Change Is Hard

The toughest challenge any creative business owner faces is how to affect change.  For those of you who have been in business for a while, old habits are deeply engrained in both you and your employees.  Resistance comes in many forms: people feel threatened, resentful, incredulous or overwhelmingly distrustful that any real change will happen.  For those who are relatively new in business, change can feel like trying to move in wet cement.

No doubt, change is a tricky proposition.  Go too far too fast and you risk undoing whatever foundation may exist.  Don’t go far enough and the change likely won’t stick.  President Obama is certainly staring down the barrel of this dilemma on a number of fronts.

My underlying philosophy is this:  a terrible system run well is always better than a fantastic system run poorly.  However, no system is a time bomb.  Most creative businesses start at the kitchen table or garage.  As the art becomes more popular, they move to an office and the artist takes on employees.  The employees usually are clones of the artist — everyone does a little bit of everything.  Then the business reaches the point where there is just too much for any one person to handle.  Usually this is where the no system time bomb goes off and either the creative business matures, regresses or dies.  I like to call this point in a creative business the inflection point.  Change will happen here.  The question is whether it will happen to you or by you.

The first place to start is with one of the immutable laws of business — the division of labor.  Everyone’s role in your creative business has to be defined, as does the interaction of that role with the other players in your business.  The concept of master-servant, task master-task doer, has to be replaced with the integrated team approach if your business is to move ahead.  Everyone in your organization has to realize that their role (including yours) is no more important (and as important) as the next person.  Take any design firm, at the beginning the sales person is the same person as the designer is the same person as the producer.  Then there is a person for each job and everyone is involved in everyone else’s job.  At the inflecton point, doing someone else’s job becomes incredibly counterproductive and the breeding ground for rampant ego. 

If there is no system in place at the inflection point, your primary role has to be to create one — assign roles and set out how the roles work together to deliver the product/service.  The best way to create the system is WITH those that will  be responsible for running it (not you).  The only caveat is that your business is not a democracy and ultimately the decision is yours as to how the business will run (i.e., you are ALWAYS the tiebreaker).  In this instance, radical change should work as any order will be better than the current state of chaos.

If there is a system at the inflection point, but it reflects the clone approach (i.e., lots of “account managers”), then it really isn’t a system, but is much more difficult to change (i.e., old habits).  Here the change has to be a tweak of sorts and A LOT of highest and best use of your time conversations will have to happen.  Your staff has to do the job they were doing, but have a new sense of priority and boundaries.  You want to get the buy-in of the toughest nut to the new order of things.  Make that person’s life easier with better structure and the rest will likely follow.