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The Long Road

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Do you see your whole world in increments – days, weeks, months, even years?  Do you hold onto the idea that there is some sort of destination and if you do it right you will get there?  Do you think that if you do enough things, work enough hours, give the right advice, make the right investments, you will earn the reward you have set out to reap?

Today’s environment of immediate gratification, overnight gagillionaires, and the relentless demand on all of us to make things happen makes it very hard to not be in planning overdrive.  Yet, the lovely irony is that my richest experiences and greatest rewards have come from absolute surprises and when I just stop.  I had worked for Preston for almost a year with very little to show for it (other than plan upon plan upon plan) and then Marcy Blum insisted that Rebecca Grinnals come to meet me at one of Preston’s events.  Not only did I meet one of my great friends that night, but Preston’s Sandals deal was hatched — all in the span of twenty five minutes.  The deal lasted for almost five years and was a huge success for all involved.  The friendship thrives.

John Lennon was right: “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”  However, when I try to not plan, not think about how to get from point A to point B, I am equally consumed (not in a good way) by the chaos of the moment.  I need to know where I am going even if no one has ever been there before.  So, for me, if I did not make plans, it would be hard for me to embrace the life I have.

My resolution is to plan, have a direction and then let my feet, not my head, do the rest of the work.  Evolution is a painful, slow process taken in radical leaps of faith.  The expectation that results can be measured through financial success or failure creates a false sense of security for the road taken or not.   I would rather focus on whether I can feel joy at where I am and realize the reward from having that joy.  Money (especially the lack of it) can make you myopic to what exists around you.  I suffer terribly from the disease and wind up shaking my head when I think of all that I missed while I was thinking only of money.  Your creative business is bigger than the financial return you hope to create, especially if your thinking is short term (i.e., 2 years or less).

No, I am not recommending that you turn your creative business into an improv troupe or that you ignore the necessity to make money.  I am recommending that you see the choices you make in a context larger than what you originally intend.  And when your choices bring you to a place far from what you intended, you will embrace them as if they were expected all along.

The Trust Tank

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Your primary job as an artist and creative business owner is to build trust with your clients.  Without trust, your path will be difficult, if not impossible.  This much I have said many times.  But knowing it and trying to implement a process behind managing trust is two different things.  So I thought it might be helpful to re-conceptualize trust and think about it as if it were gas in a tank (which it is).  Looking at trust this way, you might find it easier to manage and focus on where you are with your client vis a vis trust.

When a client first comes to you, your trust tank with them is half full.  They read or heard about you, were referred by a colleague, saw your work, etc.  They are hoping to like you and your art, but they do not know for sure.  After a meeting or two, they do know for sure and decide to hire you.  Trust tank is full.

Here is where the concept really works:  you have to consciously spend trust so that you can build it back up again.  Whether it is the time between presentation and proposal, proposal and production, or purchase and delivery, it is only natural that a client will question whether or not you will be as good as promised.  This is trust getting spent.  It is also where you should most focus your process.

Spend too much trust and you risk unwelcome surprises and an unforgiving client.  Nobody (other than maybe Green Berets) likes getting woken up from a dead sleep and going straight into intense exercise or stressful situations.  When a client is working off of a months old proposal with little or no communication prior to delivery, I can only imagine that this element of (horrible) surprise looms somewhere inside them.

However, as bad as letting the trust tank go empty is not allowing any trust to be spent at all.  Make no mistake:  all creative businesses are about theater – the (big) opening, the build-up and the take-your-breath-away finale.  If you do not have enough of a build up, then the drama of the “reveal” is gone.  Examples: an interior designer installing as pieces come in instead of as one installation; or a stationer asking the client for a million proof approvals for sending the first sample.  In terms of your trust tank, it is like stopping off every ten minutes to keep the tank full.  Better to pay the rental car company the $10 dollars for the 2 gallons of gas than drive yourself batty.  Same thing with your creative business.

By thinking of trust as gas in a tank, my hope is that you will be able to better manage your entire relationship with your client – to know that there is a difference in building, spending and replacing the trust they have in you as both an artist and creative business owner.  Although the arc of your creative business’ story might the same as everyone else, how you tell the story (i.e., manage your client’s trust) is all that matters.

Austerity?!

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I was an economics major in college (big surprise).  I love the idea that there are immutable flows and forces, which we impact by our very humanness.  One of my favorite economists to read is New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman.  Forget his crazy resume (i.e., Princeton professor, Nobel Prize winner, etc.), what I like best about him is his ability to translate enormously complex ideas into digestible, but not overly simplistic, opinions.  Recently, he has been railing against the world’s push towards austerity when what we really need to be doing is keeping our proverbial foot on the gas.  His last column talked about the craziness of cutting off unemployment benefits when one in five people are still out of work.  And the one before that talking about how cutting spending now because inflation might happen is not even penny wise, but definitely pound foolish.

Who knows whether Paul Krugman will turn out to be right or wrong (although my serious money is on the former), but history, economics and life bear out the following: sometimes the most well intended effort can be the exact wrong thing to do.  Usually, we take the wrong road because the right one feels wholly uncomfortable and alien to us.  The other idea is that culture dictates our bias.  “Tighten our belts”, “suffer for the greater good”, temperance, temerity are major tenets of what we hold as “good” and symbols of our social evolution.  Except when they are not.

It is a hugely powerful lesson for me — what was might be again but what is demands being present to a different order.  In the context of creative business I am struck at just how deeply entrenched the “right” way is to many business owners.  Money and time spent on advertising, social media, and all things marketing prevail over building real, personal relationship with clients, employees and vendors.  Focus remains on what is going wrong instead of what is going right.  There is a refusal to honor the shift that has most certainly happened in your creative business.  It is in a strange (and masochistic) way easier to grouse about what is not working than to focus on what your clients are loving.  Ego makes this step just so hard.  It is why I love economics so much – the trend is larger than you are.

You may never be able to go back to how you did business in the salad days or maybe you will.  That really is not the point.  The point is to ask yourself what you are being presented with today and what you are doing to ignore the opportunity.  There is probably a good reason why.  It might even sound good on paper to you, your friends, colleagues and employees.  Except the moment is telling you to go the other way.  Up to you to listen.

Joy

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Most creative business owners love what they do.  They get to create art and get paid for it.  Then there are those that see it as a job.  Something they do so they can afford to do the art they really love.  You know who you are – fine artists doing graphic design, indie rockers playing weddings, interior designers styling houses, etc.  I am not talking about free lancers.  I am talking about actual business owners who believe that their creative business is a “sell-out” to the true artist that they are.  Or somehow their creative business is just what they “do” and that their life happens outside the boundaries of business.

To those of you in this category: you can have many passions, your art transcends its medium and if you do not (or cannot) bring your joy to your creative business, not only will you not get to the “next level”, you are about to be swallowed by those that do.  In the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, the only difference between you and your competitors is passion.

The world today has removed all barriers to technical proficiency.  Information is available to anyone who seeks it.  The cost of production has plummeted and will only get cheaper.  Communication and marketing platforms are unbelievable (and universal) for telling your story.  Assuming you have the talent to do the art you do for your clients, the only difference is whether you choose to be iconic.  To be iconic, you have to be willing to put yourself and your creative business all the way out there – to stand for something.  I just cannot see how you can do that if you do not have unbridled love for what you do and the art you create.

If you use your creative business as a means to an end, you are hiding.  Perhaps it is your fear of success, fear of revealing yourself to your clients or your own self-judgment of your work as somehow not “art”.  It does not matter.  Without truly feeling the value of the art your creative business produces, you belittle its integrity to the clients that come to you (and pay you) for it.  Yes, you might just be that good, but you will not be for long.  Enthusiasm, in-your-belly desire and hunger to create is infectious and, at base, will be all that matters to your client.

There are many ways to make a living.  You chose to be an artist.  You can always unchoose it.  But you cannot be half pregnant.  Honor yourself and your creative business.  In for a penny, in for a pound.

Stories

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We are all a compilation of stories.  Happy, sad, angry, frustrating, life changing, destroying, creating.  Our stories define us, give us comfort in saying “that is who I am”.  As I grow older, I am coming to realize that these stories are also what can freeze us, trap us in a moment and even cripple us.

I have told the story of the day we buried my brother a million times.  It is THE story and each time I tell it, whether to myself or someone else, it is as if it happened yesterday, not 22 years ago.  The same trauma, anger, powerlessness, grief and shame I felt in that moment is what I carry with me today.  In all of those years, no one has challenged me to tell the story differently, until yesterday.  Instead, it is “move-on”, “forgive”, “let go”.  All advice that a million self-help gurus espouse (rightfully so) and to which I have been stone deaf to.  I cannot listen because THE story overrides it all.  Yet, when I think of another way to tell the story, from someone else’s point of view, focusing on another aspect of what happened that day, seeing what else I did and did not do, I can soften to the idea that a moment in time is only a moment.  It frees me from responsibility that is not mine and forces me to accept what is my responsibility then and today.

We all choose the stories we tell.  For me, being told to write a new one belied the strength of the one I had already written.  Understanding that I do not ever need to write a new story, just create a different, equally authentic version of the one I hold so dear (for better, and in my case, much worse) is opportunity to be kind to myself and to the actors in my drama.

Perhaps writing a new story will work for you.  I am a Capricorn and we goats never let go of anything.  In the end though, perpetually letting go is what we are all challenged to do.  To always let go of whatever version of yourself you know yourself to be.  Not so much because you have to in order to move forward — who knows whether that is true or not.  Mostly just to give yourself permission (and space) to go another way.  Quite literally, to go out on a limb, just so you can saw it off.

What Makes You Valuable?

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The value of art is in its creation, not production.  But your art’s legacy depends on its delivery.  I love David Lynch’s take on watching his movies on an IPhone: to paraphrase (and remove the profanity) you have not seen his movie if you watch it on an IPhone.  And this is where you will have to make a decision as both an artist and business owner.  Do you just create the art and let go of its production and delivery?  Or do you ask for (i.e., demand) control over final delivery?

First, a note on production of your art.  My argument is (and I stick by it): for those whose focus is on design as opposed to production, specialists can do a better job producing your art than you can.  The caveat is that you have to be able to deliver enough information so that producers can effectively produce your art.  Imagine if an architect delivered rough sketches to a contractor and said, “You get the idea”.  My guess is that there is a 1 in 100 (1,000,000?) chance that the contractor will get it right.  More to the point, by delivering inadequate design information, the architect has turned the contractor into exactly what he is not – a designer.

However, even if someone else produces your work, you still need to supervise the production to make sure your design is as you want it.  There is a huge difference between outsourcing and giving up control.  You need to make sure your art is as intended and its delivery exactly as you want it to be. The reason is simple:  Regardless of your medium – photography, design (graphic, interior, event, floral, furniture, fashion or jewelry), etc. – once you are disassociated with your art, the art must stand on its own.  If you do not present the work in its best light (or are not in control of its presentation), then what legacy can you hope to leave?

Where I go with this has gotten me into a lot of hot water with some of you.  So be it.  Integrity demands that you ensure your legacy.  Business demands that you get paid for it.  For photographers, giving over the file to a client so that they can print the images themselves will do more to kill your industry than anything else.  Interior designers not doing a full installation, but installing in pieces robs you of your “Wow” moment and diminishes the trust your client has in you to deliver on your design promise.  A work in progress is just that.   Even the little things matter.  If you are a wedding florist, how do you deliver your personal flowers?  In the wholesale box the flowers came in?  Or in a beautiful handmade box so that those who see them before they go on the wedding party can form an opinion of you?  A jeweler delivering her piece in a cheap box? Really?  And not documenting your work with beautiful images that you create (if you are good enough) or pay to have created for you (no, not using a photographer’s images created for someone else unless you can have a say in what images get created), is sheer lunacy.

I hear all the time that the client will not pay for delivery.  If you can come to realize that delivery is your legacy, you might be unwilling to compromise.  As with the creation of your art, the value (and profit) in delivery is there if you choose it to be.  And for the long-term health of your creative business, I hope you do.

Process

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Your art is ephemeral, random and of the moment.  Your creative business is not.  In the short term, you might be able to overcome a bad (or non-existent) process with the strength of your art.  Long term, though, there will be a cap on how far you can go.  Without process, you will find yourself struggling and will probably never get to the “next level”.

Process is simple:  it is what comes next.  It starts from the moment you are contacted to the moment your work is done with your client.  You have to know where you are with your clients always and have to be able to communicate what happens next (and when).  For smaller businesses or ones that work with only a few clients at a time, this may not be such an issue.  But what happens when five clients become ten, ten twenty?  Will you still be able to communicate the same way?  If not, then you need to set the stage now so there will be no “dropped ball” and things will not “slip through the cracks”.

And just having a process is not enough.  Your process needs to reflect what your art and your creative business are all about.  You are in the business of trust.  If what you do next undercuts that trust, then something is wrong with your process.  Example:  if you are a designer (interior, event or graphic), your success depends on your clients believing that you “get” what they want you to achieve for them. My guess is that the first thing you do, before you are even hired, is to listen, relate and even show a few examples of what might be possible.  This initial dialogue is incredibly personal and is the foundation of your working relationship.  But after your first meeting (or call) you email your proposal written in dense legalese with a conciliatory, “please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any question or comments to the attached.  I look forward to working with you.”  You can kid yourself all you want that this is the way it has to be, but a beautifully written proposal that spells out in plain English everything you will do and expect from your client is just as powerful and legally binding as all the heretofores, whereases, etc. that I read every day.

My question to you is how would you feel if you got an impersonal, stuffy proposal after you just sat and shared your innermost hopes and dreams for the art you want?  Especially if the artist you just met with did not (or would not) take the time to walk you through the dense forest of arcane words so you can understand why it is what it is?  I, for one, would feel alienated.  I might hire you because you are just that good, but I will have my doubts.

Another example: you are a producer of high art (a photographer, jeweler, sculptor, cabinet maker) and you deliver your work in a package far beneath the quality of the work.  A simple album, a Fed-Ex package, a cheap jewelry box.  What does that say about how you feel about what you have created?  Don’t you want to show it off in the best light possible?  If you are getting paid to deliver the art, the act of delivery should be high art too.

The disconnects, no matter how slight, are like spider cracks in glass: eventually the whole pane will shatter.  Having any process is better than none, sure, but only marginally so if you literally undercut yourself every step you take.  Process has to be about how you demonstrate the best version of you, your art and your creative business to your client.  Your goal should be to make sure each step builds on the next and that any misstep (as there will always be) is an opportunity to make the next step even stronger.  Keeping any part of your process just because you think it is what you have to do is, at best, silly, and, at worst, self-destructive.  Your process, like your art, has to be an honest reflection of the integrity upon which it is based.

Thoughts on Engage!10: Cayman Islands

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Last week, I attended Engage!10, a luxury wedding business summit, in the Cayman Islands.  Run by Rebecca Grinnals and her Director of Amazing, Kathryn Arce, it is far and away the best conference for those in the wedding business.  If you would like to read more about the conference, just take a look at the wonderful recaps and insights posted by Liene Stevens, Jasmine Star, Harmony Walton, Ami Elizabeth and Tom McCallum with many many more to follow, I am sure.

My biggest takeaway, applicable to all creative businesses is, to paraphrase Rebecca, Cindy Novotny, Carley Roney and Colin Cowie: change, be changed or be rendered obsolete (and broke).  You could literally see each of the speaker’s minds at work on what the next version of their business is going to look like.  Whether it is Cindy talking about how she constantly innovates at her restaurant (i.e., offering her golf crazed clientele an opportunity to go to the Masters), Carley talking about The Knot’s new initiatives in China, or Colin talking about his new date-specific wedding newsletter.  The audience too was a reflection of the innovation on stage.  Rosalind Bordo and Siri Eklund of Two Bright Lights presented some of their findings from a fantastic industry survey they recently conducted.  Among the most powerful statistics was the overwhelming success of those businesses using inspiration board technology to market their businesses relative to those that do not.  Hard for me to imagine any creative business NOT using inspiration boards after seeing the numbers.  The days of impersonal, unrelated communication with potential (and actual) clients are behind us.  Personal, related dialogue is here, thankfully, to stay.

What was also apparent is that we are all on uncertain ground.  Truly, no one knows where we will be a year from now, let alone five.  However, what is equally apparent is that trends are forming that I believe will only get stronger.  Among the biggest is the idea that design and production are diverging, leaving very little room for those that are trying to straddle both.  If you are a producer without the vertical integration and analytical capability of Todd Fiscus of Todd Events, Byron Boone of Heffernan Morgan Design, or Warren Dietel of Puff n’ Stuff Catering, you are going to get run over unless you can get to their scale quickly and effectively.  But trying to reach that scale might prevent you from acquiring the true design capabilities necessary to communicate with Todd, Byron or Warren.  Talk with Todd Avery Lenahan for five minutes and hear about his staff of fifteen who work all day long to provide developers the information they need to complete one of his designs and you will know just how much there is to be done behind the scenes if you are to be a designer.  In this divergence though, there exists enormous opportunity on both sides.  Producers will be able to extend their reach into new territories and markets. Designers will be able to go global on a scale we have not ever seen before.

It does not stretch the imagination to believe that Todd Avery Lenahan could be the next great event designer (on a global par with Colin and Preston) if he chose to be.  Nor would it shock me if Todd Events became the producer of all events (not just weddings) for The Ritz Carlton at every one of their hotels in the United States.  Less obvious are the opportunities that will exist when either of these ideas (or something like them) becomes a reality.  J.R. Simplot’s story is largely dependent on McDonald’s but no less important.

The beauty of a conference like Engage!10 is that it is simultaneously the catalyst and the facilitator.  Rebecca is singularly genius at putting before the audience a vision of what can be in the wedding business and making sure that the room is filled with those in a position and with a desire to do something about it.  The Breakers cannot come soon enough.

Multiple Business Lines

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Many creative businesses have more than one business line.  For instance, many interior designers own a retail store; stationers provide graphic design; event designers are also florists; and photographers shoot video.  I wrote last time about making each of these creative businesses very distinct from the other.  In this post, I would like to go even further: each of your businesses must be able to stand on its own and you must act in each as if the other did not exist.

Last point first: if you try to mush everything together (it is one company after all), you will wind up robbing from Peter to make Paul look good and vice-versa.  For instance, if you are an interior designer and operate a retail store, you might be tempted to not charge your usual designer percentage on the items you sell the client from your retail store AND to discount your design fee because you are counting on selling the client many items from your retail store.  Inevitably, your client buys the items somewhere else or makes you severely discount the items you sell from your store.  You lose on both counts.  However, if the same designer acted as if each of her other businesses did not exist, there would not be a problem.  She would charge her percentage on all items and not discount her fee or her items beyond what is usual and customary.  Just because you have another business line does not change the necessity of that business to have its own integrity.

And without forcing each of your businesses to justify its own existence, you will probably talk yourself into a money pit, or worse, threaten your core business.  For instance, if you are florist that has a retail shop and an event business, you might be tempted to view the minimal money you make on events as a way to offset overhead at the retail shop.  You might be right, except, in the vast majority of cases, you will have to bring in extra staff and/or pay overtime for events, find appropriate workspace and not be able to garner enough buying power with the event business in the flower market to make a real difference in your overall cost of flowers. Again, you lose on both counts.  Your event business would not exist without your retail business and your retail business suffers at the hands of the event business.

All of this is not to say that there are not reasons, beyond financial, to justify a business.  Sometimes a (core) business may make little money or even lose some (or a lot).  Take a look at just about every fashion label out there: couture loses a fortune but drives mass and licensing.  However, it is fools play to not have the discipline to assign a value the not or not-so-profitable business line brings to the profitable.  The graveyard of creative business is littered with those that justified their activities in the name of brand value.  Without the discipline of forcing each line in your creative business to stand on its own with SOME assumption of the value of one to the other, you will not have the ability to know when to say when or, better, when enough is enough.

For those of you with multiple business lines, it is easy to say one hand washes the other.  Please just remember: at the end of the day each hand still has to be clean.

Have You Journaled?

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Tomorrow will be ten days since my post on Journaling.  I hope I inspired some of you to start writing and I want to offer to work through your pages with you.   So here’s the deal:

Scan your pages (all of them, as is) and email them to me at sean@thebusinessofbeingcreative.com.  Make sure I have all of your contact information.  After I have had the chance to read them and check out your business on-line, we will have a call for an hour more or less to talk about your pages and the issues confronting your business.  I know that many of you probably did not get started the day I wrote the post so I will keep the offer open until Monday, May 31st.  There has to be ten consecutive days of pages. So, no, you do not get to start now to take advantage of my offer, you have to have already started.

It goes without saying that, as with all of my clients, anything you share is completely confidential.

For those of you who choose to share, thank YOU very much in advance.

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