BOBC PODCAST #133 – TIME IS EVERYTHING
INTRODUCTION
Just around the corner, be there soon, an hour later, you ask, uh, which corner, and what does soon mean?
Time is all you have and leaving it to the definition of negotiation or worse to decisions of others, well that’s just self-inflicted pain that you can no longer endure.
BODY
So I read contracts all day long. I, I, uh, look at businesses all day long. I talk to people about running their businesses all day long. That’s me just sitting in my little office in Northern California just thinking about how businesses run. And you know what I find remarkable, not really anyone in any creative business is making a point of defining time.
And yet everything you do is related to time. Everything you do is, are you gonna get what you’re gonna get done? When are you gonna get it done, and what happens next? The iteration of the path is really just a function of time, and some of it’s more defined than others, right? Meaning that you can understand there’s only so many ways for you to bake a cake once the ingredients are mixed right, but what is the cake gonna be in the first place? Yeah. That’s also gotta be defined by time.
And so, well, you probably think about, you know how to do it, you know how that works for your business. You know how it can go along and sometimes time is defined for you, Hey, the event is gonna happen on a particular date and you’ve gotta get done.
Yeah. But how do you relate to that date? How does that happen?
Well, very, very little goes into the specificity of what it means to get done and why it means to get done when you’re getting done. So, maybe this seems like it’s just intuitive to you and maybe you think that this is kind of like an, understood and process for everybody.
It just isn’t, and it’s really far time that if I could give any advice that if I look at another contract that has a list of things that you’re gonna do, but has no definition of time and what has to get done when, might I tell you? Please start over. Please start over. And even if you have like, oh my God, the fancy scope of work, or This is what we’re doing and here it is, but it’s not laid out for anybody that this is what gets done when, and this is the expectation of time.
Might I tell you? Well, you’re living it up to chance and if it’s not in your agreement or worse in any kind of written down collateral, then how is somebody supposed to understand that you’re the one that’s supposed to define it? Because if it’s not written down and it’s not discussed, and then hey, maybe it’s a negotiation.
Maybe it’s up to the client, maybe it’s up to other vendors, maybe it’s up to somebody else to say how these things go. Well, you know what? Like that’s just like ridiculous.
It’s time for you to do so much better, right? And the way you can do that is to define time in two aspects. No matter what creative business you’re in.
The first is design time. design time is truly a trip to Wonderland and it is far, far time for you to embrace the idea that design is irrational. Design is how you perceive it. And the definition of irrationality here, which has many definitions, is that there is more than one way to get there, right? The classic conversation for interior designers is who’s the better designer? Outside in or inside out, right? Meaning that, hey, if you start with window treatments and then you move to paint color, and then you move to the floor, and then ultimately to lighting, and then finally to floor plan. , or if you’re the one who does it the exact opposite, well guess what? Who’s the better designer?
Nobody, right? Nobody and everybody. And the only thing that matters is do you have the client that is going to tell you, well, I like to design this way. I like window treatments first or vice versa. Because if you don’t have that client in front of you, they’re gonna drive you nuts. And so what does this have to do with time?
Everything because the trip through Wonderland is your trip. So if you happen to be that outside in designer, then you can say, Hey, if you don’t define what basically color and light feel like to you, we don’t have any place to go. I quit. Right. So the first part of defining time is design time, and that means what is your path? What is your wonderland path?
And the beauty of the allegory to Alice is the very notion that Wonderland is what is up, what is down. And the only person that knows where they’re going is truly the Mad Hatter who is truly mad. And what is up is down and around, right? But guess what? Guess who the mad Hatter is in your business.
It isn’t the person from the outside, it’s you, right?
So, and if you’re not willing to say, here’s what it takes for me to create to you, here’s the way I like to do that. I like to go to museums for four days, and if I don’t get the chance to go to museum for four days, well guess what? I’m not gonna be able to do the job for you.
It is. Completely idiosyncratic. It is defined by you and the reality of the allegory of the inside out and outside in designer is the fact that. If you have alignment, both will get to remarkable design. So the point of alignment is the point of time. The point of time is for it to be defined, and that definition is its own reward.
And so defining time relative to your idiosyncrasy is what you need to do for design. It works the way it’s supposed to work because you say it works the way it’s supposed to work. Meaning, hey, what is the outside boundary? Design’s gonna take us six months, and within those six months, here’s how that’s gonna work.
Here’s what Wonderland is gonna look like. Here’s the things that we have to do. Is it definitive? No. Is it down to the moment? No. But is it going to give a sense of how this process of creation is gonna go down? Absolutely.
And pairing that with being paid, that’s a whole other conversation. But today is just about time and so, okay.
By the way, design happens first, and yes, design can happen, you know, over many iterations. If you’re building house, maybe you do architecture first. You know, you’re doing a wedding, maybe you do catering first, and then after that you’re gonna be, working on getting the catering to happen. At the same time you’re designing flowers and for a house, you do the architecture, and then you’re gonna do, you’re gonna start building the house and maybe then you’ll start working on interior architecture and all those finishes, and then you’ll start to work on furnishings all the while you’re hoping to get the house built, right? So yes, design is not a perfectly linear endeavor. However, the process from design to production to installation is always the same, right? It just may have many layers within a single project.
So what, time is time.
And so you have to define what that looks like for each of those elements. So first, design always goes first. After that we talk about production. Well, production is, is actually a, a beautiful skill in the, in the sense that there really is only a very few ways that production can happen.
How many different ways are you gonna order the cake? Right? How are the ingredients for the cake if you’re baking the cake, or how many you know times are you gonna get everything ready so that you can install it in, whatever it is you’re gonna install it in? Right? Production is its own definition. Which is cash flow. When do we get to order stuff, when is it gonna show up? All that stuff. So that is its timeline too. Hey, we need all your money to come today so that we can order it for tomorrow so that it can be there three days from now. Right. Time. Time is all that you have, right? And the communication of time about what needs to happen when. Well, that’s up to you.
And so if you don’t want to put it in your contract, fine, then put it in an addendum, right? That says, this is how this is gonna go, and you’re signing off that this is how this is gonna go. So then you’ll go through, this is the process and the dates that you’re meeting, and then you’ll have a path, right?
You’ll have a path with regard to time, and you’ll understand that when time gets messed with, You lose money, you lose a pile of money because time is effectively money, please. Right. That is the definition. If you make 10 in six months, making 10 in a year is not the same thing.
And so delays that can really hurt you are effective that way. But also it’s the energy thing. I don’t wanna stick with just money. Right. I want to talk about energy.
For instance, if you’re building to this great presentation that you’re revealing all of the things that are gonna get done and it’s really gonna take you days and days to get ready to show the client. And all of a sudden they say to you, yeah, we have a toenail itch and so we’re not gonna show up. Right? You know what? That doesn’t work because then you getting ready the next time, it just takes that much more effort and you’re not gonna, ultimately, you’re gonna sap that energy of presentation.
And same thing if you have to do the same presentation twice. Right. The energy isn’t there. So time, time that this is what we’re building to, this is what’s happening. This is what’s required of you. It has to be laid out.
And the point of this entire podcast is that the only person that can define time when it comes to your creative business is you and if other people are gonna influence those times, well then you have to have consideration about, well, all right, the person has to do this. And if they don’t do this, here’s what happens. Right? Here’s what happens if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do. If, you know the flour doesn’t show up on time and I can’t bake the cake, well, here’s what, what’s gonna happen.
I’m gonna go buy flour. It’s gonna be a whole lot more expensive, and you’re gonna pay more for the cake. Time, time, time, time. It is beyond time for you to put it out there so that everybody can see it. 24 7, everybody can see it and not amorphous not to sell it on somebody, not for somebody to be excited, but plain as day that this is what is magical for you.
In the magic of the idiosyncrasy. That’s what the Sell is, not the amorphous. This is like, well, I guess we could be flexible in the way we do things. No, you cannot. Right? You cannot because it is your show. It is the way that you do it, and the idiosyncrasy of it is what gets you home. And the idiosyncrasy of design is beyond just what you are, but also the idiosyncrasy of production. How precise are you? Right? How, how specific are you in everything that you do? Right? What is it that you’re gonna be required in order to do the job the way that you would do it? Right?
Reminds me of the floral example that clients just never understand.
You can, for those floral designers that are out there, tell the world. But I’ve never met a floral designer. That is the following. If you have two amazing floral designers and you pay them $50 an hour, or you have 10 really strong people that can lift and move a lot of stuff, for $10 an hour, which ones would you hire?
The point is you’d always hire the the two really, really talented designers because they know exactly what they’re doing and they’ll probably do more than the 10 people, right? So the point of that is, is that you’re the expert. You know what it’s about, and that’s also about time, right? Time and effective use of time, and the reality of what it is that you need in order to do the job the way that you are going to do it.
So you have to get in the habit of explaining that so that what what it is, is, is like it doesn’t create the illusion that how time will unfold is up to anybody but you. And that illusion has been allowed to be perpetrated for whatever reason. And maybe it’s because you need to make the sale and that’s how that goes. Or you’re trying to be flexible when there is no necessity for flexibility. I don’t know why. All I know is that it is a vestige of the past that can no longer exist. Time works the way that you’re gonna tell it to work or else, guess what? You don’t have a business, right? You don’t have a business because you’ve left the most important variable up to somebody else, and you just can’t do that.
How this goes is up to you, and it is up to you to define it in a way that is gonna create the most what. Joy.
You didn’t see that one coming, did you? It’s joy. Joy is what matters because the power of the expression, the power of your ability to move through time, that’s what creates confidence.
And then the confidence is here’s the what we’re working towards. And in that, that the ephemeral joy, not happiness, not romcom happiness, but joy, the satisfaction that this is a path that everybody wants to walk on is what happens when you own time? And in that joy there becomes , this magic of what art can bring us all, which is transformation and
isn’t that what you’re after, is for people to see, the world a different way? Isn’t that what you do this for? So if you want to create joy, if you want to live in joy, then I suggest highly that you own time. And when you own time, it means, write it down and it means communicate it the way that it’s supposed to be and then get agreement because that is the way the path will be designed for you.
And in that way, everything will cascade the way that you want it to.
That’s my riff for today. Until next time.
