The Business of Being Creative

I cannot tell you how many designers have told me that they want to create/license/sell products to go along with their core design business.  They want to leverage their brand.

I am all for it.  If someone wants to buy your lamp because you are a fabulous designer, fantastic.  My issue is that we all have to start somewhere and if you are not in the habit of being paid as a designer, then how exactly are we going to value the intrinsic nature of your design when you personally are not involved?

Semiotics is the study of signaling and non-verbal communication.  Many people much smarter than me have made semiotics their life’s work.  For creative business though, there really cannot be a higher study.  Oxymorons abound and semiotics are undone.  You are the best ultra-luxury interior designer in your market, but are half the cost of your competition.  You only do custom packages. You are a designer who does not charge a design fee. Mixed signals are no signals since we do not know what to think.

Signaling has always mattered because it is how we as a culture ascribe status and value and even purpose.  What we wear, what we drive, how we talk, where we live.  It all defines us, today more than ever.

When we are faced with an upheaval like the coronavirus, our usual signals go kablooey.  Usually, a jammed pool on Memorial Day weekend is a sign of celebration and relaxation.  This year it was a sign of protest to government and societal restriction that was met with heavy backlash by, you guessed it, the government.  And do not get me started with wearing a mask.

What does it mean for your creative business?  Your structure has to be representative of the story you want to tell tomorrow.  Back to the designer who wants to leverage her brand.  If she does not charge a material fee for the cost of creation, she is telling the world her creative talents have no value, only the product ultimately produced.  Good luck with that since there is A LOT of amazing product out there.  The brand is about design so the designer has to have value for being, ahem, a designer.

But you say, we have never done it that way.  See world upheaval from the coronavirus epidemic.  As you decide what is next for your creative business, you must set the stage by extracting value you most care about today.  Cue the ironies.

Most creative businesses are actually two, possibly three businesses.  Take a typical interior designer.  She is like an architect and must get paid for the conceptualization of what is to come.  She is like a contractor in that she must be responsible for the manifestation of the conceptualization and she is like a tradesperson (i.e., an electrician) responsible for supplying the actual materials and labor necessary to complete the work of manifesting the design.  If the semiotics of any of these are off, the house implodes.  If the design fee is too low, then the pressure will be to make up the margin with the overall size of the project (i.e., get as high a budget as possible), this, in turn, will drive down the value of in-house products since there might be more expensive alternative inventory outside of the in-house/custom pieces. And it all falls down…

The correction is in the signaling.  If you want to make a truly custom design, then you charge appropriately for that design alone, then you make sure the client is indifferent to the selection of in-house or selected (or even owned) items in that the management fee is what it is for all products of the design, then you drive the value of true custom for the price of selected items with in-house products.  Ergo the irony, you will sell more custom pieces the higher your design fee, not the other way around.  Semiotics is everything.

As you seek to rewrite your script in this incredible time, you will have to own your own semiotics and moor them in a way your clients can understand.  To do that, you really do need to know your underneath: why, exactly, are you paid to do what you do.  If a client could choose anyone, as most of your clients can, then why are they choosing you? It has never had anything to do with the final product as all professionals deliver in the end.  It is all about your story, that of your creative business and why clients are worth the investment in themselves by paying you and your creative business. The one thing that matters to you, your art and your creative business is eternal and never more necessary. From there you signal today’s value and earn the right to transpose that value into tomorrow’s adventure.  The choice of semiotics is for you to decide, unless you want to leave it to the cool kids.  Epic (or maybe not).

Pandemic or not, there is a massive difference between flexibility and compromise.  Flexibility is required for all businesses, creative or not.  Compromise might exist in some businesses (selling that toothpaste for pennies to get rid of inventory), but has absolutely no place in creative business.

Flexibility is like a slinky.  When you twist the slinky this way and that, it looks nothing like when the spring is recoiled. And yet it is the same toy with the same ribs.  The only way it is not the same toy is if you permanently bend or break one of the ribs (that bend or break is compromise).

Why does this matter today in the time of Coronavirus?  Because it is incredibly easy to think you are being flexible when you are, in fact, compromising.  Think about it — how far have you gone to reconfigure your current work and potential new projects to accommodate the reality we are all dealing with today?  Have you given over decision making to your clients, your production partners, even your employees? Given into their fear, their panic that things might not ever go back to any sense of normal?

If you have not compromised during the pandemic, awesome, you are super-human.  For the rest of us, the likely answer is, of course you have.  The point of today is to know that you have, forgive yourself and then move back to flexibility.  There is no shame (or there should not be), guilt or even ego in saying, “You know what, I thought about what you are asking of me, my art and my creative business, and it will not allow me to do my best work, so we are going to have to go another way.” 

Oh, Sean, you say, I could never do that because my client/employee/production partner will be so angry and will not let it stand.  Maybe.  However, how about you start with the notion that they will be angry, frustrated, critical. Nobody wants to what they once had to be gone.  That said, you have to own what you know to be true today and if that realization came to you today, then it just is.  Let that be enough to drive you back to conviction and integrity.  Doing the best you can necessarily implies that you were wrong yesterday.  If you were not wrong, then the best would be static and eternal.  And you call me woo woo?  Your best is relative to where you are in the moment.  As the moment shifts, so too will your best.  If that means you realize that what you thought was flexibility, you now know to be compromise, your obligation is to have the humility, vulnerability and, yes, courage to move away from the compromise.

Here is the thing — compromise is cancer.  It will metastasize until your creative business is dead unless you cut it out and kill it to the point of your own illness.  Yes, you can put off treating it, but it will keep growing while you wait and then it will be too late.  Let that visual stay with you for a while so that when the nagging pit in your stomach that you went to a place of compromise, you actually do something about it.  It can be something like having to have physical interactions when you are not comfortable or vice-versa, having to shop around more than you like, anything where you know you have just jeopardized your ability to do your best work.

All of which leads me to the following: you will have a pre and post-Coronavirus portfolio.  Your pre-portfolio will just be nostalgia for the most part as reality does not permit most of its existence today. Post-Coronavirus, what do you intend to show?  While it might seem quaint or naive to say you must do only your best work, know that you will be judged mercifully (and mercilessly) on this work.  Do you really want to risk it not being your very best?

The very essence of creative business is that rationality is idiosyncratic and therefore wholly irrational.  Neil deGrasse Tyson seeks truth in all things, rational truth.  Posit, test, validate over and over again.  Love it and we can all use a ton more of this sentiment today.  However, it has no place in creative business in a global sense.  Of course, one plus one equals two.  That is not the point, it is that each one is not the same.  Add them in the wrong order and the answer is zero for that artist, that creative business.  Add them in the right order and the answer just might be three.  Very simply, what is insane to one artist makes perfect sense to another.  Your creative business has to be a reflection of your reality, your rationality, without any notion that that reality is anyone else’s.  The very reason why the words “iconic” “outrageous” and “convicted” matter so much.  If you have a half hour or so, check out Tim Corrigan and Vicente Wolf’s Zoom call about presentations.  Both Tim and Vicente are wildly successful interior designers.  Industry luminaries.  If there is information you can find about how you want to present your work to clients (interior design or not), fantastic.  However, really pay attention to how these two dear friends look at each other when the other describes their presentation process.  They cringe as in neither of them could imagine doing what the other does for a nanosecond. For Tim, showing only one option of anything is a non-starter.  For Vicente, showing more than one is pointless.  Push them both up against the wall and they would have to admit that the way the other presents and operates is insane to them.  Good.  Now you get it.  Remember, these are two designers at the pinnacle of their industry and they could not be more different.

Rationality is as you define it for your art and your creative business. Let that be enough, let it be transient and resilient.  Compromise is cancer, flexibility the reality you choose to inhabit.  Your choice.

I know how desperately we all want to put the Coronavirus pandemic behind us.  We want to be free to interact with each other as before.  To gather in meetings, weddings, school, theaters, restaurants, etc. would be more than welcome for all of us.  A haircut would be savored for sure.  For some, this day has already come, for others it will still have to wait.  No matter though, we all have to adjust how we will behave with and towards each other for a very long time to come.

There is fatigue, ennui, even boredom in the slog of it all.  The exhaustion comes not from effort but the vigilance required of all things we simply did not think about just a few months ago.  The price of a hug?  A song? A dinner with friends?

Now throw in what is happening to your creative business.  If you are in the event business, you are experiencing ripple effect after ripple effect.  Even if you are flourishing as I know many creative businesses are, still you are touched by those who are not.  Are you wondering when the proverbial bottom might fall out?  School children still played in schoolyards during World War II and life did go on in the United States.  When the atrocities of war are not at your doorstep, it is easy to belie those atrocities.  The Coronavirus pandemic is not all that different.

Day by day by day we are reminded that our lives are and will be radically different and we are being forced to confront the idea that different is going to just have to be different.  Yes, the Phoenix, but more the somber reality that rebirth is not yet here.  And it complete sucks to sit still in what feels like chaos and molasses all at once.  The end of the beginning to paraphrase Churchill.

What does it all mean then?  Now is not the time for platitudes, minute blurbs of wisdom, or even well-meaning insights.  Instead, it is the time for hard-thinking, to challenge whatever solution you might have come up with even a few weeks ago.  Think about finger torture — the harder you pull to separate your fingers the tighter the bind.  The only way out is to push your fingers together.  You might be strong enough to rip the bind apart, likely not.  To get out, you have to think your way out.  The world, your world, is now the ultimate escape room. Except there is no-one on the other end of the microphone to give you a hint or let you out if you do not win the game.

Resilience is not your willingness to keep banging your head against the same wall.  Resilience is your willingness to bang your head on a new wall with the pain of the old wall still fresh in (on?) your head.  Perhaps your vision for the new new of your creative business is flying, sputtering or D.O.A.  Are you ready to work with what tomorrow might bring?  Though I have come to really despise the word, to pivot on a proverbial dime?  Even more, are you willing to stop, sit in the pain until you see clarity, then move again to the new wall?

If we really are at the end of the beginning in that what did not work yesterday will tomorrow and will not the day after that, then what can you do that will carry you through?  That one I do know.  Be vulnerable.

Vulnerability does not mean baring all of yourself to the world.  TMI is TMI.  Vulnerability means sharing what moves you, what drives you to create joy.  Why your gift matters to you and why you feel compelled to share it with us.  The underneath.  I have been working with a client who recently talked on social media about how making dolls helped her through a really rough time in her life.  Very very intricate dolls with fantastic fabric and materials and details.  Plain enough for me to see that making something beautiful helped through her pain and darkness.  Losing herself in the idea and the creating literally saved her.  She had the courage to share the story today, not really thinking about why she was sharing it.  And there it was and is for all of us to find ourselves in.  Did it result in sales for her new art? Yes.  But that is not really the point.  It also resulted in meaningful conversation with those who really care.  Who knows whether they will buy.  She saw them and they her.  After all, isn’t that what we all want today, more than ever and the deeper, the better.

Vulnerability also means you have to go first.  You are the artist, you are the force, you are the one with the gift.  You have to choose to share.  When we are at the end of the beginning, making that choice, being vulnerable, going first, is really really hard.  It is so much easier to just be picked.  If you could just make the lights bright enough, the sound loud enough to get your creative business (your life?) back to what it was, then the end might just be the end.  Of course, the strategy of being the shiniest penny was dying way before Coronavirus.  CV just accelerated the inevitable. When in the end of the beginning as we are, you go forward every day by giving us a vision of why your work matters to you and to those that you know need it most.  From there, you will become the beacon you were always meant to be.

When platitudes, one minute fixes, and a million insights fade, you are left only with yourself and the responsibility of going first, despite your pain, you fatigue, your ennui.  Art will always transcend its medium if the artist is compelled to share.

Here we are at the crossroads.  The intersection of science, humanity, civilization, politics, and, of course, self-determination.  Do we reopen now?  How exactly do we do it in a way that does minimize the threat, but more importantly allows us to understand the value of our interaction? How do we overcome the damage (physical, psychological, financial, spiritual) that the Coronavirus pandemic has caused?

Make no mistake CV-19 has indelibly changed our culture.  Maybe your young children will run up to each other and give hugs to their friends, but your high schooler?  College student?  You? We have now been taught that human interaction can be lethal to us and everyone we know and love.  Unlearning this lesson will not come easily or quickly, no matter how much we want to get back to “normal”.  So let’s stop focusing on the time when this threat (or one just like it) is gone.  Instead, let’s talk about acceptable risk and emotional value.

Unless the emotional return outweighs the emotional risk, no-one with a shred of empathy will want to engage in the activity no matter what the government says. We have to feel safe enough to be compelled to find ourselves where we will be — in the theater, at a wedding, an office, a sporting event, a bar.  No amount of statistics or safe practices will convince anyone who wishes to live in fear.  Instead, we have to remind each other of the purpose of why we choose society, relationship, friendship, connection.

What does that mean for you, your art and your creative business?  You must come to learn that the person across from you must see your interaction as a profound investment in themselves and the life they most want to live if you have any hope to move forward.  Seth Godin’s “people like us do things like this” has never ever been more prescient. Your process will be that which builds trust and moves power and faith from you to you.

I have said it many many times, trust is as real as the air you breathe.  Every single moment of your work is in relationship to the creation and management of trust.  If you move, even for a second, into the notion that you are selling a product or ignoring trust to get to the end (“trust me, you are going to love it”), you will find the cost of transacting with you insurmountable.  Trust is the proverbial grease to the friction that is permanently (well, at least until all of us are vaccinated) part of your relationship.

Not only do you have to own that you are the best in the world at what you do today, you, your art and your creative business have to be a risk worth taking.  If you are incapable of real empathy, sympathy, connection, to listen and be heard, you are going to be ignored.  These are  the true building blocks of your 3W’s (i.e., where were you, where are you, where are you going).  Empathy, sympathy, connection and the ability to deeply listen and be heard are also skills.  Yes, some might be naturally better than others, so what.  It will take work, real, persistent, daily (hourly?) work to hone these skills.  Every time you slip into selling the “thing” you are absolutely doing it wrong.  Fear is a virus and if your process allows it to slip in, you will find yourself not just in a difficult situation, you will find yourself excised, shunned even. Hyperbolic? Maybe, but do you really want to find out if I am right?

Of course, this is intense and unbelievably scary.  Just a few months ago, you could sell pretty and get away with it (to my huge dismay).  Yeah, those days are toast.  So why not come at it with a sense of love, light and kindness.  Grab a colleague and a friend.  Have a Netflix party and watch a few episodes of Middleditch And Schwartz (hilarious), make up your own setting (about your business or not) and then do it yourselves.  They go on for twenty-five minutes, how about you try for fifteen?

You can listen to all of the pundits, experts, consultants, etc. (myself very much included) as to what you should be doing and nothing will change you more than the above exercise.  That does not mean the advice you will receive is not valuable, it is, it is just that when you truly come from a place of “yes, and…” you will be simultaneously contained and free.  From there, evolution is possible. The responsibility of relationship is yours.  Pretty is gone (thank goodness), earning trust every day with intention and purpose is the gravitas you will need to go forward.

The result will be the following: instead of shoving your clients over the threshold with promises of portfolio and price, you will be inviting them in with open arms and an open heart.  You will be given the power to great work and you will never have to take it and in that transfer you will be nourished simply because your clients have chosen to invest in themselves through you, your art and your creative business.  Ignore the reality of transaction costs of physical interaction at your own peril.

The decision to stick it out in the midst of a global crisis is not an easy one.  I enjoy the thoughtfulness Liene Stevens has laid out in her recent post, “Should I Close My Business?” as you contemplate whether to keep going or not.  If you are here or thinking of being here, have a read and give yourself the space to make a contemplative decision, or as much a contemplative decision as possible. I only have one additional comment: staring down the barrel of an unending world of sh-t is not for the faint of heart.  You might have the love for what you do and a deep desire to keep going but, while no-one knows the future, I do know it is going to be a long, brutal slog back until there is a vaccine or some other effective therapy for CV-19.

The kindness, albeit self-interested, culture we find ourselves in will not last.  The market will shift and you might find yourself dealing with utter hell day after day after day with no foreseeable light.  You will then have to ask yourself if you are truly willing to swim without ever knowing if the shore will appear.  Most of us just cannot go there and that is why I am caveating what Liene talked about with imploring you to go there.

A little thought experiment for you — how long would it take you to count to a billion at a number per second?  Do not do the math, just think about it.  A month? A year? Ten years? Thirty years?  More than thirty years?

If you guessed less than thirty years (it is actually more than thirty one years), you now understand your own limitation on the depth of pain you think you can endure by sticking it out.  Adjust accordingly.  I have worked with clients who have been under criminal indictment for tax evasion, millions of dollars in debt, had loans out to the wrong people, had virtually no work for eighteen months and the one thing they all have in common?  They slept like babies, not because they are sociopaths but because they knew all they could do was chop wood, carry water and stay convicted that the way out was one step at a time.

There is ABSOLUTELY no shame if when you look into that abyss you decide it is not for you, even if you want dearly to keep going.  Life will go on and you will find another path.  Just do not kid yourself into believing that abyss does not wait for you.  Yes, it might never show up but you MUST be ready to live in it if it does.  That is the essence of your decision.

On to a permutation on the theme of letting go.  You might very well decide to pivot/reboot/refocus your creative business.  It might be to do more things virtually, let go of your office (and staff?) or could be to dig deeper into another kind of business (higher end design, micro weddings, on-line design, etc.).  Letting go does mean that you will have to say goodbye to what once was — employees, colleagues, clients with whom you might have had a deep and abiding relationship going strong right up until the pandemic.  Simply, if you make the decision that your art and your creative business no longer exists to serve these people then there is a death.  As with all death, it needs to be mourned and accepted before life can be fully embraced.  Yes, the pandemic has catalyzed the change but need not necessarily be the cause.  Hopefully, CV is just the ultimate accelerant to where you fantasized about going and now really have no other choice.  Art always transcends its medium and your foundation can and will find a new home.

The grace of letting go is your resilience and resolution that the passing is necessary and permanent.  What will not work is shelving what was, embracing the new only until the old can come back again.  Whether or not the old can ever come back is not the point.  If you go down this path, you will forever be talking over the shoulder of the person in front of you.  You might kid yourself and think that this is not so but it is.  You really do need to let go if you ever hope to be truly present and vulnerable to what lies ahead.

I very much realize that this has been foisted upon you in light speed.  Take the time you need to be forthright in your transformation, then act with intention.  There is sadness and pain in any change no matter the circumstance, ignoring that reality is its own demise.  No one likes change, ever.  Feeling forced to change is the hardest of all.  Yet, here we are and must have faith that the other side of change is unforeseen opportunity.  Let love, light and kindness guide you.  It is not woo woo, it is vulnerability that to move towards something today, you have to move away from what mattered (and probably still matters) just a second ago.  From there you can find acceptance and from acceptance you can find grace, from grace humility and from humility hope and from hope purpose.  And on you will go.

As new technology and practices emerge because of the Coronavirus pandemic, we are challenged to contemplate how to use those technologies in a meaningfully different way. Enter the Fosbury Flop. I will not retell the story of Dick Fosbury and his miraculous victory in the high jump at the 1968 Olympics.  You can read about him here here and here.  The point is when the world shifts underneath your feet, it is time to leap over the bar backwards.  Look up to the sky, close your eyes and have faith that you will survive the landing. Fail until you do not.

Let us also have a look at Sir Ken Robinson’s famous TED talk and Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams manifesto.  Both talk about how education in its form of teaching memory and compliance to receive mythical third party validation is useless when it comes to real learning.  I will never forget Elizabeth Warren teaching me Bankruptcy Law in law school when some smart ass asked why she did not know the U.S. code definition of the automatic stay.  She broke out her well-annotated copy of the Bankruptcy Code (it was 1990) and replied why would she when she could just look it up (and then proceeded to eviscerate said smart-ass on the actual meaning of the automatic stay — story for another time).  Fast forward to today.  When the sum of human intelligence lives in your palm 24/7, what exactly is the point of memorization?

Think this does not apply to your creative business?  How many of you still have office hours where you expect your employees to show up to do their work and then go home?  Like a factory?  How many of you are now uncomfortable because you just cannot monitor the work of your employees, your colleagues, your production partners via Zoom? Sure, some things require physical presence (cooking in a kitchen, making floral arrangements, etc.), but so many do not.  The question is when the Coronavirus nightmare passes are you going to go back to the old model or are you going to go deeper?  I am of the firm belief that most creative business owners truly hope to get to say 15 and have their employees either get there on their own or walk in with work that is a solid 13.  Never happens though and instead employees/colleagues/production partners show up at 5 or 6 and work to 13 and you are so exhausted that you may never get past 13, let alone 15.  Yes, there are outliers but the norm is the lowest bar, let’s not kid ourselves.

If you can reset expectations given a new world order, can you wholeheartedly upend how you do things?  Can you demand that those who you choose to physically interact with show up with their very best work and demand to take it higher? If there is a new premium to physical interaction, will you actually treat it with the new respect it deserves?  Will you see your physical interaction like the Blue Angels or a Dilbert meeting?  We need not try to impose the old world order on the new new.  We can, in fact, choose to go deeper and raise the level of excellence that is expected.

Perfect is the enemy of done.  However, intensity and willingness to push further is what is in front of all of us.  What exactly happens when we find the desire to see different as different and embrace the value of the difference as a stand-alone question instead of a derivative one.  The entire point is that the digital experience will become its own separate and apart from the physical and the two will relate to each other instead of being a poor man’s substitute.

We are already being gaslit into the epic comeback in front of us.  “We are all in this together.” “We will overcome.” And on and on.  No doubt, I want the future to be bright.  Who doesn’t?  It is just that those who want to comeback are actually looking backwards.  We simply cannot.  Eat the damn red pill, kill hope and get down to the work of redefining tomorrow.

Appreciate though that the resistance is powerful.  Many many are invested in saying, not so fast, we are not there yet.  Maybe.  Except it has been exactly six weeks and there is so much we will never forsake again.  Diligence and forthright thought is how we can redefine culture.

Take a moment to watch Andrew Cuomo with Trevor Noah the other night.  Consider his answer as to why he has been so candid, so human, so vulnerable during the time his state (New York) has endured the very worst of the pandemic in the U.S. to date.  How else could he persuade 19 million people to stay home?  Yes, other governors were able to do the same, but New York, especially New York, is a particularly fierce environment.  If you can make it there….And yet he convinced these people to stay home and sacrifice everything, for months.  Talk about the power of persuasion on a human level.

So why not you?  Can you truly see vulnerability as strength?  Can you find your own Dick Fosbury as to redefine value?  Or will you wait to be derivative?  Culture changes because we refuse inertia.  Refuse complacency. Refuse acquiescence.  It also changes when we all can find stillness, joy in what is in front of us.  A willingness to move through the obstacles a moment at a time.  Let different be different and leave it at that.  If you do, you might find your way to 15 every day, just never the way you did it yesterday.

As we watch the hope balloon begin to lose helium and the realization that the coronavirus pandemic will stay with us for a very long time, you might be tempted to cut a proverbial corner, doing what is necessary to stay alive.  Desperation or even the thought of being desperate is the justification some might need to compromise.  However, compromise is not flexibility.  Compromise is a willingness to do what you do not.  It is a non-starter if there ever was one. 

You will have to look yourself in the mirror.  Eventually, your choice to betray yourself, your art and your creative business will stare back at you.  The price and value of integrity is simultaneously everything.  So long as you have integrity, you are a success in my book.  Integrity in all that you do:  treating people fairly, being true to yourself and your art, being original, being straightforward even if the news isn’t good (and it most certainly will not be), and, most of all, being honest with yourself, your employees and your clients.

Giving up integrity is easy, because there is always a justification.  Coronavirus is your perfect foil.  Getting your integrity back though, incredibly difficult.  Personal experience has taught me this exquisitely painful lesson.  When I ran my food delivery/catering business after 9/11, I borrowed money I knew in my heart of hearts I couldn’t pay back.  Hired employees I knew I really could not afford.  Bought inventory from vendors on credit I did not deserve.  In the end, I found myself bankrupt (literally) and very much alone.  There is always grace in redemption and I will be forever grateful to the very long list of people that allowed me to return to myself.  It took a really really long time for me to be proud of who I saw in the mirror.  I can absolutely say my integrity was the one thing I am most ashamed of ever having lost.

The problem with operating without integrity is that the result (positive or negative) is never really yours.  If you do what it takes to survive in a way that does not pass the smell test (i.e., take money you cannot spend well so that you can justify paying yourself, doing work you are not able to do, taking money when you know you are on the edge, etc.).  While you might be able to live with it in the short run, the lie will get you in the end.  The spirit of creation and individualism behind any artist and their creative business simply will not permit being derivative forever.  And to go down the path of being dishonest can do nothing but destroy your own sense of self.  Hard to produce great work when the confidence in having faith in who you are and what you are about is gone.

None of this easy.  Some creative businesses will work their way through, others will not.  That is the stark reality confronting us all.  Whether you make it to the other side is a function of hard work, foresight and the ability to stay true to yourself.  You have a choice to get there with intention, purpose, conviction and faith in yourself, your art and your creative business.  Or you can beg, borrow and even steal to do what you have to do.  I am here to tell you that you will be a shell of yourself if you have to do the latter.  As painful as it will be, please walk away first.  You will, in fact, live to fight another day.

Let the temptation to copy (i.e., steal) from someone else, do business that is not right for you or lower your standards (i.e., prices, product quality, clientele) for the sake of the business pass through you.  It IS harder to stay true to yourself and your art and work to see what opportunities will present themselves during this epically brutal time.  Keeping your integrity WILL be enormously challenging.  No need to sugar coat it.  However, if you can know, really know, that losing your integrity will make you myopic, blind to your own pain and that you will most certainly cause others, the choice might not be that difficult.

I am grateful for the coronavirus pandemic.  Of course, it is cataclysmically awful in just about every way imaginable.  However, I have fallen ever more deeply in love with my wife as I marvel at her remarkable humanity.  My children love us and each other and together they are finding joy in that love.  Yes, there is unbelievable stress and anxiety.  We all wish we could be out in the world and having the ability to physically connect being taken from us, we suffer.  Still, though, there is love, kindness and light.  And that is everything.

For creative business, diamonds are made under intense pressure and heat.  Quite literally, imperfections are burned away in this time.  As someone remarked on Instagram, it took her 14 years to get what I have been throwing down, but now she gets it.  I am grateful.

What am I talking about?  Value delivery, alignment, process, scarcity, honoring the irrational, intention and conviction. Go back and read my blog over the years and you will see these themes over and over (and over) again.  If you have chosen to go the other way of package, focused on price and the thing, with randomness associated with value (i.e., 50% down, 50% prior to delivery), being just-this-much-better than your competition, the coronavirus is exposing you with exquisite pain. Yes, I have empathy and sympathy for your creative business.  Then again your straw house is getting blown over by the strongest wind.  While the coronavirus wind may ultimately take all houses, I am absolutely confident that those artists who have worked diligently on why they matter will be the very last to go.

It is very important to understand that there are two things happening to the global economy.  Paul Krugman lays it out very well in this column.  First, we are in a medically induced coma in order for us to save ourselves from ever more horrible consequences.  Next, we will be in a stagnant economy for which demand will shrivel and the pain of de-leveraging all things will cause a horrible recession.  Whether or not governments can try to solve both remains and all of us pray they do.  No matter though, you and your creative business have been given an unwelcome window for which can, in fact, choose your course.

You might blame the world and all things around you (fair enough) for what is happening to your creative business and you might dig in to what you have already built. OR.  You might take the time to reconsider the very foundation you have built to date.  Does it really, truly serve you in your effort to create joy?  And, reminder, create joy is a technical term to me.  Create — make what has never existed before.  Joy — the essence of what we all seek to feel alive. Together — the permission to be transformative in your work so that those who enjoy it are forever changed by the effort.  If it does not, then might I suggest that now is the time to erase the box, rip it up and start over brick by brick by brick.

I cannot think of another time before or in the future where we have ALL been given permission to start over, to dare what we never could have without the coronavirus pandemic.  Perhaps you believe you do not have to, and that is awesome, grounded intention and conviction are there for a reason.  BUT, if it is only because you refuse to be open to humility that there might be a better way for you, hubris is a bitch.

Change sucks.  Like it or not, we are all now forced to change and contemplate the new constraint that the coronavirus has imposed on us all.  The Phoenix is burning and it is death.  There will be rebirth.  So what.  Between now and then we need to contemplate how we intend to live (i.e., not just exist) in a new world order.  Be prepared to defend the story of your creative business and how it is going to deliver the outrageous promise you will most certainly need to make to your clients (old and new).

A few other thoughts.  For some of you, now is the time to make hay.  Wayfair has exploded as has Zoom.  There are those of you out there for whom the world is now a very very bright place in a sea of darkness.  Naturally, your good fortune might make you feel guilty relative to your peers.  While it is most certainly false guilt, you cannot just push it away.  Give it its due and then live on the stage you, your art and creative business were born to play on.  The world needs your full throated voice now more than ever.

Last, perfect is the enemy of done.  No one knows what tomorrow will look like.  We are all contemplating what will be necessary and making it up as we go.  We will all be wrong until we are not.  You were delusional enough to start in the first place and you must be delusional enough to start again.  No one has the answer, yet you must still listen.  Whether you choose to hear is the very choice you must honor now more than any other.  In the midst of it all you can be grateful to epic awfulness in front of us all as are compelled to confront yourself and question everything.  You do you because you must.

I wrote a column for Business of Home this week responding to a question about whether a designer should lower her rates because all of her work now has to be digital. Of course, I said no.  Yes, in person meetings are better than digital today. But only because the digital muscle has not been fully flexed.  Different will not mean better or worse, just different.

On-line learning for millions and millions of students is driving educators to rethink the value of memory and compliance.  Honor code schmoner code.  If you tell kids what is to study (i.e., memorize) for what is on the test, then tell them to keep their books, phones and notes down while they demonstrate their knowledge, why would they comply?  What is the true value of memory and compliance these days when you are literally sitting in front of the information superhighway?  Will coronavirus finally finally snap everyone to what Sir Ken Robinson and Seth Godin have been talking about for years?  Will we finally get down to the value of deep thinking into a subject?

I have been horrified, truly horrified about how long it has taken so many in the United States to understand exponential growth, the power of compounding unabated.  It is not a parlor trick to know that a penny doubled every day for a month is worth over $5 million.  Every single ten year old needs to know the rule of 72 (and no I am not linking to it). Nor do you have to have a higher degree in math to know that a steep curve and a flatter curve might yield the same number just in different periods.  If I hear one more time that blah blah blah kills so many more than CV without reference to time, I think I will lose it.

Growth and the implications of growth are at the heart of any business, creative business very much included.  If we are asking you to see and show us a world we cannot, then you MUST do the work of appreciating the implications of the investment you are seeking from your clients, employees and colleagues alike.

Instead of trying to teach our kids how to memorize the formula for the area of a circle, have them write a paper on the history of Pi (using the, say, gazillion articles on-line about the subject), then post it and have a zoom conference about it to discuss how it has deep deep implications for how we live today.  What would that do for all of us?

If we demand this as a culture now that digital is our only outlet, what will happen when it is not?  Then, when we look to what creative business can do with a brand new form of communication, a deeper level of thought for all, just imagine how far and fast we will be able to chart a new path forward?  What will happen to our business models then?

Let me land that plane.  The crisis of equipment and PPE for our healthcare workers is an indictment of poor supply chain management by the federal government.  No political statement here, it just is.  Except, we have, as a global community, exploded the power of supply chain management.  Do you really think the failings of the United States to effectively deploy resources is not going to catalyze further advances in supply chain efficiency?  Of course it is.  So we will likely find that the pressure to deliver better faster will grow exponentially in the coming years after the coronavirus crisis has passed.  On the other side, there are many many creative business owners that are savoring the opportunity to work methodically and perhaps even more precisely than they otherwise would because a) they have the time, and b) they are limited in their ability to physically interact.  Before coronavirus (and likely after), many of these players relied (and will rely) on commissions of these purchased items for a large portion of their earnings.

There you have it, the conundrum.  If you want the ability to do better, more diligent work that just might take longer but you make your money from an exponentially improving supply chain, you are trapped.  The coronavirus pandemic has now shown you that you have to choose another way to earn money if you would like to have the ability to extend time.  Oh, and if you choose to rely on the exponential growth of the supply chain, might I just say that being a seal in a sea of killer whales might not be the best experience.  Coronavirus has just forced you to question everything if you have now ironically found value in slowing down.  What exactly are you going to do about it?

Oh, I can and will keep going.  If you have a factory that had 100 workers and had to lay off say 90 of them, what happens when the lights go back on?  Sure, if the CARES act works perfectly and the pandemic is over in 2.5 months, you might start up right where you left off.  By the way, unicorns are real.  What if, in the abundance of caution, you keep the money but do not actually hire your workers right back?  You are going to make it, but you are going to take a wait and see approach (imagine that?).  What are you going to produce first?  The products with the lowest or highest margins?  The ones you want to build your firm on in the future or the ones that will pay (barely) today’s bills?  How long do you think it is going to take for this manufacturer to produce your order if it is not in the bullseye category?  Now how much time have you spent figuring this out for your clients?  Did not think so. Alignment was kind of sort of important before, it is everything now.

Which brings me to outsourcing.  You might be uncomfortable with working digitally with your team, then again you have been at it for just a few weeks.  What will it be like after two months?  Here is some light reading for you — Roald Coase’s Nature Of The Firm (full disclosure I was an economics major in college so reading this stuff is fun for me, still).  Coase’s theory is quite useful here and should ground you in what it might be like to NOT bring back your employees?  The idea of outsourcing is going to evolve like never before in the history of the internet age. We will move forward decades in weeks.

A moment for us all.  No one knows what tomorrow will look like.  However, we are going to look to you, our artists, to shape it for us.  To do that you must dig deeply into the notion that we can contemplate a new way that better aligns us all with your mission to show us all how to draw birds.  Clouds might have been enough yesterday and you had better know how to do that too.  In fact, clouds might still be valuable even today, but tomorrow? Not a chance.

Of course, I am writing in the context of the world-altering (world-defining?) Coronavirus pandemic, but I am also writing for something bigger — a philosophy that I own.  Everything I do and have said for the past sixteen years of working in and with creative businesses has been about niche.  Talk to the smallest possible viable audience and develop a relationship with that audience that is rooted in a singular purpose — to create joy.  Create joy, two words that are everything.  Create — to bring to life that which has not ever existed before other than as you intended.  Joy — the deep abiding sense of what we all seek as humans — connection, groundedness, community, love.  When you create joy we, your audience, find the place where we belong and from there we all catapult forward.  Nothing about the current global crisis has changed any of these sentiments.  If anything, it has just exploded them.

So time to walk the walk.  My prayer is for creative business owners to simultaneously hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts — horde cash and dream about tomorrow.  Many people have advised incrementally scaling back so that you are ready when the lights go on.  Cut salaries 25% when 75% is on order, week by week scaling back, borrowing money to try to maintain the status quo as much as possible.  I respect the idea and can see the logic but I am wholly on the other side of the trade.

As a people, a culture, we tend to underestimate the depth and length of pain necessary and overvalue hope, especially when there is an outsized shock to our system like CV.  Simply, what if it is a year before your world appears anything remotely close to normal? Two years?  From 9/11 until 2007 the airline industry lost $40 billion because people were too afraid to travel AND the imposition of travel (i.e., the TSA) (never mind what happened in 2008).  Do you really think the emotional overhang will not affect all things creative in a similar way?  I have yet to be convinced by any metric that there will be a magic V curve no matter how much we wish it to be so.  

Man-o-man do I want to be wrong. Dead wrong.  But if I am not and you have nothing left because you chose incremental change over life-support, then the ripple effect will be that much worse as your desperation will be as contagious a virus as we have ever seen.  Sharks smell a drop of blood in the water from a quarter of a mile away.  Just saying.

Sorry for the doom and gloom but it had to be said because I want all creative business owners to know this: no you, no business no matter how big your staff is.  The last person to sacrifice everything is you.  I say this will all kindness to those of you who have to cut employees who are like family (maybe even are family); to make the hard calls to pay as little as you possibly can.  I will get a lot of grief for this but so be it.  If you cannot have your business take care of you, even if only a $1, then you are absolutely saying that you exist to nourish your creative business and not the other way around.  Financially, psychologically, even spiritually this is just wrong-headed.  You will be depleted and you will increasingly resent those you are sacrificing yourself for and you will be, in fact, starving, day by day by day.  Suffering first and worst is no way out.  How could you be anything other than desperate when even the slightest tap turns on? A glimmer of hope that you will somehow be able to pay yourself?  

I am speaking to those of you who have turning the corner from starving artist to hungry artist.  The ones who know they and their art matters to their clients, colleagues and employees alike; the ones who have already made it onto their stage.  Those seeking to make it in the first place are not included here for a reason — their day has not yet come and they will have to do much much more to find their moment.  No, I am talking to those for whom going back to being starving is its own demise.  So give yourself the best chance to create joy by acknowledging and living in the idea that your creative business exists to nourish you, not the other way around.  Yes, horde cash and be sure to nourish yourself.  And, no, I am not saying do not cut back deeply, I am just saying do not wholly sacrifice yourself for the sake of your business.  You first.

You first because you need to start to work on tomorrow.  Now.  Start a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog.  Tell your story about how you are going to contemplate a world that will need to restart, a world that will need your voice to be different from what it was yesterday.  Tell it over and over and over until we are ready to hear you.  Simple example — you are an event planner accustomed to doing 200-400 person events.  What happens when no one wants to gather in groups more than 60?  Will there be multiple events?  How will you contemplate social distancing? How exactly will you create community? A spirit of celebration?  Prophylactics are not going to cut it.  

See, the reason to horde cash and nourish yourself today is so that you can live in your tomorrow beyond those that will be desperate for any morsel that might come their way. Yes, “no” will be the most important word in your vocabulary when the world starts again.  No, you will not work for half price; no, you will not do the powder room alone; no, you will not sacrifice the depth of your process simply because the shark is done eating. You will own that tomorrow has then come, having been consistent in your new story and you will be there to do what you have always been tasked to do: create the joy we will all need for humanity to move forward.