You order a pizza from the local place for dinner as you have many times before. You have never talked about how long it should take but it usually takes 25 minutes. Today, the delivery takes 35 minutes. You call to complain. The restaurant says they try to make it within 30 minutes but are happy if it gets there +/- 5 minutes from there.
Who determines success in this situation? You, the customer, who values 25 minutes or the restaurant who targets no more than 35? Who is responsible for setting what makes success and what does not?
For businesses apart from creative businesses, usually the answer is a logical one based on industry standard. Perhaps it is industry standard for pizza to be delivered in 30 minutes based on prep time and delivery requirements. Expectations can be defined because they make sense.
Creative businesses are different. Metrics of success are iconic to the creative business (and the creative process of the business). Therefore, the determination of what those metrics are and the responsibility of communicating them to clients, employees, and colleagues alike rests solely with you, the creative business owner. The reason is simple — to do your best you have to do it your way and that only happens if you set what success looks like. There is nothing rational about it.
Easy enough. However, implementing these metrics is much harder than it looks. We all want to be conciliatory and owning our peculiar preferences can appear overly self-indulgent. So we allow there to be wiggle room from clients, employees and colleagues alike in the name of being collaborative and/or supportive. Nowhere do you feel like you are compromising what matters until it becomes plain that you have done just that.
The reason compromise is painful is that if you allow others to determine what success looks like, they, not you, are defining your business. How exactly can you build anything if you are not in charge of determining the value of not only what you built, but how you built it?
Remember, nobody needs what your creative business does. Nobody. You exist to create joy and that is far beyond pretty. Beyond pretty because it requires you own that you see what others cannot despite their deep desire to possess the very thing you imagine for them. So you must use trust to nurture faith in the unknown and the journey into the mystery, not from it. Trust is only built when you resolve tension, solve a problem as you intend to solve it. If you permit others to pose the problem to which you must then solve, you absolutely lose control of the narrative. A narrative lost is the essence of fear — distrust in your ability to actually do what you say.
Own the fear in you and around you. See you clients as terrified, because they are. Stop telling them not to be scared and instead set about managing that fear with your metrics of success. Assuaging fear is for amateurs, managing it to scale your creative is the work of professionals. Do the same with your employees and colleagues alike. You will come to appreciate that defining your best with metrics of success you alone have determined will be self-fulfilling, and, more importantly, self-sustaining. From here you will sow the seeds of opportunity that will take you, your art and your creative business wherever you would like them to go.
