Cancer is an awful disease. My stepfather endured ten years of agonizing treatments for tumors that would never leave his body. As with most cancers, it is not the actual cancer that kills you, it is the other diseases (infections and the like) that move in to take a depleted body. To overstate the obvious, we desperately search for both the causes of cancer (tobacco, asbestos, defective gene) as much as we do cures. Progress is painstaking, effective, but certainly never fast enough. In the end, if we can avoid the devastation that cancer might bring and cure (or dramatically slow down) the disease if it does befall us, we should do just that.
For creative business, cancer is commodification and marginalization and our willingness to live there.
Take an email one of my clients (a wedding planner) received recently. In this context, it is about wedding planning, but could just as easily be about interior design, fashion, cooking, even graphic design — any creative business where the work looks possible to some looking in.
“I really enjoyed talking to you and I just love your work, but I am not sure I need the full service (oh how I loathe that term) you offer. I have just gone part-time and I have a lot more free time, so I am thinking that I just will need some day-of help and maybe someone to point me in the right direction when I get stuck. I know you tilt towards full service but if you would like make a custom package for me my budget is around $6,000. If not, I completely understand.”
Of course, I have set the stage for you to see this as a gross email and it is. Do you really though? $6,000 is a good amount of money and you might even be able to get to $8,000 or $9,000. If you need the money and/or are not booked for that date, are you really in a position to say no? Who knows, you might be able to convince her to allow you to do more once you are in there, make a little bit more by way of commissions and direct sales. Who are you to turn down what is right in front of you?
So many creative business owners bite and the cancer continues to grow. Just as bad, other designers get indignant and offended and say things like “you do not have the budget” or something along the lines of “don’t you know who I am.” What does not happen is a completely non-defensive response of who you exactly are, why you chose this to be your life’s work and why it matters so much to you, your clients, employees and colleagues alike. This client then lives in the idea that she can be you now that she has the time. And maybe she can from an execution point of view, but from a life’s purpose perspective? Never ever unless she decides to go all in as you have.
Yet we spend all of our time talking about price, working on strategies to be like everyone else, just a little bit better. Unknowingly, we spread the cancer, give it room to grow, silently, consistently, exponentially. There is massive money trying to get you, the creative professional, to be on a level playing field, just a little better than the rest. On the interior design side, there is Houzz/Ivyand all of the back-end systems (Design Manageretc.). In weddings, Wedding Wire, The Knot Proand 17 Hatscome to mind.
Nothing wrong with these businesses or their mission. There is huge profit in scaled commodification and marginalization. However, for creative businesses that want to matter, to have any kind of future though, you have to own, live and breathe authenticity, integrity and purpose. Yes, what you do is bigger than you, your art and your creative business. Such is the creative business of transformation. You have to know that the amount you receive or the size of the project (in terms of dollars) only matters if it is the right number, no matter how large or small it is. Do what you do, how you do it with what you need to do it.
Authenticity, integrity, purpose and unyielding conviction are the only cures for cancer in creative business, but like any cure it does not come without its own pain. Change sucks and fear of change just makes it worse, especially when there are so many that believe there really is nothing eating the very fabric of creative industries. The nature of cancer is that, too often, when you recognize its devastation, it is already too late. Same here. How about we as creative business owners not let that happen and resolve to do better now?
Specifically, here is what I think is wrong with the email: 1) you are awesome, but I can do what you do given the time (i.e., what you do is not hard, just time-consuming); 2) I, the client, get to decide what I am willing to pay for; 3) your value is my decision; and, most important, 4) how this goes is my decision, not yours. No, no and no. If seasoned creative business owners with a real reputation permit her voice to be validated by actually negotiating with her, to contemplate what they can do to “make it work” we are all doomed. We have to make it so that those in the position of leadership actually act like leaders and do the work of educating and redefining what it means to truly be an artist in business today. From there we can all do the work of excising the cancer of commodification and marginalization from the creative universe. Not a day too soon.
