Here we are in the dog days of summer and out comes the, well, outliers. People behaving badly, meaning those clients who look for cracks, find them and turn on the jackhammer.
Whether it is a client refusing or just plain ignoring the necessity of having to make decisions to move your design process along or questioning payment and the value of your art during (or after) production, there is no more frustrating experience.
I talked about client ghosting in my latest column for The Business of Home. While not all decisions are the same, it is not up to your client to determine what is important and what is not; that is your job.
Managing and valuing production, however, requires a whole other level of conversation. Suffice it to say that many many creative business owners fall down here because they have not done a good job of differentiating between objective and subjective. I am sure you thought I was going to talk about production and how you have to justify the value of what you are creating and the necessity to be paid, fully and unconditionally beforehand. Of course this is important, but if you do not separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, there will always be an element of distrust since you are trying to get paid for the ideation of your art through its creation. Will never work out.
If you do not understand, and/or cannot articulate, the difference between conceptualization and execution, you will be forced to accept that some of the so-called value you are providing for the creation is really what it costs for you to think about it. And in our digital world, the premium on the thing disappears when I can see ten other things that look just like it.
It leaves you with selling fear. What I do costs this much because of the quality it represents and if you do not have this quality you will not be happy. This may very well be true, but clients will never believe you when they can see all of the alternatives and because you have not charged them appropriately for conceptualization. Your desire to sell the fear of not doing it as you say will backfire. The answer is to say definitively that what I imagine for you will cost this much to create. Period.
Even though I have been talking about the difference between subjective and objective literally since I began as a consultant in 2009, we have now reached the time when your refusal to distinguish between the two (because, hey, it does take work and forces you to say why what you dream about matters) is what will force you, your art and your creative business to the bottom.
Clients may be gross and try to reverse charges or undercut your intrinsic value. However, they do it because they can or at least feel like they can.
All of which leads me to the ultimate point, in creative business, the client is NEVER right. Good service is about mutual respect, not acquiescence. It is about a willing on both sides to engage in honest communication with what it will take to imagine and produce art. Your job as both an artist and creative business owner is to lay it out plainly and specifically how EXACTLY that is going to happen. Your clients’ job is to show up, make decisions and pay you. If either of you do not do your job, you need to be fired. Pretty harsh? Maybe, but the alternative is to hand the keys to the inmates in an insane asylum all in the name of good service (the client is always right). Accommodation is just another word for mediocrity and has no place in creative business.
Accommodation also leads to the right client never showing up. You are left with those clients who believe your best is determined by them and not you. And when that happens you really have no business at all. So be intolerant before you ever need to be and convicted in why it matters to everyone, you, your employees, your art and, most of all, to your client.
