The Business of Being Creative

My first job out of college in 1988 was as a paralegal for a big New York law firm.  Not a fun job (read: mind-numbing busy work).  One of my big tasks was comparing changes to a document by hand and marking those changes.  The attorney would then mark his changes to those changes, have his secretary type them and send the new document overnight to the other side.  Each round of revisions took about two days.  Compare that to using Google Docs (or some similar program) where attorneys literally edit the document together anywhere in the world.  No down time at all.

As amazing as today’s technology is, the ethos (pathos?) behind ultra-connectivity has a price.  In the rush to get to the next place, we often forget to breathe.  There is so much to be said for taking time to just think (or not), be still and allow ideas to come in their own time.  You can no more force creativity as you can make a baby grow faster.  When noise overwhelms intuition and our interior voice we know we have to cut out the noise.  Without room for inspiration, we are left only with reaching for the next milestone.  Our greatest achievements are what we never see coming.  That said, this post is not about everyone’s need to stop, breathe and be present.  It is about having your creative business do so.

So many of us are in such a hurry to sign the client that we do not let the relationship develop.  We sell when we should be listening, sharing, connecting.  The rush to get to the next step makes us ignore the value of being where we are – seeing, feeling, experiencing the human being across from us.  It is then impossible to see the gift each of us give the other – from your client: the stage to perform; from you: the translation of a vision, a desire into reality.

We are so afraid of being left behind that we make everything a race.  Is it any wonder the stress we all feel to perform?  To create magic instantly?  I am not saying we should go back, only that real time still requires time.  When you build your business on speed of delivery and ultra-responsiveness you ignore the natural flow of creation.

There is theater to creative business.  What you sell is as much about artistry as it is about your art.  How your client experiences your artistry is what matters.  If what you do requires three acts, there is no sense forcing it into one.  You rob your creative business of the arcs all great stories are built on.  To say that you are not given enough time by your client might be true, but all too often it is self-inflicted.  Make no mistake, you, your art and your creative business are storytellers.  Selling the Cliff Notes version only gets you clients that have no appreciation for the nuance and necessity of time.

Take a breath.  Have your creative business take a breath.  Enjoy the hard conversation with your client.  You cannot make it happen yesterday, but tomorrow will be more than worth the wait.

With apologies to Olivia Newton John, let’s get technical.  Should you charge fees and not mark up any of goods or services your creative business provides (save to cover your costs) or lose the fees and just mark things up?  It depends.  For some creative businesses (although way fewer than are out there), charging fees is really hard.  Florists, rental companies (linen, party and furniture), craftsmen selling products spring to mind.  They are bounded by the marketplace and I am not sure moving to any kind of fee is possible.  For the rest though, if you can charge a fee, you should.  Why?  Fees are what you need, markups are what you want.  Where possible, get what you need. (close enough, thank you Rolling Stones)

A moment of definition.  A fee is a random number you assign.  It just is because you say it is.  A fee is NOT based on anything – cost of goods, hours spent, overhead, etc. – it is just what you need to create the art your client is asking you to create.  A fee is wholly subjective and irrational.  This makes it incomparable to anything or anyone else.  The moment you introduce anything objective or rational into a fee, it is no longer a fee, it is a markup, even if you call it a fee.  For instance, if you charge a production fee to produce an event and that fee is based on man hours necessary (on-site and off) to which you assign a number – say 10 people, at $25/hr. for 100 hours total = $25,000 production fee, this fee is a mark-up based on your cost of these 10 people.

Mark-ups are bounded by the marketplace simply because they are definable and thus comparable to someone or something else.  You want to get as much as you can but the market will limit how far you can go.  If you mark-up your labor and materials ten times, but your most expensive competitor only marks it up five times, good luck with that.  Oh, and if you try to put a fee into a mark-up (i.e., the subjective into the objective), you are creating distrust which will cost you money.  Meaning if you tell your client your price includes what it takes for you to create the art in the first place you will get less than the five times mark-up your competitor gets since you have introduced a variable that is confusing and distracting to what you are talking about.  You will wind up competing on price and you will have to go lower to get the job.  By putting your fee into your mark-up, you will have done a very good job of telling your client that the profit on your goods AND the cost of your artistry are the same thing.  They are so not and by putting them together you have just valued the cost of your artistry at zero.

Fees on the other hand are what you need.  You can only figure out what you need from the top down.  Everyone has a number that they want to make – the amount that will afford you the lifestyle you desire.  And everyone’s number is different, but it is a number.  To throw one out there, say it is $10,000 per month.  If you want to do ten projects per year and it costs you twenty percent to create (sketches, presentation materials, staff time, etc.) then you need to charge a design fee of roughly $12,000 per project.  It is what you need to create the art that you do.  The price of your artistry.  Nothing rational about it.  You do not need a $7 cup of coffee, but if being able to give it to yourself each day makes you happy, then it is part of your number.  Who cares if it is not part of someone else’s?  And I hear all the time, well I couldn’t possible charge that much for a project.  Then you have to ask yourself the tough question, why not?  Because if you cannot get to what you need to create your art, it is, by definition, unsustainable as a business.

Since mark-ups are bounded by the marketplace, they are subject to market forces.  Translation:  the more competition you have the poorer you are going to get.  Yes, fees do have competition, but only at the edges and mostly only when need becomes greed. So long as you live in yourself as an artist, your clients will understand that you deserve to get what you need.

The exercise is this: look at your creative business to see where there is something subjective lumped into the objective, where art is mixed with artistry.  Pull them apart, mark-up the art and charge a fee for the artistry.

Competition is neither good nor bad.  It just is.  There are creative businesses, large and small that do what you do on a macro scale.  They take pictures, supply design of all kinds (event, interior, graphic), sell cakes, light your rooms.  You can look at the world as bountiful (i.e., more than enough to go around) or zero-sum (what I get, you do not and vice-versa).  It does not matter.  Your competition will still be there and your clients will compare you to them.  The real question is how do you want to be compared?

Nothing is more disheartening to me than to see a creative business owner using some business 101 course to try to make their business the shiniest apple in the group.  They miss the whole point of creative business.  Using competition to show how your creative business is better apples to apples only makes room for an orange.  If you spend your time honing your packages, pricing, even how your site/blog/twitter/facebook looks and sounds to stand out in the crowd, you are, by definition, wringing out what makes you, your art and your creative business singularly unique.

I am not a marketing expert at all.  My strength is not in figuring out how to get people to find you.  My gift is to create and structure a creative business to best serve clients when they arrive.  It may very well be true that the best strategy to get people to your door is to say, “Hey, I’m like that other guy, only better.”  However, once they show up, telling a client that you work just like the other guy, only better, makes no sense to me.  Why is it that you take a 50% deposit when your client has not seen anything yet?  Literally do nothing with the six or so months you have a client, making it all about the deliverable, forgetting about the process entirely?  Take commissions?  Deliver a proposal first?  Because this is the industry standard?  The way it is done?  What clients expect?  The industry standard is an oxymoron, there is no “way” it is done, and clients’ expectations are solely a function of those you set for them.

You cannot use competition to do the work of running your creative business for you.  The beauty and value of a creative business is its willingness to stand alone in all that it does.  If other creative businesses do it your way, so be it.  Just please do not let it be the other way around without truly owning it as yours.

The awesomeness of competition is that it gives you the opportunity to really stand apart.  You will earn your clients’ respect (and business) with your story.  Those that do not believe (or value) your story are not your clients.  The irony of looking like the shiniest apple is that you actually make it harder for the right clients to hear your story.  We all know the hornet’s nest serving the wrong client creates and the frustration when the right client walks out the door.  Clients today (always?) are laser-sharp in their ability to read right through window dressing in a sea of sameness.  If you are going to make clients do the work to figure out what you really do, why should they pay you for it? You all look like apples to them.  Better to figure out why you are a great orange, be able to communicate the value they get by choosing your orange and making sure you deliver the best orange possible. There is just no competition for that.

As technology advances, the value of mediocre (even pretty good) art will approach zero.  Why would I buy a holiday card from you if I can go choose from literally thousands of designs from TinyPrints?  Have you design my logo and website?  I can get a logo for $150 from The Logo Company and a website on Intuit for $8 a month.  Pay you thousands for floorplans, 3D renderings, etc.?  I can go crazy and buy SketchUp from Google for $495, do it myself or hire a high school art student to give it his best shot.

Make you angry?  Feel like what you offer is so much different and more valuable than what these (cut-rate) services offer?  Maybe you are right, but will you be right a year from now? Two years?  My guess is you will be dead wrong in five.  And the more you focus on the end-result the more wrong you will be.  The new new thing has an ever-shrinking shelf-life.  Your ability to own the innovation does not exist and your imitators will be sure and swift (read: light speed).  Think about how fast fashion designers see their red-carpet couture looks for sale at retail?  Oh, yes, they are inspired looks so the designer gets exactly zero for their sale.  You-Tube makes that cool choreography of the bridal party dancing down the aisle cliché before it ever has a chance to go mainstream.

Creative businesses do not sell products or services, they sell process, emotion, connection and trust.  If you refuse to do the work to hone how it is that you, your creative business and your art relate to your clients on every level, you are going to be left behind.  Why?  See above.  You may be that good today, but you will not be tomorrow.  What is intractable, intrinsically valuable and an eternal basis for growth is relationship.  How do you go about earning your client’s trust?  Please note it is not by showing them pretty pictures and tell them they should.  What do you deliver and when do you deliver it?  Where are the dichotomies?  If you say you pride yourself on customer service, why does a digital operator answer the phone?  Nothing is ever perfect and I would even say perfect is boring.  However, consistency, integrity and your willingness to get and demand respect will always create value in spite of, and maybe because of, imperfections.

Look for where you have made it all about something other than process, emotion, connection and trust.  Price? Product? Service?  Ask yourself why and if you were the client would that persuade you to use you.  Hard conversations are hard for a reason.  You have to talk about things you would rather ignore – money, time, deliverables, mistakes, etc.  If you don’t get the client or feel like you would lose them if you did, what does that say about you and your creative business?  The corollary to making your business wholly about process, emotion, connection and trust is the notion that your clients willingly and honestly give all of their power to you.  You drive the bus not because you force them to, but because they ask you to.  If you help them understand the value of asking by speaking and acting transparently, they will just ask louder and for more.  Say what you do and do what you say.  The rest will take care of itself.

Good is good enough.  If better were possible, then the statement should make you cringe.  No client deserves a first draft.  However, if your “good” is only a function of your neurosis (i.e., there was a typo, an atomic difference in color, a misplaced pillow) then your good has to be good enough.  To paraphrase, Seth Godin, your goal has to be to send your art out the door.   All of which begs the question, how do you align how you work best to the expectations of your client and the standards of your industry?

Everybody works in a different style.  Some of us procrastinate until the last minute, others need to be finished well in advance.  As much as you might like to be other, you are who you are.  Unfortunately, if you need the pressure of a deadline to create, you place your creative business at grave risk of not being able to deliver its best.  On the other hand, if you need everything finished well in advance, you risk seriously alienating your clients who do not want to be forced to make decisions prematurely just to assuage your need to get done.  In both cases, you are going to probably wind up costing your client unnecessary aggravation and wasted expense.  Your work has to be to figure out what process allows the business to do its best and the one you can live with as an artist.

If only it were scientific to figure out what this process is.  It is not.  You will fall down on both sides and nothing will be perfect, just workable.  No matter, though, what is important is that you can explain to your client and your staff why you have chosen to do things the way you do them.  And please remember, within the bounds of rationality, it makes no difference that none of your competitors do it your way.  The point of the exercise is to create the solution that empowers your art and at the same time honors those commissioning its creation.

Too often, the focus is on earning a client’s business without thought as to what it means to continue earning a client’s business even after they have hired you.  At heart, this is what your process has to be about.  Ironically, it is far less about supplicating yourself to your client’s demands as it is to steadfastly believing in the how of what you do.  What works for you will likely only work for you.  Having your client not only understand your “how” but wholly support it is your mission as a creative business owner.  If your process is a derivative amalgamation of all that you see out there (competition, vendors, industry associations, etc.) you are faking it and you will not make it.

Time matters for all creative businesses.  From the moment you are hired until you deliver your product or service, how you manage the time will define your creative business and your art.  If you have it, why would you ever waste it?  And if you do not have it, why would you not get paid (extra) for the lack of it?  You may very well come through in the end in either situation, but it will not be for free and you will inevitably fall down the rabbit hole.  Better to think about time as currency – you need it and get paid for it only if you use it well – than to ignore its impact on you, your art and creative business.