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Confidence

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Artists sell confidence.  Everyone who wants to work with you wants to believe in you and your creative business first, your art second.  You have to stand tall and instill the sense that your clients’, employees’, vendors’ and colleagues’ faith will be well placed.  Given the neurosis we all endure (myself very much included), so much easier said than done.  An easy answer would be to fake it until you make it.  Except you can’t.  The line between in your belly confidence and paper-thin bravado is incredibly faint.  Bravado only goes so far until the real deal comes along and runs right past you.  Authentic passion and desire to create will trump a star turn, maybe not in the short run (every dog has its day), but definitely in the medium and long-term.

So how to make your confidence real?  You could stare in the mirror and say your self-affirmations to motivate you to believe in yourself.  You could find a coach to help you focus on the positive.  I am a golf fan and am fascinated by the power of positive thinking in the face of adversity.  The New York Times has an article just today about pro golfer, Matt Kuchar’s, decision to work with sports psychologist, Dr. Gio Valiante, to do just that.  You could also hire great motivators like Simon Bailey.  All of these are terrific personal strategies and whatever works for you; I applaud your willingness and desire to use them in your lives.  However, for your creative business, personal confidence, although a prerequisite, is not enough.  For you to exude confidence in the eyes of those that care, your confidence in your business model is paramount.

Confidence in your business model means that you embody the how and why you do things and never, ever apologize for it.  A fantastic example is how Vicente Wolf presents his designs to a client.  Vicente hands his client a pad and pencil before he begins his presentation and asks that they write down their questions and comments during his presentation.  They are not allowed to interrupt his presentation.  Why?  His designs are based on logical relationships that are not immediately apparent until the entire thought is conveyed.  For Vicente, unless he has the opportunity to deliver a complete thought, he cannot provide real feedback on each component in the design.

Many of you would say, well that is fine because he is Vicente Wolf and I am so and so.  To which, I respond A) he has risen just like everyone else and B) he has always done it this way. Confidence – not just in himself, but in the how and why he does things the way he does.  It does not cross over into bravado or arrogance because it is the fabric of his business.

Make no mistake, confidence in your model is not “Well, this is just the way we do it.”, it is “We do it this way because”.  If you are thinking that the difference is just semantics, you are limiting yourself and the growth of your creative business.  You can never justify “this is how we do it”, but, if you are fully committed to the reason why you do things the way you do, you will never have to.

The 4 P’s

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I cringe at rules, proscriptions, formulas — anything that tells me how I have to do anything.  It feels far too confining for me and creates an illusion of safety: if you do it this way, things will all work out.  Mostly, I just hate being told what to do.  There is no net and the only person that has the “right” answer for you is you.  That said, there is a huge difference between being unconventional and being reckless.  Not to be overly outrageous, but without core principles your creative business will fail.  I translate core principles into the 4P’s: Passion, Philosophy, Platform and Process.

Passion: The unending, visceral, overwhelming desire to create the art that you do.  There are far easier ways to make a living than to run a creative business.  Nobody needs what you provide.  Your clients hire you because they think you and your art can transport them to wherever they want to go.  Hard for me to ever imagine that you would be able to honor and embrace this responsibility if you were not deeply passionate about what you create.

Philosophy: What is the purpose of your creative business?  To be famous? Rich? A means to an end? The end? What do you want your clients to feel about you, your art and your creative business? Your employees?  Vendors, friends and family? You?  Your creative business has to have a purpose beyond delivering your art.  Your business is simply the vehicle through which you can share your message.  The integrity of what you believe is what infuses what you are selling regardless of whether you are creating it for yourself or a client.  Your clients buy the message as much as they do the art.  Soulless art is an oxymoron and is unsustainable as a business.

Platform: If you do not deliver to your clients what is most valuable about you and your creative business, you cannot hope to get paid what you need.  What makes Apple different from Dell?  The Flip different from Sony?  Target different from Hermes?  The better question is why each cannot sell the others’ products?  Platform – each of these businesses message is designed to elicit a response (i.e., sale) from the audience that cares most about it.  If you are confident about your philosophy and what you are truly passionate about, designing (or fixing) your platform will become obvious.  I just finished Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (the CEO of Zappos.com) and, for me, the coolest part of the story was how they created an extranet for their vendors.  Zappos’ vendors can see how their inventory is selling and at what rate on a real time basis – they have the keys to the store.  Instead of taking all of the power from Zappos, the extranet turned vendors into partners and made them more, not less, invested in Zappos’ success.  Transparency is a key part of Zappos’ platform, derived from their passion for customer service and their philosophy to deliver happiness.

Process: Nobody will be able to see your passion, philosophy or platform if you do not have a defined process.  Yes, you have to write it down so that everyone – clients, employees, vendors, colleagues, even your mother – knows what comes next.  There is not just comfort in everyone knowing how you do things, there is trust and faith.  Talking the talk is necessary, but walking the walk is what defines a creative business.  Tell me what you are going to do and then do it.

Fall is the time all of us think about what is to come and plan for the future.  My prayer is that you use the 4P’s to help guide you.  They are meant to be accomplished in order: Passion first (what gets you out of bed), Philosophy (what do you want to share with the world), Platform (who do you want to share it with and why) and finally Process (how you are going to share it).  Will it guarantee the financial success of your creative business?  Of course not.  All that the 4P’s are meant to do is to help you satisfy your soul —  to make sure your creative business best reflects all that is most important to you as an artist and human being.  I would like to think that the rest will take care of itself.

More on Process

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Process matters. What your creative business does, how you communicate with your clients, your staff, your colleagues, and your vendors is just as important as the art you create.  Moreover, each step of your process has to be deeply reflective of the ethos of your creative business.  This much I stressed back in June.  However, what I did not talk about was that your process has to be forward looking.  It has to reflect your creative business as you want it to be as much as what it is.

For instance, if you are trying to expand your services to include product sales with your service (i.e., a planner selling wedding gifts, an interior designer selling fabrics, a graphic designer selling branded items), then you have to provide a grounding for why your clients should want what you are trying to sell them.  You cannot just expect clients to get why you are changing.  It has to fit.  You might have the finest linen, stationary, furniture, accessories, etc. to go along with your design, but why yours is the best for your client has to be because it is in the fabric of your business not just because they are great products.  There are a lot of great products out there and if you do not incorporate yours well, clients will be alienated and feel like you are trying to “sell” them something.  Not only will you not get the sale, but you will undercut their trust in you as well.  You lose twice.

A great process should always answer the “why” of all that your creative business does or does not do.  Your job is to identify the need your clients want filled (note: do not ask them, they do not know) and fill that need with the value only you and your art can bring.  You cannot do it in a vacuum or only one time.  Your core value proposition has to be related, integral and identifiable throughout your business process.  Your business model justifies your price only if it validates your core value proposition.  If you are Colin Cowie, you can charge a large design fee because his premise (validated by his superstar clientele) is that his designs are unparalleled.  If, instead, he chose to mark up everything 300% when the market is closer to 100% then he would be undercutting his value as a designer (a wholly subjective notion) by being outrageously expensive (an objective definition).  When (and if) Colin ever decides to shift his model, he will have to make sure the new process reinforces the subjective and not the objective.

Competition and the economy have forced all of us to reexamine our business models.  Any identifiable process is better than none.  However, your long term success will be based on your ability to have that process drive change in your creative business, not the other way around.

Money

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For creative businesses, money is a dirty word.  Whether it has to do with pricing, paying yourself or your employees, even valuing your art (and yourself), your relationship to money lurks behind it.  You might believe you can never have enough, only have to take what you need, or money is the root of all evil.  You can say you do not care about it and the art is all that is important or you might need to show how much you have to validate the persona you portray to yourself and the world.  I am indifferent to how you relate to money.  There are too many far wiser people than me to guide you towards what is the healthiest relationship for you.  I am only asking you to acknowledge the power and emotionality you have given to money.

Money is not real.  It is just a construct society has created in order to better organize itself.  Money exists and can do what it does because we all agree it does.  Money is also not the root of all evil.  The love of money is.  To which I would like to add, so is the hatred, envy and just about every emotion you can attach to money.  By evil, I would like to take a more holistic approach and say it is emotions attached to money that are the seeds of our own undoing.

I have made a lot of money in my life, lost all of it and come back to life again.  Money is a crutch for me.  It is something I can obsess over and create drama from.  I can stop the fluidity of my life in a nanosecond by thinking about how much I have, do not have or even will have.  And when I bring myself down to dollars and cents, I conveniently wipe out my own spirit in the process.  If you value your entire being by how much you are (or are not) paid, it will never be enough. My aim is to embrace my ability to generate money and see it for what it is:  that which will afford me the opportunity to live the life I desire.

While money is not real and has no emotion, it is energy.  Literally, money is the food your creative business needs to survive.   There is no such thing as overcharging or undercharging, just charging what you believe is fair value for the product/service you provide.  The measure of fair value is what you need to earn in order to sustain your chosen lifestyle.

For creative businesses, fair value is not what the market will bear.  You do not make widgets.  The intrinsic value of your creative business is your ability to create.  A rose might be just another rose, except that it is not when placed in the hands of an artist.  Those that argue there is a limit to what they can charge (in most cases, a limit that is less than they think they are worth) create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The limitations speak more of emotions attached to money than to reality.

The emotions you attach to money will distort your own measure of fair value in one way or another.  The more you acknowledge the emotions, the better chance you have to free yourself from them and to allow your creative business the opportunity to earn all that you need it to.

Happiness

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Happiness is a choice.  Nothing makes you happy.  We choose to embrace joy or we do not.  From my days as a lawyer and investment banker, I knew many professionals who were miserable, even though, by any outward measure, they were hugely successful.  I was one of them and, on my worst days, I find myself there again.  I worry about everything, see the dangers everywhere and feel incredibly incapable of handling any of it, let alone all of it.

Jonathan Fields wrote a great post yesterday about feeling the need to push boundaries, to make himself uncomfortable, live in dis-ease, all in an effort to (re)explore himself and his world.  In the process, Jonathan knows he is going to lay eggs – golden and rotten – and he is choosing to do it anyway.  It is incredibly validating to me to read his words and know my moments of insecurity are the same choice as my moments of confidence and courage.

So much has been written about the economy: whether the recession is at a plateau, that we are heading up or that the worst is yet to come.  To me, it is all a reflection of carnage after the crisis.  The closer you are to the crisis the harder it is to justify its continuation to those further removed from it.

By no means am I equating any natural disaster (even if we caused it) with the collapse of an economy.  However, if your life is not directly touched in some way by the disaster, how often do you think about the Gulf Coast or Haiti?  What about Pakistan?  And how often will you think about them a month from now? Six months?  A year?  Almost without question, your relationship to these examples of extreme suffering will be far distant from those that will still then be living and breathing them every day.

It is easy and admirable to commend those creative businesses that have chosen to innovate and/or reinvent themselves as a result of the economic crisis.  Especially those that have succeeded.  It is also easy and not so admirable to condemn those that are still suffering.  For those of you that are in this place of pain, I want to acknowledge what you continue to endure as dauntingly real.  I also want to encourage you to not see your suffering as a life sentence or validation of your inability to “make it through”.  Instead, take a note from Jonathan and choose joy.  If your state of being is suffering, then choosing joy IS pushing your boundaries.

Your choice to see the joy of your life will not solve your reality, but your determination to keep choosing it will.

Clarity

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Time in Vermont has a great way of putting everything into perspective.  The mountains are emerald green.  The air is crisp.  You can actually drink the lake water you swim in without worrying (too much).  The bounty of nature is everywhere.  We try to come up here every summer to leave the big city behind, rest and rejuvenate.   It does not disappoint.

A favorite activity of ours is visiting all of the micro-farms in the area: dairy, goat, horse, even an emu farm.  The farmers are incredibly generous with the children and more than willing to open their lives to us.  Their path is not easy by any means, but it is straightforward.  They know what has to be done and it has to be done every day.  The farmers’ goal is only to create a product that epitomizes and can sustain their way of life.  None of the farmers strive to be anything that they are not – no dreams of cattle barons or mega-farming here.  And as much as their lives are a struggle, joy is abundant in the choices that each of them has made to do what they do.  You can literally taste and touch it.

In our world where we are all chasing the golden ring in some form or another, it is so refreshing to be reminded that it all begins and ends with integrity.  Who are you and what do you do?  At minimum, we have to be able to know who you are and what your creative business is all about.  But if all you do is stick a familiar label on yourself – designer (graphic, event, interior, fashion), photographer, stationer, florist, architect, planner, etc. – you are cheating (mostly yourself).  We need to know your essential nature and you need to have the courage to put it out there for all of us to see without apology.  Your creative business has to be a reflection of that nature not its camouflage.  You cannot be Picasso if your business is set up to look like Walmart and, yes, vice-versa too.

I am not saying that your art and your creative business cannot be subtle, multi-dimensional and ever evolving.  It can and should be. I am all for innovation and creating the next new thing.  But we have to be able to see who you are everywhere we look and know what it is you are trying to sell.  Just like Fat Toad Farm Goat Cheese, it has very little to do with the cheese itself (which is ridiculously delicious) and everything to do with the integrity behind it.

Forgiveness

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Of all of the challenges in my life, forgiveness is by far the most daunting.  I can mouth the words, understand how important it is to move on, but the anger, resentment and judgment offer familiar comfort.  It is far easier to feel betrayed and abandoned than it is to accept my own failings.  I aspire to empathy; compassion and I dare say even love as we all should, but so much easier said than done.

How we all move through the process of forgiveness is what defines us as human beings.  The greatest trespasses against us are those that offer the largest opportunity for humility and grace.  A first step can be to forgive yourself for not yet being able to forgive.  Offer yourself your own humanity.

Forgiveness has everything to do with creative business.  The combination of today’s technology, our economic climate and hyper-competition is a perfect storm for transgression.  We hear more and more of competitors stealing names, designs, clients, collateral from websites and blogs, and even businesses altogether.  Clients get to have their (very) subjective voice broadcast globally.  And everyone is a critic these days.  Just as much as everyone is an expert.  If you let yourself, you could spiral for years festering over all the wrongs you, your art and your creative business will suffer this month.

Get over it, move on, it is not worth it, rise above?  Really?  We are not Buddha and this is not copying your neighbor’s test answers.  This is your livelihood and the trespasses cut to your core as an artist and businessperson.  Yet if you cannot forgive, you cannot have empathy and sympathy for yourself most of all.  You do not have to accept the suckiness of the situation, but you do have to live in it.  The point of forgiveness is to not get lost  — the world will pass you by as you spiral – but to suffer your own humanness and the world’s for that matter.  Be a mess, be pissed off, and then let it be, live in your own skin and go do great work.

What Is Going Right?

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There is always room for improvement.  Something is always going wrong.  Customer service, employee, vendor, pricing, marketing (including social media), delivery, cash flow, or morale issues are everywhere.  However, hidden in the mix is a new design, strategy, brand identifier, product or service that your clients, vendors and even employees love.  I try not to be an absolutist, but the gems are ALWAYS there.

A few reasons why you might miss the gems: first, you might be too subsumed by all of the issues facing your creative business to notice.  More likely, you do not want to let go of what you are doing/have always done to fully embrace what is right in front of you.

Human nature makes it especially hard to let go of what is wrong (or outdated) and plow everything into what is right.  Even more if the old way (product, process or service) is not exactly failing, but not flying either.  How many of you in the event business (designer, florist, planner, lighting specialist, caterer, etc.) find yourself (yes you) breaking down at 3:00 in the morning?  Going to the market to shop before an event even though your business is now in the millions?  Working on your website, blog and all things social media without really thinking why?  Staying in a particular line of business just because it sounds good on paper or pays the bills (i.e., day-of planning)?

The beauty of the marketplace is that it will tell you what it wants to buy from you.  You may want to only do “high-end” work, but if you cannot produce your “accessible” art fast enough, you only do yourself a disservice not to go all the way there.  And by go all the way there I do not mean just do more of it.  I mean to really delve in and try to understand why this area of your creative business is in such demand.  It is fools play to believe it is just about price.  Maybe it is about the story you tell.  The creativity you offer in the space (i.e., coffee and cigarette cupcakes).  Or the resonance you and your art have with these clients.  Capitalizing on market demand (even if no one can see it but you) is how great businesses are built.

Pleasant Rowland was an educator who had developed numerous educational texts for children and was a publisher of a children’s magazine.  She thought she could teach history through the story of several fictional girls each living during a significant time in our history.  The girls were to be immortalized as dolls (with all the attendant accessories) and were to be sold together with six stories.   American Girl was born.  One person paying attention to the marketplace, using her knowledge of the market (Pleasant knew everything about teaching and telling stories to children) and taking it as far as it could go (which, in her case, was selling to Mattel in 1998 for @$700 million).

What if Pleasant stayed stuck to teaching children through textbooks or believing that there was no room for another doll in the marketplace?  Or if she never questioned the idea that girls older than 6 are no longer interested in playing with dolls? Or if she believed those who said the idea was a sure failure?  It is easy to say in hindsight that Pleasant Rowland identified a real niche and the rest is history.  The truth is she had the experience to know opportunity when she saw it and the fortitude to make it happen.  So do you.

Be Proactive

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Running any business will expose every emotion you have, test everything you believe, and, if you let it, teach you all that you need to keep moving forward.  Yet, when we get overwhelmed by the issues we and our creative businesses face (you pick — money, employees, vendors, clients), too often our instinct is to “solve the problem” instead of looking for the underlying disease.  And in that reaction we create processes of the moment that actually only reinforce having to react in the future.  How many of you have had to talk to a client at 2:00 a.m., worry about whether you will be able to deliver on time, or, worse, have had to explain why your final art is not what your client asked for.  You say to yourself, “I do not ever want to be in this position again” only to find yourself there again (and again).

It is only natural that, if you are in danger of being burned, you will do all you can to stay away from the flame.  However, it is only when you give yourself permission to focus on the flame instead of avoiding getting burned that you will be able to effect real change.  Solving the issues confronting you and your creative business means you have to redefine the question.

Act, do not react.  Easy enough.  What is hard is that acting is uncomfortable, risky and, if done poorly, arrogant and alienating.  You cannot be proactive with your employees, vendors, or your clients if you are worried about what they think.  Everyone’s a critic and if you put out there what your world looks like you will be judged.  No matter how thick your skin, the sting of getting it dead wrong hurts.  You have to be deeply convicted to have the strength and courage to do it again (and again).  The fairy tale is that if you do “it” enough you will succeed in the end.  Maybe, but probably not in the way you envisioned, and certainly not if you stubbornly stick to your guns.  Zealous tunnel vision is as myopic as maintaining the status quo.  Both do not allow for the possibility that the world is not as you see it.  You have to live in the discomfort to discover whether it is the kernel of necessary change or your intuition telling you to go the other way.

At Engage! 10: Cayman Islands, Colin Cowie said that he calls all of his clients after their event to find out what he could have done better.  Exposing yes, but given who he is and the level of event he orchestrates, not all that risky (or proactive).  HOWEVER, Colin also calls those clients he did NOT get to find out why they chose not to work with him.  Colin probably hears a lot of “you were too expensive”, “we liked so and so better”, but in the mix are those clients who respect him enough to tell him the truth as they see it.  I can only imagine how that information has helped him evolve his business over the years.

Will some people think Colin is arrogant for making the call?  Sure.  Wasting his time?  Of course. But proactive?  Definitely.  And for his vulnerability Colin has honest, real time information about his business that those who would not dare ask the question will never have.

Fear

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There is a wonderful new e-magazine out called Fear.less.  Started by Clay Hebert and Ishita Gupta (both really incredible in their own right), it explores, through a series of interviews (it is how I found uber-awesome Danielle Laporte), how we are to identify, confront and ultimately overcome that which we are most afraid of.  It is amazing stuff and the blog, written by Matt Atkinson, is also very well done.

I cannot do justice to the insights Fear.less provides and leave it to you to discover them for yourself.  However, my biggest take away, at least for creative businesses, is that fear drives conformity.  You become desperate to find the box you can put yourself in so that you can be easily understood (designer, planner, photographer, stationer, florist, etc.).  You use buzzwords that really mean nothing: “quality customer service”, “attention to detail”, “creative”.  You offer the same “packages” as everyone else and your contracts make Ulysses look like People Magazine.  It is all fear of having your creative business be iconic, to stand for something, to stand apart not just for the sake of being different, but because it is different.  The irony is never lost on me that you get paid to create for a living.  You do not make widgets.  I am sure you would all shudder if someone told you that your art is such a good knock-off of so and so (read: copy, not reminiscent of).  Yet, so many times I see that that is exactly what you are doing with your creative businesses and are not horrified at the thought that you are.

It reminds me of a time during my days as a lawyer (yes, back in the stone ages) when some overworked associate put “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (G rated version) into the boilerplate of some dense agreement.  This was when word processing was just getting started and all documents worked from a previously created one.  The line found its way into multiple places in 235 documents at 5 different firms before it was discovered.  No one read the boilerplate, but it was there in every document because it had to be.  Really?  Or was it easier to just cut and paste?  There is safety in the idea that there is A way it has to be done.  Except it is not safe at all.  Imagine the senior lawyer that had to explain why it was there to her client — a client who was paying hundreds of dollars an hour for the very same lawyer to actually read the documents she was going to sign.

If your art demands that you talk to your clients (as opposed to their planner, manager, agent, lawyer, etc.), then not making that a prerequisite regardless of who you might offend (clients included) is a sure way to jeapordize your art.  If you present only one opinion while your competition shows many possibilities, what will it do to you to conform?  We all have to make compromises, but never at the price of integrity.

What fear of authenticity does most of all though, is stop your evolution.  What might have worked when you got started may not now.  Your contracts, process, pricing structure, even the name of your business need to be relevant to who you are today and where you are headed.  A clever name works for a start-up, almost never for an established creative business.  If you fear the ramifications of having your creative business be truly authentic, all that should be open to question will not be.  Conformity (even to a version of your former self) will make you stuck.  And broke.

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