With creative business in full swing – tis the season after all — it is easy to get lost in the doing and ignore what lies underneath. Yes, at a point, it is all about chop wood, carry water. You can just never forget you are not farmers, you are artists. There always, always has to be a purpose to the work. Your “Why” has to be front and center not just because it is how you maintain perspective, but because you never know who is looking. Make no mistake — pretty puts a smile on people’s faces. Why is what gets you hired.
So I thought what would be really effective is to revisit the foundation for every creative business: the 4 P’s – passion, philosophy, platform and process, with process itself supported by the 4 transitions – potential to actual client, idea to design, design to production, production to reveal. Here is the link to my original post on the 4P’s and to the one on the 4T’s.
Passion is what gets you out of bed in the morning. If you are not dying to create for your clients, if you are not truly in love with the work you are doing, you need to stop. Today. Two reasons: first, you will get run over by those artists that do have the passion. Your clients have to believe. If you do not believe in your purpose, the gift you are meant to share through your creative business, why should your clients? Second, sometimes passion gets annihilated by circumstance. If you get so busy that you cannot value what is in front of you other than to get to the other side, you have just turned a project into a job. Hard to be grateful if you are overwhelmed. On the other side, if you are slow you might get lost in the hunger for money and work to see the value of creation for its own sake. Circumstance cannot drive passion. Love, desire, thirst to create and share your gift has to be its own definition. Stand in the Sun for sure.
Philosophy is what you stand for. You might like to do pretty, but we are bored by it. We have to know why you are doing it. How will you make your clients’ lives better? What part of you, your art and your creative business will we know from miles away? Philosophy is the comfort of knowing what matters to you. Finding those that appreciate and seek that comfort is your platform.
Platform means you only care to share your gift with those that appreciate it. These are the fans who adore what you do and how you do it. Why only these clients? Because these are the clients that will actually pay you for your art – for what is between your ears far more than what is between your hands. Do you think the person who bought Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)”for $179.4 Million considered what the canvas cost Picasso or how long it took him to paint it? If you do not seek out those that value you, your art and your creative business far beyond the sum of their parts, you are delusional. Talk to everyone and you talk to no one. Talk only to those that love you and your art. Ignore the rest.
The only way to serve the first three P’s is to have an awesome process. An awesome process highlights the first three P’s by giving clients confidence that you only do your best and you actually have thought about how to do just that. If you build your process around the four transitions, you cannot help but to create the virtuous circle to build your upward spiral.
If you are deeply invested in your platform, you will seek out potential clients that will be blown away by the actual you. These clients will want to participate in brainstorming their vision, but ultimately will look to you, the expert, the guide, the artist, to blow their vision away with your design. Creative business is not a smorgasbord or a deli. You are guides and your opinion is what you are paid for. Once “IT” has been imagined and approved, then you can set out to actual turn “IT” into reality. Reality is a “TA DA” moment since the “TA DA” moment is what you want people to talk about. Process is not going from point A to point B just to get there. Process is about storytelling, a purifying narrative that sets the stage for the next (and hopefully bigger) story. This is what the 4T’s are all about and why building your process around them is its own reward.
Of course, the biggest reward is seeing your first three P’s validated by your clients – again and again and again. The very definition of foundation.
