift as he was meant to share it.

Preston imagines an unbelievable fantasy world that is to exist for but a moment. Truly, there are probably ten people on our planet of seven billion that can conceptualize the environments Preston does for his events. Yes, Preston has many gifts (his ability to listen and be present at the forefront), but they are a distant second to his artistry, the size and breadth of his vision.

I did not make it possible for Preston to play on a grand stage, I just helped his business get out of the way of him actually being able to. His gift did the rest. And that is the point – your creative business has to be structured so that it supports the stage you want to play on. Not all of us want to or can play on Preston’s grand stage. So what. You are to play on your own stage – the one that most celebrates the gift you have been given. If I had to say what I do really well for my clients, this would be it — help them play on the stage that best suits them. When you allow the way you do business to hinder the celebration or stop it entirely, you are not just robbing yourself of opportunity (which you most certainly are) but the rest of the world of what you are most meant to contribute.

Here is a fact. When I was with Preston, we deliberately made less money than we otherwise could have for certain of Preston’s international events. Why? Because a) it was still a lot of money and b) it was really based on the notion that the bigger the stage for Preston the better. More important to get cheaper the bigger the event than squeeze the very last dollar we could. If you charge $100 fee for a $200 event, you are crazy expensive. But if you charge the same $100 fee for a $1,000 event, not so much. Add some zeroes and you get the idea that the bigger the event you had the more enticing was it to have Preston design it for you. When I joined Preston he had yet to do a million dollar event. When I left his largest was far more than fifteen times that and I can only imagine what it is today.

All too often I see artists compromise themselves and their creative businesses in the name of, well, business. The art, the emotion, the love gets sublimated to the shoulds, needs and have tos of the business. You talk yourself into doing things a particular way because you cannot imagine another way. More particularly, you cannot imagine talking about what matters most to you and what you deeply want to give to your clients. Whether it is because it is about the sale, the desire to please or even that you are not fully in touch with what you most want to share, I really do not know. What I do know though is that it is a shame since you are keeping part of your gift in the shadows.

I had the good fortune to have dinner with Vicente Wolf this week. He has been a designer for 37 years and has as much enthusiasm for it today as he did when he started. Just oozes out of him. I asked him why. He said it was about emotion, his need to create, to share his art. Regardless of the fantastic success (financial and otherwise) he has achieved, we both agreed he could have made much more if he were willing to compromise his design integrity. He just could not though and is ever proud of it. He knows who he is, believes in the gift he was given and refuses to ever hide it. Call it what you will – I call it spirit; something larger than you from which you are simply the delivery vessel. Yes, you have to get out of the way as we all do to let that spirit go as far as it can. So too with your creative business. It is there to serve you and your art. Never ever ever the other way around.

When you find yourself upside down, the work is to acknowledge why you create in the first place. Joy of expression has to be the end all be all. If you lose it, come back to it and refuse to allow your creative business (clients, employees, vendors and colleagues included) to ever mute it. An incredibly simple thought, overwhelmingly difficult to implement, but unbelievably freeing if you do. It just has to begin with the idea, nay the faith, that your gift is to be shared fully with the world, never in compromised sound bites.

Primary Roles

seanlow

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May 9, 2012

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All of us have many different roles in our lives – business owner/employee, artist, colleague, client, parent, child, friend, lover, teacher, student. We cannot be all roles simultaneously. We focus on being one or two of them at any one time, mostly dependent on who is sitting across the table from us. Let’s call those roles the primary roles of the moment. Playing the wrong primary role in a given situation tends to not turn out well. Children need parents not friends. Students need teachers not lovers. Creative businesses need owners not parents.

The question then is what primary roles do you play in your creative business? Why and, more importantly, when? So often, you do not define your role because you believe you need to be all things to all people. To you, your client expects you to not only create the design, but then draw, build and drive the truck to deliver it. Your employees expect you to be able to answer all questions no matter how much you tell them it is their job to know. Welcome to the land of Lilliput.

There is no one right role for you in your creative business, only the one you must play for the world to perceive your business as a business and not merely an extension of yourself. Extensions do not scale, businesses do. Even if you are all by yourself, you can still make it clear what your primary roles are. The rest you can outsource. The point is that you must do all you can to be viewed in the light most favorable to your creative business. Designer, technician, craftsperson, it does not matter, so long as you pick your primary role.

Apart from misperception about what is necessary, failing to play the primary role you know you must is about lack of confidence. You cannot play small no matter your size. Yes, you can be hungry and scrappy to get where you need to be so long as you never get stuck there. Ultimately, you have to own the stage. To do so, you have to allow those around you to celebrate your gifts. When you allow yourself to play the wrong primary role, you get lost in all that you are not. No wonder then that your creative business cannot find its place as a business. Much better to invest the time to do what you do, nothing else. Only then will your creative business will have something to be built around. The more specific your role, the further you, your art and your creative business can go. Ironic in the very best sense. Know who you are so you can move beyond yourself. As true for you as an artist as it is for you as a creative business owner.

The Importance of Presentation

seanlow

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April 30, 2012

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The value of any creative business no longer (solely) rests on the quality of its final product. Whether it is a sofa, a photograph, a floral arrangement, lighting, stationary, or a shoe, there is too much great stuff out there for you to rest on your work alone. You might be that good, but not so good as to stand wholly apart. Today, you need an amazing process to get to your final art as much as you need to be able to produce amazing art. Done well, it means putting the spotlight on your creativity and getting paid well for the brilliance between your ears much more than the brilliance between your hands; to get paid for inspiration far more than perspiration. Engaging and connecting your client to your process is the key determinant of your success as a creative business. Communicate your ideas well and you will earn trust to continue building the relationship. Your final product will then be the by-product of the relationship not the definition.

All of which brings me to the importance of presentation. If you do not invest in the theater of presentation, you are asking for trouble. Skip presenting and you are dead even if you do not know it yet. Presenting used to be hard and expensive. A client knew that creating a rendering, organizing materials and ideas was difficult. Very few knew AutoCAD and even less could afford to use it. Even if you could put together a PowerPoint, printing in anything other than basic Kinko’s style was not happening. The result: one sample, one room, one big investment to give enough of a taste of what was to come to convince a client to take the leap.

Today, Marriot design rooms virtually in 3D instead of building demo rooms and lobbies, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and six months of design time in the process. Google Sketchup is $500. Forget about the wealth of freelance talent out there to use it. With Pinterest, how can you not know what a client loves? And how can you not find the perfect image of what you are thinking about if you cannot/will not create one for yourself?

The tools available to tell your client’s story have never been more accessible. And we all know a killer presentation App is just around the corner. Clients are right to judge how you tell your interpretation of their story as much as anything else. Simply, how you present is the single most important linchpin to the value of your art and your creative business. Just take a look at the difference in philosophy between Vicente Wolf and my friend’s interior designer.

Read Vicente Wolf’s brilliant post on how he presents his design vision to his clients. To me, it is required reading for all creative business owners to see how someone like Vicente approaches his presentations, where he places the value of his creative business. Vicente is decidedly low tech, but thorough in how he “paints the colors” for his client. You may or may not want to present how Vicente does, that is not the point. Look at how methodical and detailed he is to every moment he is communicating his vision. If you are his client, how can you not appreciate the thought that has gone into his design? The perception of value is clearly on his creativity not the stuff he intends to use. Your faith in him is defined by his communication of his vision his way.

Juxtapose that with a story friends told me about their experience with their interior designer. The designer came highly recommended and had worked with several colleagues and friends. Her fee was $5,500 plus 20% of items chosen. My friends shared several Pinterest boards, took her to places whose design they liked, and talked with the designer for several hours about likes and dislikes. What did the designer show? Ideas in three genres that did not at all represent what was discussed. No floor plans, no specific ideas, just pictures of items that my friends had found online. The result: incredible frustration and distrust of the designer and whatever vision she might have had. Instead of wanting to maximize the relationship, they just want to get through it. They feel like they have invested too much of themselves to start over, but do they value the designer and her talent? No. Strong relationship? Not even close.

If only my friends’ story was an outlier. I see it over and over – the unwillingness to invest in process and the theater of presentation. I suppose it is because it is not the norm and, why bother, if the work will speak for itself. So not true and, even if it did, think of all the opportunities lost when a client only wants to be done. Today, it costs virtually nothing for your creative business to reveal the soul of your art before you have to deliver it. Next to nothing to create and be paid for an immutable relationship with your client. Here is my prediction: in the (very near) future all value to you, your art and your creative business will be put squarely on your ability to present effectively.