The Business of Being Creative

Dog whistles are what is assumed as we say something other.  Racism, sexism, any kind of ism really masked in undercurrents of judgement of other.  2020 has been the apex of all things dog whistle for just about anything you can think of, even science and scientific discovery.

For creative businesses, heightened emotionality on all sides has only exploded dog whistles between clients and creative businesses sure but even within colleague communities and employer-employee relationships.  It is the virus (term used intentionally) that rips at the fabric of creative business every day and is something that needs to be exposed and contained as much as humanly possible.  The cure is it is with most things is the light of day and frank conversation with deep clarity of expression.

Not only is it not enough to act professionally, creative business owners have to move far past professional to even get credibility that is mostly assumed for other professions.  Would you ever talk to your doctor, lawyer, accountant the way some clients speak to you and your team?  Of course not.  While this is self-inflicted pain with poor business models and dramatic underpricing of the art created, it is also about perception of value and its delivery. Subtle wrenching of power or effort to marginalize is the underbelly and it is the obligation of every creative business to just say no.  Bring the bias to the light.  Examples abound, but I will point to three areas: money, design and “I made you, you owe me.”

Money.  If you are getting flustered when money conversations start happening, then know that most of the conversation is about power much more than money.  When I ask you how much, you have to tell me how much YOU are worth as much as the thing you will be producing.  Many times you get to relate your worth to the thing, but you still have to justify THAT value (why 15% and not 10%?).  Here is the point: you are NOT a) a jerk, b) non-responsive, c) stupid, d) not professional, or e) flighty by asserting your expertise.  If a client asks what you cost before you can establish that they are willing to pay for what “it” will cost, there is no point to answering the question.

By the way, it is never a question of afford, it is a question of willing.  Clients all have the wherewithal to engage you (and if they do not, why exactly are you talking?), it is whether they choose to spend it with you is the real question.  This is where power comes in.  If you answer the question of what you cost before establishing they are willing to pay for what “it” costs because one of the above reasons are running through your head, you have subtly, insidiously, yet demonstrably ceded your expertise to the client who is not, in fact, the expert.  Please stop doing that as it serves no-one, least of all your client. 

What 2020 has to teach you is that the world does not need amateurs pretending to be artists, it needs professionals who own the responsibility of transformation.  You meet that responsibility with permission to take the next step until you are finished.  No more no less.  No permission, no step.

Production budget first, the cost of your creative business second. Next, design.  Ideas are ephemeral, options today bordering on limitless. If you believe in blue, there can be a wonderful argument to be made for red.  Who cares?  You believe in blue, have sold blue, value blue and are willing to stake your reputation on blue. It ends there — your clients, colleagues and employees alike get to believe in blue or they do not.  Again, here is where the power thing comes in.  “I will not pay for the blue couch, I want a red couch”. The idea is that the impact on your design of a change from blue to red is up to the client when it is not. You and only you get to decide the significance of the change and it is almost always irrational, meaning two designers might come to exactly the opposite conclusion — “Meh, the red couch, no big deal” vs. “OMG, the red couch kills everything.”  You can then see the slippery slope to design marginalization, if not oblivion.  See above about asserting your expertise.  Standing in the position of saying the red couch is thermonuclear (or not) to your design is EXACTLY what you get paid for.  If you give up the position, so too your intrinsic value.  Again, please stop doing that as it not only serves no-one, but undermines the fabric of the very industry you so dearly love.  Today, more than ever, if your work is based on your vision, it has to matter or it is illusion.  Placebos stop working once they are exposed as placebos.  Do not be that artist.

Last, the “I made you” zombie.  Most creative businesses have had patrons, those that helped you get to where you wanted to go as an artist.  Sometimes these are amazing relationships where the purity of the work remains and you are fairly paid each time.  What I am talking about is where it slips into an expectation of “you owe me” because of the past.  Here is the point: if you sucked, there would never be a next time.  The reason there is a next time is because your work was brilliant for what the client needed.  End of story.

Will you be better the next time?  Sure — if you are not promising to improve on today tomorrow, you should quit.  A big break is valuable, but, once proven you belong on the stage, you need not keep paying for the break.  The proverbial genie is out of the bottle because you are that good.  See above statement about expertise (applies here more than anywhere else).  If someone has market power, they deserve to be paid for that power — i.e., an interior designer getting a trade discount from a production partner they buy a ton from, a wedding planner getting a discount on rentals she might purchase for many of her events.  Even for these players though, there has to be an explicit understanding that there will be a future purchase, else no discount/preferential treatment.  Still though, I see artists giving over their power to patrons who no longer are, compromising themselves and everyone around them daily.  Please stop. 

In a world where yesterday is truly irrelevant, you have to understand that tomorrow begs you to leap forward onto (or further into) the stage you most belong on.  Those who choose to take credit for you success are not just ballast to your balloon, they are the ones who will rip the fabric until the air can no longer hold.  You not only have to be free to be who you are today but have the imagination for what you will be tomorrow.  I will say it again, yesterday is beyond irrelevant.

For the most part, bias can be exposed if only artists can demonstrate how the bias jeopardizes the power of the art, the ability to say, “Here, I created this for you” and to say it purely, with integrity and not a shred of doubt that it is yours and yours alone to say.  I have said it thousands of times — if your clients could see what you see, do what you do, they would.  COVID-19 slaps us all in the face with this reality.  Since clients cannot create your world but want to inhabit it, they choose to come to your world to receive its largess. No sense making your world look like theirs, especially today.  Be the professional in the room, know what “it” will cost to create the container and then create as you will earning what you need to do only your best.  It can be that simple if you allow it to be.  Sirens’ voices are seductive for a reason though and are perilous indeed.

The earth is not flat.  You can show me all of the mathematical formulas that “prove” that it is and you will convince yourself of a knowable untruth.  For the rest of us, we have to waste our time justifying what has been known for thousands of years and proven, truly proven, innumerable ways.  But the time-suck of upending wilful ignorance is not without cost.  It prevents us all from the hard-thinking of what to do about our round earth and its relationship to itself and the cosmos as a sphere.

Let us take this notion of having to suffer fools/wilful ignorance a step further, say to your creative business.  We are long past the point when the pain of COVID can be considered temporal.  The Phoenix has already burned for so many and yet there are those that cling to the notions of yesterday.  Everything from how we learn to how we interact to how we even play sports is indelibly changed because of our (non) response to the virus.

I have to say that I am incredibly saddened by just how many creative business owners refuse to even consider another way today; refuse to acknowledge that their (in)actions are part of the problem of marginalization running rampant throughout all creative businesses; and refuse to acknowledge the depth the problem of marginalization is in creative business, no doubt happening pre-COVID, but now beyond rampant post.  Pretty is dead and if you are in the business of selling pretty, unless you are capable of massive scale (i.e., Wayfair, Amazon or KnotWeddingWire), you are in for an unbelievable world of pain — hit on all sides: price, competition, and viability.  The machine is your competition and it is only going to get better exponentially.  Moore’s Law matters everywhere in technology, not just speed of computing but especially when it comes to artificial intelligence (yes, click on this link and if you are not really understanding how AI is coming for so much of your creative business then you are being wilfully ignorant).

If I handed you a scalpel, told you to watch a few videos on YouTube, maybe cut into a few oranges, you probably would not think yourself a cardiac surgeon and would not dare to hold yourself out as one. And those that would would be exposed very quickly by anyone who cared to check the background of the person they were allowing to physically invade their body.

So why oh why oh why do creative businesses allow those who either cannot or are not yet ready to stand in the same light as they who are uniquely qualified to do the very thing the client seeks? Simple. Fear and disrespect for the value you offer. While these characteristics are problems in the pre-information, pre-COVID age, today they represent the seeds of demise to so many brilliant and fantastic creative businesses today, both established and on the rise.

Specifically, I am talking to those of you who have been in business for more than three years pre-COVID. For the most part, after three years, you are past the novice stage, have garnered real clients with real budgets who deeply respect what it is you are there to provide. If this is you and your creative business, you matter. You are the leader. You are the future of your industry. You can do better. You need to do better. You have to do better. For all of us.  Now is the time to retrench, reconsider and reconstitute what it means to be in the business of transformation.  Look at the story of AirBnB and how they went from all things to back to knowing that people want the privacy of a home they can travel to by car.  Bread and butter to them and opportunity to use their platform to service the needs of those that are desperate for the outlet.  As the WSJ article points out, AirBnB is poised to go public in November at a value of $30 Billion.  Take it as a lesson to find humility, rediscover why you and your art matters and get to work honing that value.  Or do not, your choice.

After three years in business, you should know who your ideal client is, know how best to serve her and what is required financially of your client to do great work. Adjust accordingly for our changed world.  The paradigm is still there though.  She wants to be seen, heard and honored for the life she seeks to invest in.  Whether it is a ten dollar client or a ten million dollar client, it does not matter so long as you know that she is YOUR client. And if you do not know, please accept that that is not good enough. Today, more than ever we need relationship, introspection, empathy, sympathy, connection and community to resolve a desired ethos.  In short, we need you to know everything about her, including, most of all, the underneath, the ephemeral so you can do outrageously well for her above all others.  Heightened emotionality is opportunity to do better work.  Ignore the fact of the previous statement as you would the fact of the round earth.  And for those of you that know the truth of heightened emotionality, please stop suffering fools, the lowest common denominator goes to the computer and they are not your competition.  Live the pressure of emotional expectations and earn the just rewards.  It is your future, own it.

Here is my fear and why I continue to be so stirred: in today’s information age and all things post COVID digital, when your clients cannot instantly and intrinsically perceive the value you, your art and your creative business offer them (like they would a cardiac surgeon), they will seek to marginalize you, your art and your creative business. They will reduce you to the value of the thing you provide and you will always, always be subject to those willing to provide that thing for less.  It just does not have to be that way today and forever more.  However, if we wind up on the other side of pretty, it will be entirely the fault of creative businesses and the decision to be the regular kind today when the challenge is to be anything but.  Own that you, your art and creative business matter because you inhabit a world your clients need to touch to feel whole.  Respect that this is your reality and is, in fact, reality.  Act accordingly.

For those of you who have earned the right to be outrageous in how you create for your clients, please live there without compromise.  It is your obligation today more than ever.  Nothing about COVID changed that, if anything COVID only exploded it. 

If you are willing to redefine how your creative business works to do its best work, then you set the stage for those that follow. We all crumble when those who should be paragons act with intransigence or, worse, with callous disregard for their place in their industry. Sure, you may lose to those that are determined to meet the lowest common denominator. But if you give in, we have all already lost. Just a matter of time. So please go the other way. We all rise when you dare to be iconic and invite, nay demand, others like you to act similarly. That is how voices rise and great art is manifested at every level. For me, it is where I find hope for what a post-COVID world can be for creative business.  The responsibility of evolution demands that you thumb the nose of myopia so that we can live beyond today’s understanding.  To do this work however, we truly have to quit debating whether the earth is a sphere.  Suffering fools helps no one, least of all the fool.

Here we are in 2020, the CF of all CF’s and yet I still see so many creative business owners trying desperately to be the regular kind, the pre-digested, easy-to-understand business model that does everything in its power to ignore you experience, professionalism and wisdom.  The idea is that if you dumb your creative business down enough clients will say ok.  Maybe if we just took care of the forest floors, California would not have burned this year.  Grrrrr.

I am on a mission to wipe the word “Package” from the vocabulary of every creative business.  Add to that list “Inventory”, “Offerings” or any other descriptor that denotes a standard grouping or bundle of services.

I actually do understand the impulse and desire to create an easily identifiable structure for clients.  I am sure your thinking goes that if they know what you offer, then the better chance you will land the client.  No, no and absolutely positively no.  Things can be complicated AND you can do the work to explain them easily as would any fifth grader.  Do not make the mistake though that you are selling to a fifth grader when, in fact, you are selling to a patron who wants to know why exactly they need to care about your art as you do.

When you talk about what you do in terms of “Packages”, “Services”, etc., you debase the connection you as an artist need to establish with your client and make it all about your ability to accomplish tasks.

Industry standard offerings belong where the underlying product and/or service is the same: your internet provider, utility or cell phone service. They have no place in creative businesses

A short cut that undermines everything.  Packages focus on stuff and what will be done for the client.  It connotes sameness and choice when neither could be further from the truth.  Package is about process and what matters to you.  Use those words instead.

On the other side of the coin, here are terms, concepts and industry norms all creative businesses need to embrace: a design statement, the one thing that matters, cost of production vs. investment in your creative business, and, most important the promises you intend to make to earn trust and deliver your best work.  Your core, yes, is always timeless and eternally resonant; its expression, however, demands that you embrace all that today’s world offers.  Tomorrow’s too.

Creative business is the happy business. Even if you do commercial work. You exist to transform. You transform by surprising, delighting, energizing, inspiring clients with what you intend for them. They live in the afterglow once your creation comes to life.

So why oh why would you ever make the business of your creativity pure drudgery? Or worse, boring, stiflingly rigid with nonsensical agreements that do nothing for your business or your clients? You wouldn’t you say? Were that true, I would happily be done writing. Instead, I see a sea of packages, form agreements, boilerplate everything and I literally want to scream. I can only imagine what your clients feel. And in a world littered with emotionality caused by all things COVID, natural disasters, social unrest and climate change, same same is just not going to cut it.  Do the work or please, for the sake of all creative business, exit stage right.

And if you insist that you must have packages, because, hey Sean, you do not know my market, my industry (blah, blah, blah buh blah), then please know that you are only allowed two (high and low) and the high package must be AT LEAST three times as expensive as the low one. Also, if a ten year old cannot understand what they get for their money and why they should pay for it, start over. You have to be able to define what your creative business stands for at every level. Your packages support your definition; they, themselves, are not the definition of value. Again, do the damn work of defining value promised, value delivered and when.  There are NO shortcuts.

Speaking of why a client should pay for what you offer, do not forget about when you offer it. Time is relative and has relative value. For pure design, time is a silly measure of value. Flux Capacitor Issue (not linking, I have given the example many times and it is more fun to Google if you do not know). However, production of any design is a measurable event and can be estimated as to who and how much is needed to effectively produce the creation. For production, getting paid for your and your creative business’ time makes total sense.

The point is: your creative business offers different things at different points of a project. Stop getting paid as if you do one thing always. It does not mean you have to change the method of payment calculation (i.e., flat fee vs. hourly), it just means you have to clearly define the value proposition that exists at the particular stage of a project. Ahem, the value proposition needs to make sense. Or you can let your mind-numbing package/hourly rates do the work. Your choice.

Next, quit making the final promise and instead focus on checkpoint promises. Who cares if clients will love it in the end? A) Of course they will or you would not have a business; and B) even if they do not, what will you do about it then, the proverbial pooch will have already been screwed. Instead, give your word about the next step, give it again, then keep it.  It really truly is about making outrageous promises and keeping them all the while honoring the outrageous demands you make to keep the outrageous promise.  Incremental promises kept along the way make the final one inevitable.

Beware the cruel temptress of getting it done. It is too easy to just let it all slide, to just focus on getting the project finished. Everything in the name of moving on.

Slow down, especially in our world of instant everything. Evolving relationship, deepening trust, building investment are the foundation of transformation. Let your business be creative. It is there to support your creativity, not be the hurdle you and your art need to overcome to find success. Invest in the intimacy that matters – being the steady hand in the face of uncertainty. You need your business to be a reflection of that steady hand and the only way to do that is to have it be a reflection of who you and your art actually are. Make sense and make promises. Then keep them. No better recipe to create happy than that.

In the spirit of moving on once and for all and having the CF that is 2020 actually mean something, how about we finally, finally stop saying things just because or because everyone else says or does them and has forever.  Three words/concepts that need to be eviscerated from creative business forever and ever.  And if anyone uses these words — clients, employees, consultants (especially consultants), colleagues, please stop them and tell them to use another word/concept. Words matter and have connotations that bring us somewhere else.  These words/concepts just bring us backwards.  Community, promise, creation, custom, related, purposeful, transformative, investment — this is the language of creative business, how about we use these instead?

Package. One more time.  You are not an all-inclusive hotel. The notion of saying “Here’s what you get” sucks. See above. You are an artist. They get your creative business to create incredible art for them in the best way you know how for which you are the best in the world for the client who seeks it. Telling potential clients they get what everyone else gets is exactly the opposite of what you want your clients to think.

Full Service/Full Design. We are a full service “____________” (you fill in the blank). As opposed to the self-service, sort of do-it-yourself shop down the street? If a client says “I just need”, they do not need a creative business. A creative business, ahem, creates. Specifically, it creates what a client cannot. You are not a helper, you are an artist. Act like one and do not apologize or remind someone that you are full anything. You just are.

Lists of Services. In the same spirit of Package and Full Service, giving me a list of what is included when a client hires your creative business starts a negotiation you do not want to have.  No list of what a client gets is ever going to make (or even help) them understand the power of what you are going to create for them. The power of your art and your creative business has to be communicated intimately. Meaning human being to human being. It IS personal. There is not a full service, package list of services that will get around that.

If 2020 has taught you nothing but one thing, let it be this: sweat the details.  Deeply, profoundly, empathetically and sympathetically understand what you are saying and to whom. Say it with intention and direction. The dialogue is there for you and your creative business first, client second. Pretending it is the other way around does not help anyone. You are the guide and you are there to transform. Clients are seduced by what you and your creative business has done for others, but they leap when they can see what the guidance and transformation will look like for them.  Clarity and conviction require intimate conversation and responsibility for the challenges ahead.  Purpose, intention and integrity live there.  Packages, Full Design, List of Services and all things predigested simply do not.  Fools will be fools but you, your art and your creative business need not play the part ever again.  Abundance abounds if and only if artistry and creation is manifest.  The rest deserves its own fate to the scrapheap of history.

We are in chaos.  Here in the United States, fires (I live in Northern California), hurricanes, COVID, distance learning, politics (Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and the abject ugliness of what is going on in Washington) and on and on and on.  Many days I feel like I am in the orange haze of darkness that surrounded me but a week ago in real time; and I know I am very much not alone.  Yes, some creative businesses are thriving in this time, but even they are feeling the effects of the other disasters around them.  The most depressing, infuriating and frustrating part is that there is no end in sight and no clear path to how we will even get there.  Clarity to the myopia of the moment is fleeting at best.

John Lennon was right: “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”  However, for this moment, life, for me is when I am busy trying to figure out if there can be a plan at all for my business and that of my clients.  If I try to not plan, not think about how to get from point A to point B, I am 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.  The only way through is to imagine a way through and if that way turns out to not be the way to imagine another and another if required.  The challenge to grit — purposeful intention with unbinding faith and conviction without consideration of any certain outcome.  Maybe it is not how you get through, but it is how I do and I would suspect for most creative business owners, it is and ought to be too.  

My resolution in the midst of this exploding chaos is to continue 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.   

Especially today, 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 blind you 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).  Of course, we all have to eat and that is no easy task today, but if we cannot give ourselves permission to imagine a future, how exactly will we be able to manifest it?

No, I am not recommending 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.

Nature abhors a vacuum and the wreckage around us will compel change.  It just will.  The scars will remain though and we should remind ourselves of what is the best of us appreciating that we are the sum of all things.  Perfection is not only the enemy of great, it is the demise of other.  Other is our very humanness capable of unspeakable horror coupled with the ability to learn and say no more.

I find it equally ironic and horrifying that modern communication tools have become the very thing that has divided us, made us more primal, less able to confront challenges together.  Broken.  And make no mistake, the more it breaks the better it is for those who supply the tools.  I suppose it is the underbelly of the long tail.  And yet.

Despite the difficulty of real connection, real learning, deep community, we must persist, if only in the idea that your art and your creative business demands it of you.  Resilience does not mean you are right, it means you have a compass to guide you and that compass will lift all around you, not because they see the world as you do, only in that they can see the beauty in how you do.  Darkness is always available as justification for stagnation and destruction.  Light is the opportunity for movement and is fleeting, ephemeral and ever evolving.  I loathe the idea of good and evil because we are all things. Art exists to show us our better nature.  If this is your business let it also be your responsibility to better, to strive towards the light and revelation, acknowledged for the effort alone.

Health practitioners (Western and Eastern) manipulate your mind and body in all ways for the purpose of wellness.  All healers seek to improve the quality of your very vitality.

So the idea that manipulation is always negative is a misnomer.  That said, manipulation to convince somebody of a half-truth, a facade, or worse a lie is worthy of its tarnished and awful reputation.

Sometimes it is really, really hard to tell the difference between good and bad manipulation; especially if there is a power/knowledge imbalance.  Healers make such great foils for both because we want to believe in their ability to “fix” us.  Same goes with anyone we would want to bestow our faith and liberty too.  Just think about the amount of personal information you provide every single day to technology companies (how many of you really decline the cookies??) so that you can enjoy the benefits of their creation.  Simultaneously, you enjoy the curation the information brings but feel suckered by all of the marketing that comes your way.

The whole point is honest intention.  Purposeful action with the direction towards creation. Faith.

If your study of human behavior is intended to game the system with your crappy business model, please go home.  The idea that sales should be easy belies the idea that the process is not.  Clients need to invest in the ability to get to the first step, nothing more.  Quit selling the mountaintop as if that is the end all be all.  The shiny penny is the manipulation and that is the difference between good and evil.

Your portfolio, your promise that it will be fantastic, to just trust you is the ultimate in showmanship and snake-oil sales tactics.  The entire point of your creative endeavor is that the end is uncertain.  Simply, how can you know what will be if you have not created it yet?  No matter how many times you have done it before, you are doing it for this client, this time, as they, and they alone, deserve and require.  If you want to sell a product, even if that product has a thousand permutations (hey, a particular model of a luxury car comes in many colors, with tons of different options) it is still a product.  It is what it is.  Art is not a product, it is a journey towards discovery for both the artist and the patron.

As with all relationships, there are phases in the artist/patron relationship that reveal the depth of personality and, hopefully, offer more moments for intimacy, empathy and reflection.  Manipulating your client to skirt some, ignore others and hyper-focus on some is the work of an amateur.  Today, more than ever, we do not need amateurs pretending to be professional artists.  We need professionals to own the gravitas of the day, to explain the singularity of the moment in relation to all moments that have and will come.  Yes, be the guide so that all can own the journey.

Even in these insane times, never forget that the creative business is the happy business, the purposeful choice to create joy for your clients so that they might be transformed.  The great responsibility that comes with that is the bias to believe in the best outcome.  No one wants to say their wedding sucked, the image is boring or their home design is horrible, so there is a vulnerability to those that would prey on this bias. The power imbalance gets exploited and the journey becomes a death march to the inevitable end.  Ugh.

We can do so much better.  How about we teach each and every client to simply buy the first step with the knowledge and understanding that every other step will be earned with purposeful intention and deep respect for the decisions to be made.  Each decision will build on the next until there is completion.  Of course, there will be ups, downs and all-arounds.  That is the nature of the beast and completely besides the point.  Positive manipulation is to shape clay for all to enjoy the sculpture, not an exercise in ego and self-indulgence that may or may not work out.  Standing in your own light does not mean being an oracle, it means conviction on the ground upon which you find yourself.  There will always be charlatans and slimy used car salespeople and the dark side of manipulation lives in your basest instinct.  My prayer is that the world today will never excuse such behavior and will force you to be the artist you actually are.  Shape today to earn permission to shape tomorrow.  Let that be more than enough.

If you read last week’s post or listened to my podcast this week, you know I challenged you to quit.  I asked you to consider why you are persisting and if was because of shame or guilt or even blind rage masking as determination, to reconsider. This week the other side.

Even if you are working now, perhaps even swamped, the world is shifting underneath your feet.  As I write this in Northern California, Cate and I joked this morning that the sky, with its smoke, fog and otherworldliness makes us feel like we are in the middle of the peach in James And The Giant Peach.  So strange and discombobulating.  Such is the nature of our time.

The real question in front of all of us is what tomorrow looks like.  Some creative industries will be decimated — events, hospitality, specifically restaurants.  Some will just raise higher like architecture and interior design.  And those businesses related to all of these creative businesses like air travel, fashion, even entertainment will be redefined for a very long time to come.

So what are you going to do?  Easy, choose the one thing that matters.  Why do you create? What drives you to see the world differently than those you seek to serve?  What you serve is always subservient to why.

Now for the expression.  The only thing that COVID-19 and all of the upheaval it has wrought is to beseech you to upend crappy model.  Please please please stop putting lipstick on a pig.  Which would you rather focus on —patrons or testers?  Spend all your marketing on getting the next client or delighting those you already have?  I completely understand project specific work.  But does it have to be your whole business?  And, no, I am not talking about licensing or  some other side-hustle that will bring in ancillary money relative to your core business.  I am talking about reconstructing your model to provide for a different relationship to the art you wish to create for a living.

Meal kit delivery businesses will exceed over $19 billion this year.  You subscribe so you can get food sent to your door that you then make yourself.  What?? The value of not having to go to the grocery to buy the exact same products, look up the recipe and then prepare it is worth $19 billion?  Why yes it is because having the professional make/show you how to make your food is worth it. 

If you are a chef, and you can use your restaurant as an effective marketing tool to sell your at home preparations, why wouldn’t you?  Because you are mostly trying to figure out how to serve the first time diner in largely the same way as you serve the true patron.  Yes, the true patron gets the nice table, acknowledgement from the staff and a few freebies, but real tangible value beyond the infrequent diner?  Not so much.  Until the chef acknowledges the true value of a patron and offers ways for that patron to join a deep community designed to serve ONLY patrons like her, the chef/restauranteur has no chance to make meaningful changes to his/her model.

I am not saying that meal kit delivery is the salvation of the restaurant business by any stretch.  What I am saying is that the possibility of redefining models, or better said, destroying bad models is most certainly there.  We just have to be willing to go there.

Our culture has been defined in the information age and will continue to be defined by the value of idiosyncratic choice.  The better our machines have gotten, the better our choice.  Some do it better than others (Netflix yes, Audible not so much).  The trend though is to continue to allow the machine to work diligently to know us and offer us ever better choices tailored to our own preferences.  When I was a kid, Saturday nights at 9 starting in the Fall, it was time for The Love Boat.  If you missed it, it was gone forever (other than in random Summer reruns).  Fast forward to today, we can consume content in any quantity at any time we want and most often the content lives for a really long time for us to get to it when we can/desire. 

How can the instant everything mindset NOT have an impact on your creative business?  Infinite choice needs curation and yet you choose to say only when you need me, my art and my creative business?  That is inverted.  You provide constant curation so that those who seek to choose look to you provide curation.

Now, more than ever, is the time to question everything about why you do what you do, starting with how you get paid to create.  Every single model for just about every creative business I can think of is based on a pre-digital world, where information was scarce and communication tools lacking.  It took a global pandemic to finally blow these models to smithereens.  For that, and that alone, I will always be grateful.  Nature abhors a vacuum though and the real question is what will fill the void?  Might I leave with this: the safe choice is not, so start over with the singular idea of what really matters and rebuild from there.

Fall is around the corner.  For most creative businesses, that usually means busy time, and, for some, it still does.  Awesome for those of you in this position.  This post is not for you specifically, though I would highly suggest you keep reading for two reasons: 1) there but for the grace of God go I; and 2) empathy for the suffering of so many artists is required of all as we look to turn the page to tomorrow.

We in the United States really did hope that most of the pain of COVID-19 would have been behind us.  We were wrong.  The suffering and uncertainty continues and the very notion that you will find your way back to the art you love so much is ever fleeting.  Yes, there is another side and we will get there.  Who cares?  You do not have it to make it there – financially, physically, even spiritually.

Two responses: one GFY Sean, you do not know and we will do what it takes.  Or, the second, I am so ashamed, embarrassed and distraught over all that has been lost that I just cannot face letting it go.  Both are real and I honor each.  However, for those that are defiant, might I say that defiance feels strong as you are frozen, even as the earth melts underneath your feet.

How about an alternative? Own all of it. It is your fault (and nobody’s).  Be scared, embarrassed, ashamed, even humiliated.  Now put it all aside, money, emotion, expectation, obligation and just ask yourself if you can create today in a way that is nourishing to you and everyone around you.  Or are you just trying to stay alive until you can?

As the goalpost is still in flux, the depth of uncertainty needs its due.  It means that the only question to ask yourself is whether your art matters, mostly to you, any more.  If it does not, your answer is clear.  Stop.  Today.

Quitting is messy no matter how you do it.  There is no nice way to end what you have spent a lifetime building when that end is not really your choice (and all too often, even when it is).  So just stop and deal with the mess.

I am not tone deaf.  The reality of a financial, physical and spiritual crisis awaits.  However, the ability to truly let go, acknowledging all of the shame, embarrassment, upset and upheaval is the very space you are going to need to find your way back to center.  What do you want to share with the world and why?  Art truly does transcend its medium if you allow it to be so.  It was never about the thing and it never will be.

The certainty of pain is almost always more tolerable than true uncertainty.  Think about that for a second.  If only you do this that or the other thing, then things will be ok.  Not, I am dying a little bit each day, my voice a little quieter, more generic, more diluted, and it is only getting worse.  The first denies you the permission to say enough until it is forced on you, the second asks you to make a choice.  Choose to stop.

Choose to stop even if you can make it to the other side, limp along in the GFY Sean realm until the proverbial sun shines again.  The reason: you will be a shadow of yourself competing against those that are not.  Zombies do not change the world, artists do.  No glamour in being the starving artist when no one can see the path for the medium you are starving for.

The path to freedom is never for the faint of heart.  Why should the path to this freedom be any different? You were called to introspection the moment you decided to turn your art into a business.  You were asked what you wished to share and who you wished to share it with.  You are still asked those questions, just now you are asked if it is possible. Too often the answer is that it is not possible.

Choosing freedom means living in uncertainty.  Uncertainty brings opportunity and the ability to tell a great new story.  Okay, but the Phoenix has to burn.  Hope of what might be as justification will just dig you a deeper hole.  The future you imagined never was, so now you have to give yourself the ability, the possibility, nee the desire to dream again.  Choose yourself, choose your gift, choose art.  Stop today.  The rest will come.

Here we are in distance learning 2.0 in Northern California.  One thing about home schooling is that the natural problem solving that happens in physical interaction with teachers and fellow students becomes constrained because of the screen.  It just is that students are left to solve things on their own more than ever.  Of course, I think this is simultaneously awesome and not.  Awesome because it pushes kids to do the work to understand BEFORE they show up.  Not because frustration leads to more frustration and a feeling of hopelessness.

One of the biggest factors is what my wife pointed out to my son as he struggled with his math.  You cannot eat the whole sandwich at once, you have to take it in bites. When so much is available instantly, there is a huge push for the whole sandwich, to move faster and faster to the end.  You would think that the pandemic would have slowed this energy since there are limitations everywhere, but in so many cases the opposite is true.

The allegory for creative business in today’s world is not lost on me at all.  Take small bites, find like items and solve those, then the next and the next.  Simple right?  Except it is not because it requires two things: patience to go through each step and the ability to suspend the influence of the next step of the problem.  Let us stick with a math problem.  How do you reduce (-5x^-2y)*(-2x³y^-2)?  Some of you can see the whole thing and just solve straight away. For the rest of us mere mortals, we have to break it down and first multiply the whole numbers (-5*-2=10), then x (add exponents 3+-2=1), then y (add exponents -2+1=-1), then know that a negative exponent is a positive exponent inverted to finally get the answer 10x/y.

Patience to solve each element in turn.  How much work do you spend making sure issues belong where they belong?  Really?  If you have blamed your client for anything in the last six months, might I tell you that you have not worked hard enough.  It is like blaming -5 for having an influence on y, when it really does not in and of itself.  The pandemic and the unwillingness to truly slow down and analyze its effect on each element of your creative business sends you down the path of its them not you.  We will just wait until this is over.  Nope.  All things have shifted — expectations, emotionality, deliverables and value.  If you do not take the time to at least separate out each element then how can you really believe meaningful change will happen?

Suspending influence.  Of course, -5 has an influence of y.  It is just that until you do the work with -2 you do not know that the influence will be 10 not really -5.  Once you have separated each element of your creative business you can work on it alone and then recombine it with everything once it has been contemplated.  How about something so basic as presenting your idea?  If you cannot meet in person, what happens now?  What will you craft to make your presentation as compelling as possible?  Now that you know what you have to do, how will you get paid for that presentation?  Same goes for production and reveal.  Now how to you put the pieces together?

And that is the problem with pivoting.  Inevitably it means you are eating the whole sandwich as you do not know the impact of each piece.  To which I say, slow the “F” down (yes, I owe my 9 year old a dime for the swear jar).  You are intentionally guessing as what might work.  Yes, a broken clock is right twice a day, does not mean I want to rely on it to give me meaningful information whenever I need it.

I get the pressure to perform, to create the Insta illusion that you have it all together.  Please give up that ghost and slow down to do the deep work of investigation necessary for you to solve the entire puzzle, knowing that the solution is inevitably fleeting.  And that is the whole point of the exercise.  If you slow down to separate each piece of your creative business (break it down however you like — businessish: sales, marketing, operations, finance (yawn) or the 4 transitions — potential to actual client, idea to design, design to production, production to reveal, or your way, do not really care), and analyze each in turn, you will have insight into how to solve tomorrow’s puzzle.  You likely will have to do each step again but you will have the tools to change the challenge but attack the problem in a similar way (or not).

I recently offered this advice to an interior design client as an example of all of the above.  Their firm has a deep investment in managing production of their designs as do all designers.  With the pressure to make it happen for clients in the time of COVID, how can managing production be reimagined as an intense marketing opportunity to demonstrate to clients the beauty of manifesting design?  They are world famous for installations (read the principal designer frequently sets the stage for incredibly high end auctions). Sure all of the logistics and product management still exist, but does it have to be matter of fact or even painful?  Is there any reason it cannot be something the client can look forward to hearing about on an ongoing basis?  Can production not only sustain trust but truly set the stage for installation?  The finale is ever more power if there is a sense of crescendo.

The beauty of the puzzle is that each piece matters even if the puzzle changes everyday.  Racing to the mountaintop misses the point of savoring the moment for what it is.  Fool’s gold.

I would cut off my pinkie toe if we could just skip 2020 and go on to whatever comes next. Just the idea of having lunch with my wife at our favorite restaurant without worrying about a mask or the virus or the fires or the injustice or the thousand other worries 2020 has wrought is fantastic and fantastical all at once.  I know we will get there one day but I also know just how far away that day is.

In the meantime, we have to live here and work to contemplate what will simultaneously get us to the other side and make today better than yesterday.  We are past the point of triage for all of the shocks we have felt this year.  Maybe a little PTSD and lingering trauma, but we have absorbed so much for so long that we are all just in it.  And I have loathed the term ‘new normal’ for as long as it has been out there.  Let’s just say that today’s reality is far more understood than it was back in April.

The question then is what comes next.  What can possibly make all of this pain, angst, agony and disruption worth it? To take a page from the Blue Angels, how about a debrief:

Grateful to be here.

First, opportunity.  Technology has been exposed as simultaneously limiting and wonderful.  Just think about what your world would have been like if the pandemic had come in 2005?  No smartphones, meaningful video technology, social media, e-commerce, etc. that would give us a chance to even try to shelter-in-place. The very idea that, given the breadth of access to the internet and its connectivity, that we can, in fact, connect with each other is miraculous.  And yet.

We are still at a moment in time when we are taking digital as a virtual version of analog.  Like newspapers simply reproducing its printed copy on-line as they did for far too long, while powerful blogs and Craigslist came along to undo them. The pandemic has shown us just how far we have yet to go to make digital its own experience, neither better or worse than physical, just different. 

A screaming example, education and its challenges.  Asking kids to stare at a screen for six hours a day so that school boards can measure effort is relying on the idea that time invested is a measure of success.  For the physical realm, sure.  Knowing how to be in a room together and manage our way through a shared experience is a powerful way to build our society.  But to learn what is on offer?  No way.  We can do better to challenge independent thought, inspire deep thinking and offer powerful conversation far more with technology than we are even attempting.  Time to toss the metric of time in favor of real problem solving.  How about we come up with projects on a topic and solve them?  Let teachers lead meaningful discussion on the topics they care about and assume (challenge?) students to gather the foundation on their own.  It is long past due to pay attention to what people like Seth Godin and Sir Ken Robinson have been talking about for years.

As for your creative business, it is forever changed.  Nobody can know for sure, but we can be confident that thirty to fifty percent of restaurants, in the U. S. for sure, maybe even globally are gone.  Yes, the pandemic is a monster cause.  However, the model of a largely single revenue stream based on people in a single environment for a limited time was breaking far before a pandemic.  Margins in the restaurant business have not changed forever and were/are only getting worse.  Meal replacement, better delivery services, expedited food service catered to particular palates and budgets, brand extension was a tsunami already forming pre-pandemic.  Here now. Same goes for any event driven single revenue stream business — social events, interior design, even architecture.  Value is at a premium and if yours is not compelling, there simply is no justification.

Equally though, I am loathe to the idea of a pivot.  We are past that — doing what you have to do to survive only to go back when you can.  Instead, I am about embracing a paradigm shift and living in that reality.  The idea of a sharing economy was a non-starter fifteen years ago.  Today, we have come to rely on the gig/sharing part of our economy more and more.  Whether we can build a sustainable new paradigm remains to be seen but I am fairly certain we can agree that the gig/sharing economy is not going anywhere anytime soon. Then, the notion of getting someone fantastic to execute your vision becomes ever more possible and expected. This too predated the pandemic.  What does it mean?  The divergence of creation and execution grows as does the tools for each.  The single use idea of outsourcing is also burgeoning.  Most of us do not need an in-house lawyer.  What else can be outsourced and even more what else can be developed to nourish creation?

Speaking of creation.  There are two components that are crazy important to simultaneously distinguish and integrate.  First, the essence of creation.  What can it be for what is on offer?  It can never be open-ended as that is simply fantasy.  No, it needs a container — budget, location, time, etc.  Like improvisation, the better the container, the better the creativity.  Within that container though, how far and deep can we go?  What sort of expectations can we create for clients and the meaning of the rewards of revelation? An expansive toolbox in a defined room brings untold results.  We have barely scratched the surface of that one. 

To go even further, the model of owning the idea so that you can then get paid for its use singularly is myopic.  If I can sign up to receive lectures from the greatest minds on the planet for one affordable monthly price, why can’t I have access to a library of singularly great creative ideas of any sort that I can incorporate into my work?  Shutterstock at the Bentley level?  Now that everyone’s portfolio is dated and, in so many cases, irrelevant, how about we use those elements that matter in a way that shares with all of us?  Nothing new here — license fees, royalties, etc. have been part of our world for most of the modern industrial era.  We crowdsource everything these days, why not ideas for your creative business?  

And specifically NO, I am not talking about lazy or derivative design, I am talking about standing on each other’s shoulders to be better and better than we ever could alone.  Do not even get me started on the role of artificial intelligence in this endeavor.  Imagine if the sum total of every design that might impact yours was at your fingertips to create your baseline. Where would you go then?  My point is that today we start on say the tenth floor and hope to get to the twentieth for our clients.  What happens when you are expected to start on the nineteenth?  How high will you go then?  Still think value and its specific delivery are not ripe for upending?

What is even more impressive is our ability to functionally link creation and execution in a more profound way.  When we know how it was done once instantly as we contemplate manifesting our own idea, we can import that knowledge into the fabric of creativity.  Your idea might not have ever been done before in the particular way you imagine, but the problem has been solved in so many tangential ways that solving it for the idea at hand becomes fluid.  When dream to build shortens, confidence explodes, perceived risk abates and we all go further.  Or go ahead with your Pinterest boards and Powerpoint presentations. A design library at the highest level, monetizable for all is right in front of us.  I pray we leap.

2020 has shown us that sometimes a dysfunctional model can continue but it will fall away quickly when stressed.  It has also shown us that functioning models depend on a much narrower environment than previously understood. Not so functional then.  It yields opportunity to break the model once and for all to set the stage for different. New metrics of success, new definitions of value, new expectations and new life.

The challenge: change one thing without regard to where you are.  Do it because you believe in its promise to you, your art and your creative business.  Charge monthly.  Create a library of ideas. Bridge the gap.  We get to tomorrow sooner if we are willing to release the promises yesterday can no longer keep.