Most of you are heading into a slower time for the next six weeks or so. I do hope many of you get the chance to rest and refresh. I see taking the time to invest in yourself — whether a vacation, educational endeavor (conference, class, travel, etc.) or just time away — as incredibly meaningful. The reason is not woo woo. It is because the single biggest asset in your creative business is between your ears. If you are not nourishing that asset, it is the same to me as leaving your laptop (or whatever device you work on) near an open window in a rainstorm. It might keep working, but not for long. Inspiration comes in the quiet moments when you allow the noise of the everyday to be still to the beauty around you that you simply do not notice in the noise.
When you do return to hard thinking about your creative business, my prayer is that you come not only with an open mind, but beginner’s mind. Truly, to contemplate what your world might look like if you rewrote your script with fresh eyes. To help you down the path, I thought it might be useful to have some comparisons you might not have contemplated and ask the question about why things are the way they are. Perhaps you might choose to ignore the accepted way/standard/market and define a better version for yourself.
First, hourly rates. Regardless of whether charging by the hour is a good practice or not for your creative business, charging an appropriate rate does define the story of you, your art and your creative business. In ten years of doing the work I do, I have never seen an hourly rate exceed $300 but once. Most are in the $200-250/hr. range. Hmmmm.
If you can see the work you and your creative business does in the moment it does it as important as other significant moments in someone’s or some business’ life, then why the disparate rates? An interior designer redoing a client’s home literally shapes the way that client will live their lives every single day. A creative business focused on weddings is involved in one of the most important days in that client’s life. A photographer tells the story we will all use to remember the moment. A graphic designer can shape us with her work so that we perceive her client’s world as she most wants us to. Certainly, the work is as important as a lawyer writing a contract, an accountant doing taxes, even a therapist, um, therapizing. And yet the hourly rates are not even close. If a senior partner at many law firm can charge more than a $1,000/hr., why not you? Value is how YOU define it. Saying that it is just not the market presumes a defined market when there is none. What you are saying is that convention and perception are up to someone else so you can only get what you get. That only has to be true if you let it be true. So do not.
Percentages are made up numbers. Interior designers often get 30-50% of a production budget to produce their designs, event planners and designers 10-20%, architect’s 10-18% the cost of construction, agents and managers 10-20%, real estate brokers 2-7%. Why? Mostly because some business owner did some quick calculations and figured out that the percentage range was what they needed to make a decent profit and made it a short hand for clients to easily understand. And then the shorthand spread regardless of whether or not it was the right number for your creative business and so you stuck with it. If your creative business happened to look like the business where relative percentages can work, you are good. But what if you are an outlier? What if you are an interior designer who loves working on intimate spaces and you are a minimalist? If a space is 1,500sf, how exactly are you going to spend enough on production to generate a production percentage that will justify your time? Your fees could easily be as much as the cost of your design. Same is true, ironically, of a huge project. Most often these huge projects take an enormous amount of time (years) and a gargantuan amount of work. While the percentage looks great, what happens if the number is too low given the time involved? Again, live in convention and you will fall to convention unless you are in fact conventional.
A final thought. If you and your creative business are literally paid to imagine a world that does not yet exist, why wouldn’t your business get to live there too? Yes, it is incredibly scary and vulnerable to say to anyone what you truly value and what you need to be paid for that value when you create it. Then again, if you will not say it and live by it, why should anyone else?
