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Look Underneath

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No creative business is immune to the shadow of its owners.  You might think yourself fair-minded, kind, even gracious to clients, employees and vendors alike, but underneath, as shameful as it is to admit, there are likely some less than savory motivation behind why you do what you do.  Perhaps, there is an element of entitlement to take what is yours, an expectation of a little diva treatment or a sly enjoyment of “getting over”.  Dirty little secrets seldom admitted and very real.  This is the underbelly none of us wants to pay attention to and from which is borne undisclosed commissions, kickbacks, price gouging, even outright fraud.  It is also the place from which we throw, knowingly or not, our clients, employees and vendors under the proverbial bus.

I am certainly no angel and have been guilty of all I write about.  It sucks to have to admit that my motivations are less than honorable despite my desperate attempts to hold on to the “good” reason for doing what I did (and I am sure will do).  Humiliation and authentic shame is a horrific experience.  However, learning to forgive myself (over and over again) is just so freeing, accepting my humanity even more so.  We can all do better and we are all works in progress.

The problem with not looking at the underbelly is that it perpetuates a mistaken belief that you are not an actor in your own drama.  For example, you believe yourself to be fair, value-driven and completely client oriented, yet your business is predicated on mark-ups you do not share with your clients.  You argue to yourself, “I do not have to tell my clients what I make.  If I can mark-up so and so five times instead of three, then I should.  If the client is willing, even happy, to pay the price, who am I to argue?”  Or if you provide a service, your rate is whatever you think you can get.  Hey, if the client does not argue, why not?  Like it or not, you have a business that is about getting over.  So is it any wonder why clients negotiate your prices?  Make you defend what you make?  Force you to compromise yourself into a situation that belies your and your creative business’ essence?

It is on you to look at yourself and make your creative business in your own image.  If you cannot look a client straight in the face and describe how it is you make your money, then you deserve their distrust.

Employees and vendors too are a reflection of your shadow.  You should demand excellence and hope they exceed the highest bar you set.  However, if you are unwilling to stand up for a vendor when it counts – in the face of a client unwilling to pay their fees, terrible treatment, etc. – what does it say about you?  Same goes for those of you with employees.  How deeply invested are you in their failure?  Do you give them all the tools they need to succeed?  Time, information from you, resources?  You may be frustrated by an employee’s inconsistency, desire to support you, even incompetency, but if you do not own your role, then you can only hope to fix the symptom not the disease.

If the underbelly of your creative business belies fundamental truths you believe in, it is just a matter of time before you implode.  Better to ask yourself what it is you most believe in.  Look for where you and your creative business are not walking that walk.  Then change it.

What Is Going Right?

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This is the time of year that most creative businesses are starting to get busy.  Vicente Wolf famously travels the world each year from December to February because nothing really starts to move in the interior design world until March.  Same with those in or supporting the event business.  Sure, there are exceptions, but, for the most part creative business is seasonal and focused heavily in the Spring, early Summer and Fall.

The natural instinct as you go through your first wave of projects is to “debrief” and focus on what went wrong.  You feel good about addressing the issues – client and internal (mis)communications, vendor problems, delivery, etc.  You make sure you will not make the same mistakes again.  And maybe you will not.  Except you will have made a series of long-term decisions based on a short-term issues/crises.  The result: you will “fix the problem”, but there will be others the next time.  Fix those and there will be others the time after that.  You will probably wind up feeling like you are constantly playing a giant game of Whac-A-Mole.

Instead, why not focus on what is going right?  Make a list of 10 things you and your team did well and 2 things where you screwed the proverbial pooch.  Then review the list of 10 right things first.  Indulge the positive – praise yourself and your team.  That is just good energy.  But then ask what you can do to accentuate what went right.  For instance, if the success of the project was due to your or a member of your staff’s crazy organization skills, what can you do to support those efforts and pare away those responsibilities that do not.  Is it important that this person writes proposals or can she take over once everything is set?  How can you make that a reality for the business?

No matter what, write it down.  You will be able to see with your own eyes what can make you better.  Use the moment to inform how to make your process better.  Then you can strike while the iron is cool to strengthen your strengths.  That could be a week after the project is complete, a month or even three months.  What you will find is that as you embrace and encourage your strengths, they will overwhelm and likely remedy your weaknesses.  Moreover, acknowledging and feeding all you do well can only serve to highlight what it is you most stand for.  And, after all, that is what your clients pay for above all.

As for the screw-ups on the list, don’t ignore them.  They will not go away.  Just put them behind what went right and then ask yourself the question – if we support “x” that went right, what happens to the screw up?  For example, if you are a florist and you were late with your delivery, do you increase staff to make sure it will not happen again or do you focus on finalizing the incredible design earlier?  Focusing on fixing the problem draws resources to production when the client loved design above all else.  Supporting design allows better information to flow to production, giving them a better chance to get it right.  What if delivery was fine, but the look was not great.  Client loves the little details.  Fix design or let production take over earlier?

Some problems need to be addressed and fixed no doubt.  But they are few and far between.  More often than not, the answer is in what is going right.

Value Does Not Equal Cheap

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Last Sunday, I spoke on the 4P’s at Event Solution’s Idea Factory Conference in Las Vegas.  The room was filled with amazing event professionals of all kinds – caterers, planners, florists, designers, lighting companies and musicians.  While I was talking about Process, a lovely woman raised her hand and we had a conversation that went roughly like this:
“How can this work when I have to send out a proposal of what everything will cost right after I meet a potential client?  Are you saying do not send a proposal until after the client decides to work with you?”

I asked, “Are you providing a service or delivering a product?”  She said, “Product” (she was a designer).

“No proposal until you are hired then.”

“How can I do that when all of my competitors are doing it? How will my client be able to compare what I am offering to my competition?”

“Why would you want them to?  If you are in the social market, for the most part, you have an un-educated client.  Just how many weddings has a bride organized?  So how can you expect her to be able to truly compare what you offer to your competitors? And you are not in business to provide $300 worth of goods and services for $299.  You are in business to provide the most value for $300.  Oh, and how can you say what your art will cost when you have not made it up yet?  The 4P’s dictate value, not price.”

I do not know if I was fully successful in persuading the audience that sending a proposal first thing if your creative business provides products is usually a very bad idea, even though I did make some headway.  So I thought I would try to seal the deal here.

First, a distinction.  There is a huge difference between selling creativity and selling creative products.  I am talking here about selling creative products.  The price of selling creativity alone is whatever you need to make it up.  If you are a graphic designer, how much money do you need to be able to devote your time and energy to creating a logo and brand identity for a client?  A photographer, how much for you to shoot an event?  You are artists looking to be commissioned.  So when a potential client asks you for a price, you can certainly provide it as soon as you know what the scope of the project is.  You are getting paid to make it up.  Not to say that these creative businesses do not fall into the trap of making the subjective objective, it is just that it is easier for them not to.

If you get paid to deliver products – flowers, lighting, custom cabinets, food, etc. – sending a proposal before you actually design the product undercuts your credibility.  How can you know what it costs to make if you have not designed it yet?  The only way you can with real certainty is if you have made it before.  Problem — your client is paying for a custom design.  Sure, you might be able to come close based on experience, but is that the message you want to send – close is good enough?

Which, of course, leads to whether you believe your value is your art or your price.  If you believe the latter, unless you are Wal-Mart, good luck to you, you are in a race to the bottom.  For those of you who know (or want to know) that the value is in your art, then you will never say to a client that you will create more for less.  You create the best art you can for the money they have to spend.  So rather than sending a line item proposal with prices that are guesses, why not send some preliminary thoughts of what you think you can do for the budget they gave you?  Just a glimpse to let them know you heard them and provide a window into the direction you would like to head.  If they would like to see more, they need to hire you and pay you to fully design and produce what it is they want.

The last concept is probably the hardest and most controversial – talking to uneducated clients.  Those of you who deal largely in the corporate market have the benefit of having clients who know exactly what you are offering.  However, creative businesses focusing on the social market have clients, for the most part, that have little or no experience with what you offer.  And yet you ask them to understand and evaluate what you offer as if they did.  For instance, I have seen a florist send a line item for a beautiful plinth.  Even if the client knew what a plinth was, my guess is she would not know what it should cost.  So what happens is that comparisons become self inflicted.  Your client might come back and say that your competitors will do the plinth for $3 less than you.  Now you are negotiating price with someone who you have not educated as to the value of YOUR plinth or even what a plinth is for that matter.

In the end, uneducated clients will do their best to reduce your art to price.  They really have no other choice as it is the only way they can rationalize their spending decision.  Your job is to understand that your value is, by definition, irrational.  Trying to make it rational is like trying to explain how you create what you do.  You cannot and you should not apologize for it by putting your proposal before your art.

Your Shadow

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From 1995 to 1997, I worked on Wall Street as an investment banker structuring asset back securities (i.e., bonds) mostly ones made up of subprime mortgages.  It was the very beginning of what would mushroom (severe understatement) into the housing bubble and the financial meltdown of 2008.  Although it is far too technical (and boring) to talk about what I worked on, let’s just say that I helped create and sell one of the first re-securitizations of subprime mortgages.  You put the loans together to make one bond, then put some of the bonds from different offerings together to make another bond.  The bonds in the second offering being made up of the bottom (i.e., not so good) pieces of the good bonds, all put together in a way to make them good bonds.  The concept got taken sooo much further with CDO’s, credit default swaps, etc., but the underlying premise is the same – package bad (i.e., junkier bonds) together to make good ones.  Yes, sell the same thing twice.  And we all know how that ended.

So when I watch films like The Inside Job (absolutely amazing) and read articles like this one in the New York Times by Joe Nocera, I feel like I have an insider’s view.  When I was on Wall Street, I actually believed what I was doing was of service to investors, finance companies and ultimately to borrowers.  How could better access to credit for a consumer to buy a home/consolidate debt be a bad thing?  This was before I experienced my own pain of borrowing what I could not pay back, suffering the shame (and personal stigma) of bankruptcy.  Leverage is indeed a cruel mistress.  You need only ask those in financial ruin who had no business owning the homes they did.

My lesson is this: euphoria, greed, depression, despair, ego are never places from which you should make a decision.  No one will be prosecuted for the financial cataclysm of 2007-2008 because we all had a hand in it.  Everyone is at fault and, as Joe Nocera wrote “delusion is a great defense”.  I do not mean for an instant to say that many should not be prosecuted.  They should.  The size and extent of their greed, absolute conflicts of interest and outright fraud is unparalleled.  However, stigma runs deep and when we all have our hand in the proverbial cookie jar, it is very hard to not only punish all the hands but also to say which hand deserves the biggest slap.

So what does this have to do with creative business?  Everything.

Circumstance dictates your situation, but does not define it.  What you believe today may be exposed as foolish (or highly suspect) tomorrow.  When you are shown the way to know better, you need to listen and question your (long) held beliefs.  You might be able to walk away when it all crumbles, but not without a steep price, to your soul if not your pocketbook.  If leverage is a cruel mistress, ego for a creative business owner is the ultimate dysfunctional relationship.  You are in the precarious position of having to create art every day, simultaneously serving your own vision and that of your clients.  Your ego must be allowed to express itself and, at the same time, understand it is not all about you.  Just when you think you are being selfless, humble, a person of integrity and faith, your ego will test you.

The financial crisis shows just how far we/you can go down the rabbit hole.  When you believe (or talk yourself into believing) that there is one motive behind all that you do, you are deluded.  And in that delusion you rob yourself of any possibility of clarity in the moment.  Better to strive to accept your own humanity and your shadow – the good and not-so-good motives behind all that you do – if only that you can listen when you are not where you should be.

Blogging

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I read hundreds of blogs each week.  I have my favorites in business, design, entertainment and personal musings.  These blogs are an endless source of information and stimulation for me.  However, I do also have to keep up with what creative business owners are writing about, well, because it is my job.  To be honest, these blogs, for the most part, bore me to tears.  They should really be called let me show you the work I just finished over (and over) again.  Or let me tell you what I love about so and so without any context.  It might be just so cute to you, me not so much.  To be clear, I am talking about blogs that are an adjunct to a creative business, not THE business of the blogger.

My expertise is not in marketing.  I do not know what it takes to get eyeballs to your site/blog and what is most engaging for potential clients.  I look at a creative business from the inside out and my work is to make the business underneath your vision as supportive (and exciting) as possible to that vision.  So when I read a creative business’ blog, I am looking to see how it establishes your soul as an artist and that of your art.  What do you; your art and your creative business stand for.  From there, the creative business can build.  When all I see are examples of your work without context from you, I am left with only do I like it or not.  My assumption is that you are not the only one working in your style and that, if it is your business, you are good at what you do.  Into the sea of sameness we go.  Once in the sea of sameness, it is hard (i.e., impossible) for the business to be iconic.  You are almost forced into doing things the same way everyone else does.  And from there it becomes all about money not creation.  Not a place you want to be.

With this in mind, take a look at Jeff Ascough’s Image Of The Week series and compare it to his older posts on recent weddings he shot.  Even though Jeff carefully edits his wedding images, these posts do not compare to the Image Of The Week series.  My vote is that he loses the “here’s my last wedding posts” (or most of them) and stick with the Image Of The Week.

After reading each IOTW entry I know Jeff is deeply passionate about the work he does (photographing weddings), how he does it (being as unobtrusive as possible, framing his image and waiting for the perfect shot) and what his aim is (to capture the decisive moment).  His artistry, technique and experience are self-evident.  Each post is eminently readable and a fascinating look into how Jeff creates his art.  And it does not hurt that he is just that good, with the resume to back it up.  In terms of his creative business though, Jeff’s IOTW series sets up everything.

I do not know Jeff and have no idea how his business works, nor would potential clients since there is no information on his services on his site (and there does not need to be).  However, I and potential clients reading his IOTW series can assume he does not give clients thousands (or even hundreds) of images to choose from.  Each image will be of significance to him, carefully and consciously chosen and presented.  Albums, maybe even large prints, are a must and need to be of a quality befitting his work.  And whatever Jeff thinks is necessary for him to do his work – assistants, time on site, access, etc. are not negotiable.

Jeff’s IOTW series reveals his soul as an artist and potential clients that want what Jeff has to give will have to work with him his way.  My guess is that all of Jeff’s clients do so willingly and gladly.  Yours will too.

Make Your Clients Work

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Make your clients work.  Sounds antithetical to great service doesn’t it?  And in some cases it is – having your clients have to go back to your home page in order to get to another section of your site is a pain, incredibly frustrating and a good way to make your clients give up.  Same if you make them chase you to find out the status of how things are going.  However, if you can educate your clients to the value of your process – why you do things the way you do, then the more you make your clients adhere to your process (i.e., work), the better their experience will be with you.

In 1999, a partner and I started a business called Red Wine With Fish?.  We delivered price-fixed three course dinners primarily to the bankers, lawyers, accountants and other professionals who pretty much ate dinner at the office every night.  Having been a banker and a lawyer, I knew that options were limited and wholly unsatisfying, despite having the firm’s money to spend for a meal.  Moreover, the experience for the poor junior employee responsible for ordering was horrific. They have to take everyone’s order, aggregate them and then be responsible for the whole order showing up. Inevitably, the restaurant forgot something and then it was the junior employee’s problem to fix it.  Imagine working 12 hours, having to spend at least 45 minutes ordering, another 30 minutes fixing the problem and only then being able to go back to work.  Not fun.  So we developed our business around these junior staffers.  We took each person’s order individually and packed each order separately with the order on the outside of the bag.  If Bob got a salad, tuna entrée and a Coke, then Bob got a bag labeled with his order.  If there was a mistake, it was our fault, not the junior staffers.  And we were very good at fixing mistakes.

The only problem was the junior staffers hated us the first time they called.  They had just spent 45 minutes aggregating everyone’s order and most times didn’t know who wanted what individually.  We made them undo all that they had done.  We also made them give us all of their information – firm, address, telephone number, email and credit card information to make it easier the next time (no other restaurant did that at the time, remember we are talking 1999).  But that meant more time on the phone.  Some early customers would just give up mid way through.  After much tweaking and training of our staff, we were able to convince the junior staffers of the value of doing things the way we did.  All we were hoping for was the second order from the junior staffer, because then the value would hit him or her over the head.  On the second call, we turned a 45 minute process into less than 5 minutes, taking margin of error and blame from nearly 100% to almost zero.  Very happy junior staffer.  Given the choice, we expected these junior staffers would want to order with us multiple times per week.  And they did, on average 3 times per week – usually for at least 5 people.  It did not take them long to create an order form that they sent around to make their life even easier. I made a million other mistakes (read every one under the Sun) that ultimately cratered the business, but I am very proud of the process we created to teach value to our customers and ask them to do work our competitors did not.

For creative businesses, I see all the time the desire to provide great service to customers.  Nice idea, except it usually means catering to their every whim and offering them only the illusion of value.  A whole lot more focus on the “what can we do for you” than “here is what we will do for you”.  For instance, if your creative business provides a tangible product, the more time and certainty you have to deliver the product the more value you can deliver.  A florist that knows what it is going to do definitively six months from now can lock in wholesale pricing and set aside inventory, where a florist who does not know until just a few days before cannot.  So telling your client that, if she wants your best, she will have to approve your design six months ahead of time is just good business.  And yet you do not for fear of alienating her.  When she changes her mind, you let her and do not change the price.  You never really asked her to decide in the first place so you do what you can to “make it work”.  Yet, as much as we would want economics and math to not be rational, they are, and you pay more and make less.  Your client never understands the value of certainty since you never asked her for it. The end result is that you do the best you can (and lose a lot of money along the way) instead of your absolute best.  Your accommodation provides only the illusion of value — more a disservice than service.

Loyalty and value is not created because you are willing to be a doormat, it is created when you are convicted enough to believe your way is a better way and can prove it to your clients.  Make your clients work hard for your creative business to receive your very best and they will respect you more, not less.

Know The Business You Are In

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How many of you would describe yourself as being in a particular creative business?  Graphic designer?  Florist? Photographer? Caterer?  All of you I presume.  Now how many of you would subcategorize yourself – Commercial Interior Designer?  Wedding Photographer?  Invitationer?  Still probably most of you.  Now how many would subcategorize the subcategory (just had to say it)?  Wedding Photographer who only works in ballrooms?  Caterer who only works in tents?  Interior Designer who only works on fine dining concepts with 250+ seats?  Not many.

Red Lobster and Le Bernadin are both seafood restaurants.  Anthony Bourdain wrote about Justo Thomas in his new book, Medium Raw (awesome book btw).  Justo’s job is to cut fish (700 to 1000 pounds of it) each day for Le Bernadin.  It takes him five hours and he is treated like a God at the restaurant.  When he is not there it takes three people seven hours to do what he does.  Cutting fish to Le Bernadin’s standards is that hard.  I suspect Red Lobster does not have a whole lot of Justo’s working for it.  Then again, you do not pay for Justo’s craftsmanship (not to mention Eric Ripert’s brilliance) at Red Lobster.  And yet when I look around at creative businesses and their underlying structure – I see a sea of sameness regardless of whether they are closer to Red Lobster or Le Bernadin.  Usually, there is not even a hint of understanding that Red Lobster and Le Bernadin, even though they are both seafood restaurants, are in entirely different businesses.  Scale, margin and volume are all that matter to Red Lobster.  Precision, quality and creativity is the lifeblood of Le Bernadin.  That is why you pay $9.99 for lobster at Red Lobster and $75.00 at Le Bernadin.

For those of you who think the Red Lobster/Le Bernadin example does not apply to you, ask yourself how you price a $15,000 project vs. a $150,000 one?  If you provide products (flowers, food, invitations, lighting), my guess is you “mark-up” your costs by the same (or very close) percentage – most times 100% so you can get to 50% gross margin.  Or if you provide services, the same flat fee and/or percentage.  Then you wonder where all the money went.  Simple – you were in two businesses at the same time, doing ok in one area and getting crushed in another.  Then when the economy slowed you did more business in the area you were getting crushed in to begin with.  Voila – no more money.

Specific example, if you are florist specializing in events (i.e., no retail) from $5,000 to $50,000, you probably experienced (and are experiencing) growth in the $5,000 to $10,000 business and slowing in the $30,000+ business.  You price at three times your cost of flowers and hope to make 50% before overhead.  The problem is your mistakes are actual regardless of the size of event, where profit is a percentage.  So if you make a $1,000 mistake on a $5,000 job you just lost 40% of your profit.  The same mistake on a $50,000 job cost you 4% of your profit.  Still think you should price the smaller jobs at 3 times the cost of flowers?  Better said, are you willing to risk 40% of what you can ever hope to make on a simple mistake?  Even more, what is the difference in the amount of work between the $5,000 and $50,000.  My guess is it is not ten times more.  So if you feel like you are just doing ok on the $50,000 jobs, imagine how much you are losing on the $5,000 ones?  And now you are doing far more of those than the $50,000.

Yes, markets and pricing have adjusted because of the recession. But you cannot look at every piece of business in the same way.  If you do, you will send yourself down a road you did not know you were on.  The road will erode the further you drive.  Before you drive yourself off a cliff, better to stop and ask yourself what business you are actually in and then act accordingly.  My guess is that you will not be able to turn around fast enough.

Pacing

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Isaac Asimov wrote and published hundreds of books.  J.D. Salinger six.  Woody Allen makes a movie every year.  Terrence Malick took a twenty year break between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line.  Who is more important?  Why?  No comment on who is qualitatively better.  My assumption is that these are all amazing, iconic artists whose work matters.  My comment is on those that would use quantity of fantastic work as a measure of validation.  Translation: for those of you blog every day with tremendous insight, tweet all the time, update your Facebook status regularly, go to “networking” events several times per week and still manage to provide terrific service to your clients (potential and actual), you are no better than those that do none of these things save for producing fantastic work and providing a wonderful experience for their clients (potential and actual).

I am all for doing whatever it takes to help your creative business succeed, so long as it is true to all that you are.  My children have become huge fans of the old Jetsons and Scooby-Doo (I mean, who isn’t? and, yes, I know I let them watch too much TV).  When I watch with them, I notice immediately how much slower the pacing is, how much longer it takes for the story to unfold and how specific the underlying plot formula is compared to today’s shows for young children (i.e., anything on NickJr).  I try to imagine how viewers of those generations would perceive today’s media.  I suspect they would be completely overwhelmed and just want things to slow down so they can savor the story.  And sometimes I feel like there are those creative business owners that belong in earlier generations (no matter their actual age), yet feel like they have to produce at today’s pace.  So they go about doing all of the work to keep up and maybe even do it all well.  But the personal price is huge.

Just because the idea is a good one, does not mean it is right for you.  I went over a business idea with one of my clients and her answer was, “great idea and I can see how it will help me grow my business and my brand, but it is just not for me. I would rather focus on design than managing people.”  It is why she is one of my favorite clients. She is not afraid of letting a good, even great idea go if it will cost her the opportunity to focus on what she loves most.  Let someone else have it, she will just do what she does.

Everything you do has a price – to you, your family, even to those you do not serve.  If you are willing to sacrifice everything for your creative business, you need to do so consciously and only after giving yourself time, real time not just lip service, to determine that it is the path you wish to take.  A day job with design on the side is as admirable as making it your livelihood, provided you believe in what you do during the day.  We are all multi-faceted.

The message is everywhere – make it happen, do whatever it takes, be unreasonable.  But much less often do we hear, “will this work for you?”  Short term sacrifices are always necessary.  They are a fact of life.  We all have to do what we have to do, even what we may not love.  Long term though, we have to do what we love in the context of all that we love.  The fluidity of great work has to be relative to life stage and what is right for only us.  The point is to do great work at our own pace.  You will not be left behind.

Be Who You Are

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Is the work you do for your clients yours or theirs?  Not legally, but artistically?  More and more I hear from creative business owners that what they do is make happen a client’s vision.  These owners go on to say that what they do is not about them; it is about their clients.  If a client wants Pepto-Bismol Pink on their walls, then that is what they get.  Hot dogs and Manischewitz for their cocktail hour and “At Last” for their wedding song.  Not a problem.  They are paying after all and who are you to say that theirs might not be the best idea.  Moreover, they say it is just so arrogant to say that it is as much about you as it is about them.  And they are not arrogant, they are there to serve and provide great service.

To which I say, yes, your clients have ideas about what they want, but this is your art, not theirs.  Your job is to understand their vision and interpret in a way that explodes their idea in a way they could never have dreamed of.  When you surprise and delight your clients with YOUR vision, you are entitled to own that vision (i.e., take credit for it, scream it to the world).  To do otherwise belies the essence of you, your art and your creative business.

If you are unwilling to own your art, then you are a functionary.  Functionaries get paid an objective market rate, artists a subjective premium.  And as the market floods with functionaries, what do you think is going to happen to market rates?  Sending the message to your potential clients that it is all about them places you squarely in the role of functionary.  From there it is almost impossible to either extract a premium for your services or avoid a price negotiation.  The result will be that you will have to create “packages” (again, that word) which will try to shoe-horn bundled value rather than focus on the art itself.

An example: if you are a photographer and you only release hi-res images on disc if your clients buy enough prints, then you have just made your whole business about negotiation.  How many prints?  Why that number and not half that number?  Why any prints at all if you are ultimately willing to let go of how YOUR image is going to be reproduced?

Most creative business owners are not very good negotiators.  You care too much about wanting your clients to be happy and love your work relative to price. Yet, in my example above, you have just made it all about the money.  Better to make it all about the art and never apologize for what it takes for you to create it.  Integrity is having the grace of confidence born from years of experience honing God-given talent, not false humility to say it is not about you.

The Tiger Mother

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Amy Chua has certainly stirred the pot with her new memoir, “Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother” as excerpted by the Wall Street Journal last week.  For those who have not heard about the book, basically it is Ms. Chua’s description of what it means to be a Chinese mother.  To Ms. Chua, a Chinese mother demands perfection – at school, on the piano, whatever a child undertakes.  There is no room for playdates, sleepovers, parts in the school play.  Unwillingness to achieve perfection might result in burned toys.  Failure demands immediate work to correct the failure.  Ms. Chua cites the time when one of her girls came second in a math competition and she made her daughter go home and do 2,000 math problems so it would not happen again.

As a parent, I have no comment on what works (or does not) with any parenting style.  Ms. Chua’s girls seem well adjusted and, the oldest one at least, is proud to be her mother’s daughter.  My only endeavor here is to compare Ms. Chua’s philosophy as a Chinese mother to running a creative business.

It is still up for debate whether we now have computers that are faster than the human brain.  What is not up for debate, if you believe Moore’s Law (and it is kind of hard not to), is that the computer will be faster in the very near future, maybe even smarter.  So if we are about not making mistakes and learning to be perfect, we are going to lose to the computer.  Every time.  And yet we will still try to win – at least children of Chinese mothers will.  To which I say, there is value in never being willing to fail, to admit you cannot do something, or, more to the point, having someone (your mother) refuse to believe you cannot do something despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Within the margin then, being the Chinese mother of your creative business can work.  If you fail, find the flaws and fix them, no excuses and no exceptions.  Despite everyone telling you to the contrary – your employees, colleagues, even your clients – believe that you are capable of doing what you say you can and then refuse to be wrong.  However, when you reach your edge (and we all know what that is for each of us) you have to let go of being a Chinese mother.

If you are going to be successful, you are going to have to be willing to fail – often and spectacularly.  The cure to the failure will not be to avoid repeating the failure.  It will be to figure out the success within the failure and to do that instead, all the while knowing you might repeat the failure.  Fixing the mistake will just create other mistakes, like the proverbial finger in a dyke.  Better to ignore what is not working, let it keep not working and focus on what is.  Instead of doing the same thing better than everyone else, you are going to have to do things differently from everyone else.  And not just lip service to that difference, truly different – absolutely intrinsic to only you.  You will have to embrace the idea that practice makes perfect is an oxymoron.  Practice will have to make you, your art and your creative business more you.

Once you figure out the success in your failure, you can then go back to being the Chinese mother.  Refuse to be anything other than the best.  Until it is time to do something else.  Then go be the best at that.  The ethos of art, by definition, is (re)invention.  The cycle for your creative business is not to be (re)inventing for its own sake.  It is to be willing to (re)invent to find a new path and then take the path as far as it will go.

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