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Walking The Walk

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When we make change, the biggest ones are often the easiest.  Once we commit to lose the weight, give up smoking, drinking, doing work for nothing, ending a bad personal or professional relationship, etc., the first move offers the most dramatic results.  These dramatic results are the catalyst to keep moving, keep changing.  However, once we have gone substantially down the road to transformation, there has to be a new impetus to keep going.  Yes, there is no there there.  And, for so many of us, myself included, this is our true test of whether we are willing to walk the walk or just talk the talk.

How committed are you to your choice to walk a different path?  We all suffer the illusion (delusion?) that once we have chosen, we will not be confronted with the choice again.  While you might have set new boundaries, redefined your core and that of your creative business, reconstructed your process and outlook, have a shiny new website/blog/twitter and facebook page, there will always be those that do not respect the new you.  And, of course, they strike when you least expect it.

Now that the high season is ending for many creative businesses, the question creeps in – what happens when the wrong client, in the wrong style, with the wrong attitude shows up and wants to work with you in March.  You have experienced what it is like to have absolutely no business in January and February and never want to be there again.  Do you walk away or talk yourself into how much you need the work and compromise everything?  How much do you secretly want to go back to the way things were, no matter how dysfunctional?  Most of us would say no way Jose, just look at me now, why would I ever want to go back?  And yet you leave yourself no choice.  You have to eat right?

Except you always have a choice and by living in the box you have created for you, your art and your creative business you ensure that the door never closes on the old you.  Simply because your business is seasonal does not mean your cash flow has to be.  Why are you taking a 50% deposit when you need it the least?  If January and February are your slow months and your high season is in May-July, how come you are not working to take in money from those projects in January and February? A major cop out if you say that is just not the way the business works.  Says who?  And even if it is impossible to collect money in the slow season, how about ancillary business and financing (lines of credit, etc.) that can safely carry you through?  I have yet to meet a creative business owner that can continuously and securely manage lumpy cash flow.  You just do not know what is around the other bend.  For most creative businesses, it is much better to earn $10,000 per month for the year than to receive two payments of $60,000.  Yes, getting that big check is so sexy.  However, going to bankruptcy court while you wait for it is not.

The point is is that there is no wiggle room when it comes to the integrity of you, your art and your creative business.  You can never go home again and you would not want to live there if you could.  The razor’s edge is not to know it when you see an invitation to compromise your truth, it is to remind yourself that it is there when you do not.  Closing the door is a process of perpetual self-evaluation.  Walking the walk is not so much about making the hard choice, it is about working very hard to make sure it really is not a choice at all.

Saying Goodbye and Hello

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How we turn the page defines us.  Friendships come, evolve, some stay and some go.  None stay the same.  Children grow up.  Those nearest and dearest to us die.  We will have to leave the people we love most when it is our time.  The grace with which we can say goodbye and hello is our lifelong challenge.

How we grapple with the challenge personally is for each of us to discover in our own time and our own way.  However, as artists and creative business owners, there is a different sort of pressure.  Personally, we are hopefully surrounded by those who love us unconditionally or endeavor to do so.  They allow us the space to come to our goodbyes and hellos in our own time.  Not so in art and business.  We exist in our clients’, employees’, colleagues’ and vendors’ lives to serve a purpose – to create art, provide meaningful work and fuel the industry we belong to.  So if you do not learn how to effectively and meaningfully turn the page in almost every aspect of your creative business you will jeopardize all that you hold dear.

Examples:  How do you fire an employee that is not working out?  Is it all their fault and you are literally getting the monkey off your back?  Or worse, cleansing the toxic air so you will be free to breathe again?  Hmmm.  Pretty sure you did not hire him or her with that in mind or else you probably would not have hired him in the first place.  So when it does not work, what did you bring to the table?  And more to the point, what did your creative business bring to the table?  Did you ask for an entrepreneur but got a functionary, or vice-versa?  What platform does your creative business support?  Which one do you want?  You cannot truly say goodbye unless you actually know what you want to say hello to.  A mis-fit employee is never the whole problem and often the smallest symptom of a much much larger disease. It is a lazy excuse to believe otherwise.  Your work has to be to say goodbye with as much grace and enthusiasm as you did when you first said hello.

How about a business that does not fit anymore?  A retail store, wholesale delivery, day-of planning, click through advertising, commissionable sales are all great examples.  Do you close down the business right away or figure out how to integrate it into another part of your business?  Or do you ignore the reality and allow the “black-hole” to fester?  Although you are most certainly killing an aspect of your creative business, you must know that all things have their time and failing to acknowledge this truth, especially when the time has past, is a sure way to stay stuck.  Those of you who might think that this is obvious are probably only thinking about aspects of a creative business that do not make money and/or are huge problem areas (i.e., too much labor, time, etc. relative to psychic and financial return).  However, what if the part of the creative business we are talking about is profitable (psychically and financially), but just does not fit into the future you envision for your art and your creative business.  For instance, if you are heading to all things digital, maybe doing your own letterpress is not the best idea no matter how much you rely on it.  No one said saying goodbye was easy or even strictly rational.  But if you are to live the truth you choose, you must say goodbye no matter how hard.

The last example is the inspiration for this post:  saying goodbye to the wrong client.  Whether your (potential) client cannot afford you, does not “get” what your art is all about or is simply unwilling to respect how your creative business works, how you say goodbye is what defines you.  If you take on the wrong client for whatever reason (money, fear, etc.), you will pay much more than you receive.  On the other hand, if you tell your client to effectively jump in a lake, shame on you.  I was watching an episode of Million Dollar Decorators (such a guilty pleasure) and was horrified at the way one of the designers told a potential client she did not want to work with her.  She lied (said she was too busy), told her to go talk to other designers without referring any to her (so arrogant), and she did it all on national TV (how shaming for the client).  Oh, and the client had a million dollar budget.

Saying goodbye with grace, honesty and humility is what we all deserve as human beings and to strive to do anything less in your creative business is an opportunity lost.  Designers I have worked with, to a person, would have done their very best to help the client understand why the relationship would not have worked, tried to find her the relationship that would and been available if the first referral did not work.  For them, a client is a client as soon as they pick up the phone.  If you work very hard to say goodbye well, the next hello almost always will be terrifically sweet.

Disconnects

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I want to sell you a brand new, top-of-the-line Mercedes.  It will cost you fifty dollars.  Really.

Ridiculous?  Sure.  Except it is the conversation more creative business owners have with their (potential) clients than any of us would care to admit.  These are the instances when what you communicate does not match the value of what you provide.  It can be too much or too little.  Too much – your list of services and the description of your planning, photography, design, production, etc. overwhelms the cost.  Too little – the deliverable does not justify the price no matter how well it is described.  When I was an attorney, my firm charged two dollars a page for a fax – sent and received.  Making an outsized profit is a sure way to alienate clients.

Yes, disconnects create distrust between you and your client, employees, vendors, even colleagues.  And distrust is the seed of discontent.  However, what is more insidious about disconnects than the distrust they cause is the statement of ego they represent.  No one consciously creates a disconnect.  They exist because part of the business remains unexamined.  You, the creative business owner, actually believe the fiction you are telling yourself and refuse to acknowledge the mixed message you are sending out to the world.

Harsh words?  Of course.  The reason I use them: your fiction can affect all creative businesses.  If a photographer can give away digital files even though it takes hours to create them because she believes that that is what clients demand, then those who know better suffer for it.  Will there be opportunity for those artists willing to educate and act with integrity?  Yes – but moving against the proverbial tide is never easy and gets harder with each disconnect perpetuated in a given industry. There may be no one right answer, but there surely is a wrong one.  Every time a creative business establishes a precedent that makes no sense in its industry you hand power over to those (clients, vendors, colleagues) who will refuse to acknowledge the strength of the art behind the business.  It will become all about the money and the disconnect will only validate that you are just trying to rip them off anyway. So not a place any of us wants to be.

Does every artist and creative business owner have disconnects?  Yes.  We all live based on our own predispositions, values, teachings, morality and internal compass.  Over time, we can all come to see that our worldview was off, sometimes way off.  We can only learn and go forward with integrity and humility that, despite our best intentions, we were wrong.

What I am talking about here is when you are shown the other side and you choose to do nothing about it.  Today, you have to work hard to ignore the feedback and information coming your way about you, your art and your creative business.  Whether it is because it is how you have always done it, are scared to change, refuse to believe anything is wrong or are too deep in the mud to hear anyone or thing, it does not matter.  Your suffering will continue (and grow) the longer the disconnect stays around.  When you choose to know better, you will be better.  However, if you do know better and choose not to own your responsibility to rid the disconnects in your industry please do not complain when you, your art and your creative business becomes marginalized.  Value is created when the story we all tell reflects the ethos of the art behind it.  Disconnects undermine the ethos of a creative business’ art in their contradiction.  The biggest disconnect of all will be your belief that the disconnect others suffer from but you do not will not affect you.  You are wrong.  Best to do your part to stop the disconnects you see in yourself and other creative businesses in their tracks.

More On Transparency

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Creating art is irrational.  The inspiration, thoughts and experience in coming up with what you do, as artists, are immeasurable.  Sometimes it takes an hour, ten hours, ten days or ten minutes.  In addition, what you need financially in order to do what you do is also immeasurable as it is what YOU need to justify your commitment to the creative process.  For some, it is a thousand dollars, others a million.  If you ask why the difference, you will get an exercise in mental masturbation when the real answer is it is just what you need.  As hard as you try you cannot make the irrational rational.

But try creative business owners do, to their own undoing.  When you justify the cost of your art based on time – “this project will take me ten hours and I charge $100/hr.”; by markup –“we multiply our costs times three”; or by percentage – “we earn 30% on top of the cost to produce our design”, you inject an element of distrust into the process.  Why ten hours and not nine? Why three times not 2.75?  Why 30% not 25%?  The usual answer is that it is what you need to sustain your business and create art, except that makes no sense if others are willing work for 9 hours, at 2.75 mark up or 25%.   You are trying to profit from your art and simultaneously sustain your creative business.  They are not the same.

You profit from your art by receiving what you need to create the art in the first place.  You sustain your business by earning a proper return on the assets you employ (staff, technology, materials, office space, etc.) to produce that art.  The market controls what a proper return on your assets will be, you control what your profit needs to be.  A graphic designer might want to charge fifty thousand dollars for stationary, but I expect clients would never pay it if the same stationary were available for one thousand.  The same cannot be said for what the graphic designer would charge for what will go on the paper.  That number could very well be fifty thousand dollars.

The more you keep the irrational irrational, the easier it will be for you to be wholly transparent about what is rational about your business.  Transparency is not so much about revealing how you arrived at a rational price as being able to defend it.  In the space of rationality, you calculate your needed return to sustain the business and develop a pricing strategy accordingly.  If, however, you bring in what you need to feel good (i.e., the irrational), you lose.  On the other hand, if you do not apologize for what you need as an artist as a wholly separate matter (preferably first), then when you switch to the rational pricing of everything else there can be nothing but trust.

Of course, some creative businesses lend themselves more readily to compartmentalizing the irrational and rational – all designers for instance.  However, even those it might be more challenging – photographers and florists for example – where the art is the product – compartmentalizing is still possible.  The goal is to be able to say to your clients (in your own way), “this is what I need to create what I will for you” and then “this is what it will cost once I do.”  The irony is that the more you can live in the space of the unknown, indefinable with your client, the more you will have credibility when you do not.

Gay Marriage In New York

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On June 24, 2011, New York approved the right of gay couples to legally marry, joining five other States (and Washington, D.C.).  Couples will be able to marry starting July 25, 2011.

On a personal level, I am most gratified.  I wrote my law school thesis in 1992 on the injustice and inequality gay couples had to endure simply because they could not marry.  No matter the rights and privileges of civil unions, being excluded from the marriage club is discrimination no different from the miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage the United States Supreme Court struck down in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia.  Equal but separate is still separate.

I am sure there are those of you who believe that marriage is reserved for a man and a woman.  I absolutely respect your opinion and we can agree to disagree.  However, I do hope that you will respect the legal, equal right in New York now bestowed on gay couples.  And access is the heart of this post.

Much has been written about what it means to now have gay marriage in New York, including this really interesting Op-Ed piece by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.  What gay marriage ultimately resembles – conservative notions of monogamy and fidelity, openness or something in between is what it will be in our culture as will the transformation gay marriage may or may not bring to our notions of marriage – gay or not.  Lives transpire and evolve and we are all informed along the way.

Gay weddings, however, are the province of creative business.  What you as artists will or will not do to bring gay marriage into its own light is a responsibility not to be underestimated or ignored.  Yes, gay weddings will be good for business.  But this goes far beyond business and is a rare moment when great business can shape how we choose to live in society.  Art can expand another’s ability to see differently, to value beauty as the viewer may never have conceived it, to move someone past their own preconceptions, even to reconstitute a person’s own ideas of morality.

If we can all be stirred by Kate and William, then so too can we be stirred by Kate and Jane.  If, however, we are stirred without context, tradition and revelation, then we will be left only with us versus them no matter what the law says.  The goal has to be to have the tears of joy flowing, audible gasps and “what a great party” no matter who stands at the altar.  A task singularly assigned to creative business.  In doing so, you, your art and your creative business will have a hand in moving people beyond tolerance to actual acceptance and respect.  And, in that moment, you will set the stage for all that is possible.  My prayer is that you embrace the responsibility of this opportunity as much as you endeavor to make a profit from it.

A Different Vibration

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No matter how much a butterfly might want to go back to being a caterpillar, it cannot.  A butterfly cannot eat what a caterpillar does, live in the same place or consider being in a cocoon.  Simply, a butterfly has to live a different experience than a caterpillar.  The same holds true for you, your art and your creative business.

Change is incredibly hard.  The process of evolution is exquisitely painful not so much because of who and what the new you represents, but because you cannot live like the old you any longer.  The illusion (delusion?) is that you can always go back to the way you always did it.  Mark everything up instead of charging fees.  Take commissions again.  Move production back in house.  Take and deliver fewer images.  Deliver the disk regardless of whether you actually get to produce an image.  It won’t work.  Why?

You will be in no man’s land – you have changed your vibration and how you are perceived has also changed.  So if you are to backslide all you will do is create confusion – for clients, staff, vendors, colleagues, and you most of all.  And in the confusion will be distrust.  “I do not understand, I thought you only earned money on fees?”  “I thought your image was your art, so why are you just giving it to me now?”  These questions may not be posed directly to you, but they are in the air.  The “new” you will just be proverbial lipstick on a pig when it is anything but.  The irony is, so will the “old” you.  Once you take a stand, are willing to put you, your art and your creative business all the way out there, then you have to live there – warts, fear, glory and all.

Enough with the negative.  The beauty of evolving to a different vibration is all that can and will come to you when you do.  I have seen it enough times in my career to know that aligning your business and your art in your own unique process creates unforeseen and wildly different opportunities.  Preston Bailey designing an art installation in Hong Kong?  Sounds obvious now, but 10 years ago?  A photographer can sell an ottoman, an event designer a hand bag, a graphic designer sunglasses.  When you live at a different vibration, you attract different energies to you and your creative business.  Not altogether better or worse (although hopefully better), just different.

Trying to convince a client, partner, colleague or even yourself that you, your art and creative business should be, could be and will be a butterfly is an incredibly tough challenge when you are still a caterpillar.  However, when you are a butterfly and embrace not only the metamorphosis but live in the transformation, those that see possibilities available only to butterflies will surround you.  There may be those that would want the caterpillar you once were.  The challenge will be to know the difference.  However, the more you are a butterfly the less you will remember that you ever were a caterpillar.

Don’t Stay Lost Too Long

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Tis the season for most creative businesses.  Late Spring/Early Summer just seems to be the time when most creative businesses find themselves slammed with projects.  Maybe it is the turn of the weather or just the desire for clients to make things happen (or get married).  Trying to manage it all is more than a full-time job and thinking about anything beyond cranking out the work is a non-starter.  And herein lies the issue.

All those plans you were busy making when you and your creative business were slower fall away when you are back in the soup.  Most experts would say that you always have to be thinking about your strategic direction no matter the circumstance.  If you do not know why you are doing something, how can you really have a strategy?

I am not there.  I think you should have your head down at this moment, doing your best work, always dazzling and amazing your clients.  Forget about the big picture, focus on what is right in front of you.  Why?  The time for rehearsal, training and tinkering is over.  As with any performer, at a certain point instinct has to take over and you just have to dance, not with your head, but with your heart.  If you have not embodied your strategy yet, thinking about it while you are barely treading water is not going to help.  In fact, it will distract you from the work you need to be doing.  So go get lost in your art.

However. Make sure you give yourself an order to come back to strategy.  Do not start analyzing your projects with what went wrong.  Instead, focus on what went right.  Think about what your clients really valued about you, your art and your creative business.  And, no, you cannot say it was because you provided great service, were passionate or, heaven forbid, cheap.  If you have employees, please do not evaluate them based on the tasks you assigned them, but rather the enthusiasm and talent for the role you placed them in.  To make sure you come back from busy neverland, set a date on the calendar on which you (yes, you – not your staff) will deliver a written analysis of how your execution matched the strategy you set out for yourself.  For example, if you decided you wanted to be in the high-end market, even if you are doing work for lower-end clients, what is it about THAT work that would interest higher-end clients.  No designer (event, graphic or interior), photographer, florist, etc. started out at the top.  They all honed what they did to make their work attractive to those at the higher end of the market.

The risk of getting lost in busy neverland is that you will start to confuse it with actual strategy.  If your primary focus is to work on improving what went wrong, you will always be looking in the rear-view mirror.  Then your goal will be to get to the next busy season hoping that you will be able to do better once you are there.  In the meantime, you will miss out on the opportunity to figure out how to extend your relationship with your clients (existing and new).  Just because you are a florist, does not mean your clients will not buy your sunglasses.

Artists that do not believe their art transcends its medium are those who refuse to leave busy neverland.  My hope is that these artists will come to realize that busy neverland is a nice place to visit, not so much to live.

Dare To Be An Icon

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I have just returned from Engage! 11: Grand Del Mar, a semi-annual conference where the best of the best in the wedding industry gather to listen to trends, learn from each other, commune and combust with ideas.  Some of my favorite thoughts from the conference are Simon Bailey’s concept of Vuja De – see the future and create it for yourself.  Todd Fiscus’ glorious idea to lead your clients to success is an elegantly simple expression of what all creative businesses have to aspire to.  What Todd has created to make his “leading” happen is not too shabby either – take as an example the 77 point budget analysis he provides his clients to show just what they will be spending their money on.  Cindy Novotny spoke of focus, having the courage to know who you are, what you want, what you offer and to never stop until everyone you care about (friends, family, clients and colleagues) knows it.  And my favorite was the singular Marcy Blum telling everyone to look beyond the world you inhabit every day to enrich your world.  It is nice to see what your peers have done, but true inspiration is never derivative.

What I became more and more convinced of is that if you are unwilling to be an icon – to do things your way, without apology — you are going to get run over.  It actually does not matter what “it” is so long as it is your “it”.  The price of looking like a prettier version of everyone else is now too steep, no matter how good your art.  In a chorus, you can have the biggest, strongest voice, but unless you are out front getting the chance to show off that voice who can really hear you?  Does not mean you have to be Beyonce or Lady Gaga, just firmly away from the sea of sameness.

So how do you get away from the sea of sameness? Do things your way?  Start by listening to what works for others who have found success in creative business by being an icon.  If you have the time and wherewithal, go spend a day with Vicente Wolf.  Even if you are not an interior designer (and almost better if you are not), learning how Vicente approaches his art and his business is beyond valuable.  To give you a flavor of what I am talking about, here is a guest post I did for Vicente while he was on his annual trip.  Yes, Vicente travels the globe for at least six weeks (most years,eight) at the end of every year and he does not exactly live in a tenement so he can afford it.  Or you can buy Preston Bailey’s course and hear how he does things.  Insight into how Preston can imagine the environments he does and how he has put himself in a position to play only on a grand stage is nothing but inspiring.   Preston and his creative business live his truth every day.

If Preston and Vicente are just too too (expensive, intimidating, removed from you – you pick), check out the great material, including my workshop on the 4P’s, that Howard Givner has created for his newly-minted Event Leadership Institute.  As part of his ELI initiative, Howard has put together a series of talks to assist event professionals.  He is kicking it off this Tuesday, June 7th, with a talk by Sasha Souza in New York City.  Howard has written well about Sasha’s non-event questionnaire on his blog and hearing about the questionnaire is reason enough to go.  However, for me, the most important part of a creative business owner listening to Sasha (and, like Vicente, even better if you are not in the event business) is not so much the questionnaire, but what she does with it.  Having spoken to Sasha, I know that the questionnaire kicks off her process of event design and production and it forces her clients to make decisions in a way very much similar to any architect or interior designer.  Fascinating.  Sasha’s questionnaire establishes the foundation of how she will make her clients work – a concept I think every creative business has to embrace if they are to be iconic.

It matters not what you think of Vicente, Preston or Sasha.  They may or may not be your cup of tea – personally, professionally or even creatively.  What they share, alongside countless other successful creative professionals – Todd, Marcy, Cindy and Simon among them – is the desire and unflinching determination to be an icon – to do it their way.  For that reason, and that reason alone, you should pay attention.  And yet.  Once you have saturated yourself the various ways icons have developed their processes, put all of your notes, thoughts, materials, etc. in bin and burn them (hopefully, outside).  Take a page from Marcy and remember that true inspiration is never derivative.  If you have the Vicente Wolf, Preston Bailey, Sasha Souza or even Sean Low playbook in front of you, you may very well be tempted to say that that is the way.  Welcome to the chorus.  Better to clear your mind, embody all that you have learned and then walk an entirely new path that only you can.

Choices

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Everything we do is a choice.  Whether we act or not, play the victim or the martyr, underwhelm or overwhelm, accept or reject, feel or ignore, we choose.  Nothing is forced upon us.  Circumstance may grace us or befall us, sure, but how we receive the circumstance is up to us.  None of us are Buddha or Gandhi and the temptation to give in to the other is always present. “It’s the economy.”  “I have to feed my family/pay my employees/keep the lights on.”  “I’m just too busy.”  “It’s not my fault/my problem.” “We have always done it this way.” “My competitors are all doing it, so I have to.”

Seth Godin wrote a post recently about the difference between working long and working hard.  Working long is slaving away at the tasks in front of you.  Get more done.  Move a bigger pile from one side to the other.  Stay at it ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day.  Working hard is pushing yourself to perpetually question everything, always in the pursuit of what matters most to you, your art and your creative business.  Hard work is moving past the resistance the “other” offers and owning the choices you make.  Who are your clients and why?  Who are not your clients?  Can they tell the difference?  And what do you do about it when they cannot?

You may have a style that makes it obvious who your clients are.  For instance, if you are the king of chintz, likely is a minimalist will not be interested in your interiors.  Not enough.  If you cannot defend why you do things the way you do, other than “that’s industry standard” or, my favorite, “that is just what it costs”, why should your right client trust you?  What are they really buying?  You and your art might be so good a client will overlook your unwillingness to own why you do what you do.  More likely, they will tell you you are too expensive.  You will shake your head and blame the [you fill in the blank – economy, competition, employees, even the client].  Magically, your solution will be to offer a “more accessible” package.  You have convinced yourself it is all about money, when it is anything but.  Money is not real and, for creative businesses, evaluations based on price are a function of distrust rather than expense.  The hard work would be  to say I do it this way because and mean it.  Choices.

The irony is is that if I told a creative business owner to defend her artistic choices, she would do so to her dying breath.  Why she chose the color, layout, structure, elements, etc.  My guess is that her answer would not be, “Well that is just the way I was taught”.  Of course, training is a crucial element of any craft, but it is only to provide the tools to make better art, not define it.  Information is supposed to enable growth, not limit it.  The amount of information available to creative business owners to help them run their businesses is mind-boggling.  You can and should avail yourself to a very healthy dose.  If you do not know the difference between a capital and operating expense, operational and net profit margin, you do so at your own peril.  However, to think that someone else has a better answer for how to run your creative business than you do is the same as someone telling you they know how to do your art better than you do.  Not possible.

So what if you fail?  Just as your design might go splat, your business model might too.  Whether you choose to do the hard work and really understand the splat so that you can give yourself the chance to make another splat is up to you.  Please remember though that giving yourself an excuse to not choose or to act on the excuse is still your choice.

The Art of Negotiation

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For some, negotiation is torture.  It all feels like haggling and you are just exhausted by the experience.  All too often these creative business owners give away too much, negotiate against themselves and become more and more resentful of the whole process.  Then there are others who live for the deal.  Negotiation may very well be cultural, literally in the creative business owner’s DNA.  For these artists, negotiation is fun, a game to be won and is really never personal.  The presumption would be that those who love negotiating make for better business people than those that abhor it.  Bad assumption.

Those who love to negotiate for negotiations sake can sometimes miss the bigger picture.  Sometimes the better deal is to consciously NOT get as much as you can.  Conversely, those artists that loathe negotiating may create a pricing structure that is so transparent and simple that there is literally nothing to negotiate.  No packages here.

Regardless of your feelings on negotiation, you need to understand that it is a conversation, first with yourself, then with your client and then in the context of your overall business strategy.  Make no mistake though, it is never about price.  You will have lost far before the words “why are you charging me $x for this” ever comes out of your client’s mouth.  You are not selling widgets (or IPads).  A rose might be just another rose and cost $2.99, but how you put the rose with other roses is what your clients pay for.

Talking To Yourself – Why do you do what you do?  What is important for you – Recognition? Money? The chance to do the work you want?  Where is your center – where you feel happiest, proud of what it is you are doing and delivering both as an artist and creative business owner?  If you cannot figure out what you really need from your art and your creative business, you will be distracted by something other.  Yes, we all need to make a living and support our families.  But to what level and what purpose?  You must know that what it is that you are trying to achieve with your art and your creative business is the place you need to come from before you ever start a negotiation.

Listening To Your Client – What does your client really want from you and your creative business?  And how do you deliver that value?  Better question is how much time you spend trying to figure out how to identify, price and deliver that value?  The more transparent you are about what it is you deliver and how much it costs for you to deliver your art, the more you will gain your client’s trust.  If you have talked to yourself first, you know that not every client is your client.  The right client will trust you and believe in whatever business model you adopt so long as it is an intrinsic reflection of all that you stand for.  The wrong one never will.  If you listen, really listen, you will be able to tell the difference. Immediately.  For the wrong client, please do not let the door hit you on the behind as you leave.

The Bigger Picture – No deal is ever about itself in isolation.  Everything you do has to be in context of the overall strategy you have for your creative business.  Want to be in the upper-end of your market?  Do you get cheaper the bigger the project?  If your goal is to take the proverbial money and run, you will think it is insane to make less than you could.  However, if you want A LOT of this work, it might make A LOT of sense to have a model that has a cap on it and a minimum.  For instance, you can have a minimum fee of $x and a maximum fee of $y that will make you VERY expensive for a particular project, okay for some projects and very compelling for the larger projects.  And I am not for a second saying that you compromise yourself or your creative business, but simply honor your own integrity – make the money you need to, in the market you most enjoy and deliver incredible, compelling value to that market.  It is all a question of what you want for your art and your creative business.

Nothing you do exists in a vacuum and whether a deal is good or bad is only a function of why you are making it in the first place.  Mindfulness and perspective is a far better negotiation strategy than trying to figure out how to charge as much as you can or do the same thing for less.

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