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Storytelling

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The best part of today’s technology is that you can share your “story” instantly with the world and in whatever way you wish.  Fifteen years ago, the cost to create a video of you drafting at your desk and time lapsing the work to finished art would have been prohibitive.  The cost to produce the CD’s to send the video to potential clients and valuable supporters (vendors, colleagues, etc.) also significant.  How about today?

As the cost of media production and distribution approach zero, the premium is on valuable, interesting (read: fascinating) content.  Too often, I see creative business owners using technology to tell the story instead of telling their story with technology.  Just because you can create a pictorial storyboard for every piece of work that you do does not mean that you should.  Nor should you link to everything you ever do on video (TV, YouTube or otherwise) if it is not very good or, more important, does not fit your brand.  For instance, if you are in the luxury market, doing “design on a budget” does far more harm than good, even if it is on national television.  Unless there is a bigger “mass” strategy, doing on TV what you do not do in real life undercuts the value of your real life.  Why? We do not know who you are.

One of my favorite experts on strategic storytelling, Bill Baker, puts it this way: “Strategic Storytelling breaks through barriers of cynicism, opens channels of understanding and creates the kind of ripples that can make big waves.” However, you can only do that if, in fact, you are paying attention to the story you are telling.  And, yes, everything tells a story – on top of the direct story you tell, there are the clothes you wear, the way you deal with situations, even how you answer the telephone.  Allowing yourself, your art or your creative business to be seen in a way that is not an accurate depiction for the sake of exposure or expedience is a sure way to make you look like a rudderless ship and, therefore, small potatoes.

Better to do what you do and invest in being all things consistent to the mantra you espouse.  Your passion for your mantra will always be a compelling story.  Just think about how far Oprah has taken “live your best life”.  The point is not to get exposure.  In today’s world, that is the easy part.  The point is to tell a story (your story) in a way that resonates and is in the fabric of your art and your creative business.

Value

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Bundling is a function of fear.  How many times have you seen offerings by creative businesses that are a mile long?  I have seen far too many photographers, planners, designers (graphic, interior and event) have up to seven, yes seven, different “packages” for their services.  Forget that I loathe the word “package” for creative businesses and that they all look, sound and feel the same (read: boring).  How is a client to discern what the real value a creative business is offering if it is buried as one item in a series of packages?

An apt analogy: you are asking your potential client to buy a rock with the faith that it has gold in it.  You figure the bigger the rock they get, the more likely they will believe that there will be gold inside.  And as competition grows, you continue to offer a bigger rock.  Then again, so does everybody else.  The result is that everyone offers a boulder that, of course, completely obscures whatever gold is in there.  No, you are not offering more gold.  The gold is the intrinsic value of your art and what it represents to your potential clients.  It is not the stuff you do to support that value.

Offering the bigger boulder is also arrogant.  You are asking your potential clients to extract the gold for themselves instead of doing the work to make it front and center for them to appreciate (or not).  Even more, you ask your potential client to define their gold for you and to presume that their gold and yours are the same.  As yours is buried in the boulder of services, you ask them to intuit that you do what they care about.  Then, when they do hire you, is it a mystery why they are underwhelmed when you technically do everything you said you would but not focus on what might be most important to them?

But delineating what you believe to be your gold and making that the fabric of your creative business is risky.  By definition, it means you are right for some but not for others.  You will be excluding those who might have bought the boulder, but not the gold alone.  Then again, you assume those clients are free when they are not.  There is a huge price you pay for having the wrong client, almost always more than they are paying you.  The fear comes in putting yourself out there and having no one respond.  To which I would say, that is the price of admission for owning a creative business.

The irony is is that the larger the boulder, the less leverage you have to grow your creative business.  Unless you are WalMart, serving everyone serves no one.  Better to separate and price each element of what you believe is most valuable about you, your art and your creative business.  From there, you can go anywhere.

Reflection and Perspective

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The holidays are always a terrific time for me to stop (or at least try to), reflect on what has happened and what might be coming.  I am not one for New Year’s Resolutions and love Howard Givner’s thoughts on why he does not make them.  They just seem, well, too resolute for me.  I would rather give myself the freedom to be dead wrong.

The insights I glean when I am away are almost always cliché’s but resonate nonetheless.  Some of my favorites: If you never fail, you will never know that you can get back up.  If you see the world only through your eyes, you might as well be color blind.  Your best is relative to circumstance.  The best imitation is just that.  If it is not fun, why do it? And, flying high is great, but you have to land the plane.

Failing does not mean watching your business go under, it means not recognizing what you bring to the party to make the failure a reality.  If you do not embrace your role, you might never understand that you, not your business, has fallen down.  It will make it that much harder to get back up.  Oh, the economy.  On the flip side, financial success is no measure of success, especially if won on the backs of others.  Strange as it may sound when there is financial success, it is actually the other side of the refusing to recognize your part in a failure.  Make no doubt, you will fail (we all do) and will have an equally hard time getting back up.  Having all the money in the world does not mean you are not bankrupt.

Similarly, if you spend all your time trying to craft your image, to make sure people see you (or your creative business) as you would want them to as opposed to how you (and it) actually are, you are missing the beauty and value of your own reality.  Let people see you as you are and celebrate it everywhere.  You might have started as a duck, but now that you have morphed into a goose quit trying to swim in the duck pond.  Not only are there a lot of ducks in that pond, they are probably better at being a duck than you are.  Even if you were once a duck.

You never have to apologize for joy.  And doubly so for creative businesses since the whole point of their very existence is to create joy.  You need to make a profit, yes, but never at the expense of joy.  Better to get a day job first.

So, to land the plane, a client of mine lost a potential project because when a prospect asked about how she worked, she got flustered, gave a price and then got push back from the prospect (you are too expensive).  She happens to be one of the very best in her industry, so much so that she teaches the subject at a major university.  A few minutes later the prospect mentioned how much they were spending on an element of the project and my client got angry.  If you are spending this much on the element, how can you balk at my fee?  The element was clearly important to the prospect and my client could have run with it to show her expertise.  It could have been a terrific place to show how much she heard them and why she was worth what and how she charged.  She said that it sounded like a lot for the element.

My client is a goose.  The prospect was comparing her to ducks.  She could have said, no no I am a goose and you want a goose.  Let me show you.  Instead, she said I am better than all the other ducks.

She did not get the job.

Year-End Planning Part II

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My last post was about honing all that you, your art and your creative business stand for, recognizing the opportunity in front of you for 2011 and then putting yourself in the best position to seize that opportunity.  Lofty, overarching (but such worthy) goals to be sure.  This post is about two very practical things you can do as you prepare for 2011.  Things I hope will improve your existing creative business and help you prepare for a larger future.

The first is to understand the arc of the service and/or product you provide.  Your arc is the level of value your clients perceive during each phase of their time with you and your creative business.  For instance, if you are an interior designer working on a residential project, you start with trying to understand what the project entails.  Not much differentiation there.  Then you present your ideas, a huge value point – your client will love it or they will not.  As you source and price everything, you will certainly keep your client’s respect the more professional you are, but the sizzle of the initial presentation is not there.  Same with shipping and delivery.  Then comes the installation, when hopefully your clients are blown away.

Now think about how your arc of service matches with both your pricing model and how you collect payment.  Going back to the same interior design example, which works best: flat fee, percentage, hourly or some combination of all of them?  And when do you collect payment?  If you charge a flat fee and take payment in incremental percentages (i.e., beginning, middle and end or beginning and end), what are you missing?  You might be taking a lot of money from the client before they have seen anything (i.e., your presentation) and then not again until you are ready to install (i.e., when they are excited but with the sizzle of the presentation long gone).  Might it be better to collect a smaller fee upfront, a large fee after the presentation and then an ongoing percentage during the production process?  You would be matching getting paid (maybe the largest portion of your bill) to when your clients are most excited by your work.  Even if you do not charge more, simply improving your pricing and collection model to match your arc will make your life sooo much easier.

All of which leads me to two points.

First, the business of your creative business is theater.  How you manage the business process of creating your art is as important as creating the art itself.  Your clients are hiring you to take them on a journey.  So why not make the business journey as entertaining as the creative?  Just like a great actor cannot save a horrible script, neither can awesome art save a boring business process.  Process matters.

Second, there is no such thing as absolute under-charging or over-charging for what you do, just mispricing relative to value offered.  Translation: if your client knows what they are paying for AND are paying for it at the time they value it most, you will be able to be paid appropriately.  However, if all you are working on is making sure you charge enough, you are missing the whole point.  Today’s consumer is far too smart to pay $2 for the same thing they paid $1 for yesterday.  It is up to you to show them the value you are offering for the $2 (even if it was included in the $1 yesterday) and then collect it when you deliver that value.  Timing (including a dramatic pause) is everything.

Year-End Planning

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Tis the season to think about next year.  Many of you will embark on setting your goals for 2011 in the coming weeks.  You will probably look back at 2010 to see what has transpired, take a look at what is already on the books for 2011 and try to figure out what holes need to be filled.  No doubt, this is a valuable exercise and certainly worth doing.  However, I would challenge you to engage in deciding how to move forward in a whole other way.  Work on your Look Book.  Peel back the “shoulds” and “supposed tos” (i.e., your website is supposed to look like so and so and you really should be doing so and so).  Dare to expose the core of your art and your creative business everywhere.  Pay attention to what the world loves about you, your art and your creative business today.  Hint: it is not what it loved yesterday.

2011 will be the year to manifest opportunity.  Circumstance has set the stage for creative business to reap very large rewards.  Although financing is very difficult for many, the cost of money is at or near its historic lows.  What does that mean?  Maybe not a loan for you or your business, but an opportunity for investment that does not come along very often.  An article in Sunday’s New York Times about the recovery in the hotel industry is a perfect example of what I am talking about.  There were words like “war chest” and “ready-to-pounce” with people like Richard Branson and Barry Sternlicht mentioned.

Then there is the wholesale shift in the way the world operates from the way it did in 2008.  Think of the businesses that have found significant traction since then: Facebook, Twitter, Apple (IPhone (introduced in 2007), IPad (2010)), Zappos, Groupon, and Gilt Groupe.  The way we communicate has fundamentally changed as has the way we buy goods and services – including your art.  Forever.

2011 offers a very big opportunity to reinforce, or better yet, redefine all that you, your art and your creative business stand for.  An opportunity I do not think will come around again for a long time.  So see your world as it is, embrace where it is heading and then shape yourself, your art and your creative business accordingly.

An example: the experts quoted in the New York Times article say that there will be much more re-development of hotels and condos than new construction.  If you are an interior designer, how do you offer your services in this arena?  New construction is easy – blank slate.  Re-development is constrained by what is there.  If you are graphic designer, how do you tell the story of the new look in a compelling way?  If you are an event designer, how can you put your spin on what events will look like at this “new” facility?  How will your brand serve the re-launch?  For all of you, if you are really interested in the opportunity, how will you align your art and your creative business to serve the coming needs of this redevelopment wave?

And, if you think this is just for the big guys, then you are being a chicken.  The trends are macro trends and they will affect your market if they have not already. You have to be able to ask for what you want, know that you have the goods and be relevant to the solution.  Need inspiration? Read Daniella LaPorte’s post on how to ask for stuff.

One of my favorite experiences this year was hearing Bryan Rafanelli talk about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding at Engage!10: The Breakers.  Someone in the audience wanted to know how he got the wedding.  Bryan said, “I asked.”  The audience member followed up with: how did you know you could handle it?  Bryan said, “We were ready.”

The point of your planning for 2011 is not to decide how to be incrementally better, it is to make you, your art and your creative business indispensible for what is to come.

Letting Go

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If we were all masters at moving on, there would not be a multi-billion dollar industry (self-help, psychology, psycho-pharmaceuticals, etc.) to help us do it.  It really does not matter whether we are talking about resolving personal issues or those surrounding your creative business.  Letting go, moving on, moving forward is exquisitely painful, always uncomfortable and really effing hard.  It is also fundamentally necessary to our growth as human beings, artists and business owners.

I was an economics major in college and know all of the lessons about ignoring past investments when looking toward the future.  The academic statement goes: ignore sunk cost in your evaluation of future opportunities.  If you have to create a new website because of a shift in your business, you cannot factor in the $10,000 you spent last year to update the site.  But if only life were numbers on a page.  Not so easy when you spent six months and countless hours of your and your staff’s time (read: blood, sweat and tears) making the old new site happen.  And certainly not when we might be talking about saying goodbye to employees who might be closer to you than your own family or, as in so many cases with creative businesses, who are literally your family.  Yet, say goodbye you must – to the site, your employees, maybe even your (hopefully distant) relatives.  You cannot fully embrace your next phase until you actively work to move away from the old.

If you, your art and your creative business have evolved, operating as you always have is literally like operating on a different frequency. It creates static and that static is a recipe for frustration, conflict, even depression. Very much like wearing a coat that does not fit anymore. To Laura’s insight I want to add: you have to know where you are going before you let go.

As human beings, sometimes (ok, a lot of the time), letting go is the goal, even if there is nowhere to go.  Be it addiction, bad relationships, neurosis, or other destructive behavior(s) we all have in some form, the work is identifying the issue and then making sure you do your best to just stop doing it.

Your creative business is different.  If you do not have perspective on what the evolution of your creative business needs to look like, letting go of even dysfunctional behavior is, ironically, a recipe for more dysfunction.  You might have stopped taking commissions, but, without the revenue, you find yourself forced to take business that does not fit your art and/or your business model.

You need to recognize the potential in the embryo before you devote the energy necessary to nurture the being to fruition.  Whether this means an entirely new business or a new process for your current business is irrelevant.  The question is the same:  what deserves your energy and focus now?  With the answer in hand you can actively look at what behaviors do not fit that energy and focus and change them (i.e., let them go).  Change for change’s sake when it comes to any business, creative or not, does far more harm than good.  Change with intention and purpose, on the other hand, is essential if you want to allow your creative business to evolve as it is meant to.

The Fosbury Flop Revisited

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In 1968, Dick Fosbury won the gold medal in the high jump.  He set an Olympic record.  He was 21 years old.  Nice story, but what does it have to do with creative business? Everything.

You see Dick Fosbury was not really very good at the then established straddle technique.  It was just too hard for him to master kicking one leg and then the other over the bar.  But when Dick was about 14 years old (1960-1), his world changed.  Instead of having a landing area of wood chips barely coating concrete or asphalt, foam mats began to be piled on top of one another under a mesh cover.  By 1962, most colleges and high schools had replaced the wood chips or other thin landing surface with mats that were about three feet high.  So Dick decided that he did not have to go over the bar feet first, he would go over backwards, head first.  The rules did not say how he went over the bar just so long as he took off with one foot.  Had he tried his Flop technique with the wood chip landing area he would have broken his neck.  In the early days, Dick’s coaches thought he looked like he was having an airborne seizure and tried to get him to go back to the tried and true straddle.  Dick refused.  And by the time he was 17 he was starting to set high school records.  Today, the world record in the high jump is held by Javier Sotomayor from Cuba.  Javier used the Fosbury Flop and his record is over four inches higher than anyone using a technique other than the Fosbury Flop.  Javier has held the record since 1993 and his record is one of the longest standing records in track and field today.

Just like I said when I wrote about the Fosbury Flop last September: a better way is a better way if only you have the conviction to see it through.  New opportunities abound when the world changes.  No foam (now air) mats, no Fosbury Flop.  No Internet, no Social Media.  However, just because you invent a better way does not mean that someone will not come along and do what you do better.  Just talk to MySpace or Ask.Com. Or even find a way to kick your ass using the old technique.  The record for the straddle technique today is 7’81”, over 4 inches higher than Dick Fosbury’s Olympic Record of 7’4”.

The point is not finding THE new way, it is finding the way that works best for you.  Process matters only in relation to what you and your creative business are all about.  If you do not do the work to figure out what your passion, philosophy and platform are first; having the new new thing will not matter.  Dick Fosbury took stock of who he was in relation to the world around him and used that to drive him forward.  You should too.

Energy

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I am a firm believer in energy.  What you put out to the world consciously or unconsciously is what will be returned to you.  I do not believe in direct linkage — nobody courts getting cancer or having anything horrific happen to them.  I think it is subtler than that — energy focused with specific intention manifests itself beyond what we think to be possible. If you shift and focus your energy, what comes back will also shift.

Even though, in my belly, I know energy to be a two way street, I am always amazed not just when I see it happen but how quickly it can happen.  In business, it is having the courage to change course to focus on what the marketplace most values.  For Zappos, it is delivering happiness.  Before they focused on customer service and delivering happiness, Zappos was just another on-line retailer.  For Apple, it is delighting customers with its functionality.  Remember, Steve Jobs got fired from Apple before he returned with his current vision.  Even Groupon, the fastest growing company EVER, started as a subset of its originally intended purpose of creating platforms for causes.  Once the focus shifted to social buying, in less than two years Groupon is on its way to $1billion in sales faster than any company in history.  Faster than even Facebook or Google.

For creative businesses, letting go of the energy that is impeding real value or blocking it altogether can have dramatic results.  I have a client who has firmly embraced her role as an event designer despite being in the planning and design business for over seven years.  She was willing to change her business model (yes, create a design fee and complete transparency to the cost of production) to reflect that role.  The upshot: I found out yesterday that she has been able to pay back over $50,000 in debt since April.  Even more importantly, a colleague in the event industry that is very jaded when it comes to websites and blogs sent me to her site as an example of one of the most well done sites he has seen.  Punch line: he did not know she was my client.  I am tickled for her.

And energy builds on itself.  Just look at the response Rebecca Grinnals has received for Engage!2011 after announcing it yesterday.  To her credit, Rebecca has always believed in the strength of what she offered at the Engage! conferences for the wedding industry and has never waivered from her model.  Like everything else, her success is hard fought and justly deserved.  Energy aligned with intention.

Change is brutal and will challenge the very essence of your being and that of your creative business.  Even though you (read: we) might think that there is no guarantee anything will come back to you, there is.  No doubt, it will not come as quickly as you would like or be the answer you would want, but your shift will shift all that comes to you.  I wish I could say that I expect to see the shift that comes back happen. I don’t.  I can say though that I am always surprised and delighted when it does, ironically, even if the result is not always positive.  It gives me faith to keep going and to be even more determined not to just embrace the possibility, but to expect it.

Angels and Demons

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Creative businesses are reflections of their owners.  They embody all that we bring to our lives – strengths, weaknesses, neuroses and glories.  As my career working with creative businesses continues to develop, I realize more and more how deeply personal my work is.  Even though what I do is strictly in the context of a business, there is definitely a psychological component in the mix.

I have often written that I want creative businesses to be the best versions of themselves, their owners and the art that is behind them.  I am realizing that I have to revise that thought: I want creative businesses and their owners to be the truest, purest versions of themselves.  Artists should celebrate what is unique about their art and use their intrinsic, iconic nature to drive value for their businesses and their clients.

I am all for life coaches, motivational speakers, and all things empowering to help you to have the courage to make happen a reality you imagine for yourself.  We all need to dream, to create and to manifest something larger.  The world can only be better off if everyone on the planet can believe all things are possible.

However, too often the dream is not our own or, more importantly, it belies our essential nature.  You have to accept, embrace, and savor the you that you are before you can think about what can be.  Specifically for creative businesses, how many of you have websites, pricing models, contracts, even pictures that in some way hide the real you?  Extrapolating from what my clients share with me in their journals versus what they put out to the world (and share with me in their answers to my business questionnaire), my answer is all of you.  Me too.

The process of revealing ourselves to the world (and to ourselves) is often exquisitely painful, always enlightening and ultimately freeing.  I have seen the literal weight come off of a creative business owner’s shoulders when they realize that pretense is unnecessary, limiting and destructive.  Having your creative business be the best version of itself means that it has to be the truest, purest version of you and your art, warts and all.  You are who you are and you need only read Danielle LaPorte’s last post to know how valuable that really is.  Your creative business is no different.  Authentic power comes from internal integrity.  From your place of conviction your creative business can manifest the destiny you envision, not the other way around.

The Tiny Trap

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Most creative businesses are micro-businesses.  Only a handful generate more than a million dollars and it is rarified air to be generating more than ten million.  I can count on one hand (ok, maybe both) those that fall into the latter category.  Yet, the perception is that the creative businesses you admire are not only hugely successful but also of a scale that they are not.  Call it great PR, marketing, a bit of celebrity worship or a combination of all three, it does not matter, the result is the same.  Your business pales to theirs and prevents you from seeing what you have and where you can go.

To co-opt an old horse-racing adage, do not look in someone else’s wallet.  More important, do not use the stature of others to relegate you to a case of the tinies.  Many creative businesses hope to grow from say $50,000 this year to $150,000 five years from now.  The plan is to keep doing the same old same old to chip away at the loaf to get more crumbs.  The big ideas get relegated to “visionaries”, the celebrities with the “high-end” clients that either dominate a local market or are (inter)national players.

I am all for realism and staying true to yourself.  However, if you never push yourself to be uncomfortable, you will never know what is possible.  So instead of trying to figure out how to turn your $100,000 business into a $200,000 business, why not ask yourself how you can turn it into a $2,000,000 business (yes, I used numbers for effect).  There may be a whole host of reasons why you might choose never to go there – time away from family, reluctance to become a manager, fear of investment, etc. – but to not do the work to understand how it could happen keeps you stuck.

Being stuck has ramifications.  It means you spend money on things that may not matter.  Jazzing up your website and blog, joining all things social media and advertising in the name of progress without substance will keep you frustrated.  On the other hand, if you know in your belly that doing all of these things will change the world (or even how the world sees you), then it is money well spent.  Moreover, if all you care about is incremental change (read: incremental growth), almost by definition you will miss the forest for the trees.  Perception of value is tainted by our own bias.  Imagining a bigger world removes the bias if only for a moment.  And sometimes a moment is all you will need to find the courage to go another way.

Do not mistake faith and conviction for arrogance or conceit.  We are all entitled to believe in something, ourselves most of all.  Give yourself the permission to think bigger than you are and embody what that image looks like.  Whether you choose to bring that vision to reality is your choice.

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