Here we are in 2020, the CF of all CF’s and yet I still see so many creative business owners trying desperately to be the regular kind, the pre-digested, easy-to-understand business model that does everything in its power to ignore you experience, professionalism and wisdom. The idea is that if you dumb your creative business down enough clients will say ok. Maybe if we just took care of the forest floors, California would not have burned this year. Grrrrr.
I am on a mission to wipe the word “Package” from the vocabulary of every creative business. Add to that list “Inventory”, “Offerings” or any other descriptor that denotes a standard grouping or bundle of services.
I actually do understand the impulse and desire to create an easily identifiable structure for clients. I am sure your thinking goes that if they know what you offer, then the better chance you will land the client. No, no and absolutely positively no. Things can be complicated AND you can do the work to explain them easily as would any fifth grader. Do not make the mistake though that you are selling to a fifth grader when, in fact, you are selling to a patron who wants to know why exactly they need to care about your art as you do.
When you talk about what you do in terms of “Packages”, “Services”, etc., you debase the connection you as an artist need to establish with your client and make it all about your ability to accomplish tasks.
Industry standard offerings belong where the underlying product and/or service is the same: your internet provider, utility or cell phone service. They have no place in creative businesses
A short cut that undermines everything. Packages focus on stuff and what will be done for the client. It connotes sameness and choice when neither could be further from the truth. Package is about process and what matters to you. Use those words instead.
On the other side of the coin, here are terms, concepts and industry norms all creative businesses need to embrace: a design statement, the one thing that matters, cost of production vs. investment in your creative business, and, most important the promises you intend to make to earn trust and deliver your best work. Your core, yes, is always timeless and eternally resonant; its expression, however, demands that you embrace all that today’s world offers. Tomorrow’s too.
Creative business is the happy business. Even if you do commercial work. You exist to transform. You transform by surprising, delighting, energizing, inspiring clients with what you intend for them. They live in the afterglow once your creation comes to life.
So why oh why would you ever make the business of your creativity pure drudgery? Or worse, boring, stiflingly rigid with nonsensical agreements that do nothing for your business or your clients? You wouldn’t you say? Were that true, I would happily be done writing. Instead, I see a sea of packages, form agreements, boilerplate everything and I literally want to scream. I can only imagine what your clients feel. And in a world littered with emotionality caused by all things COVID, natural disasters, social unrest and climate change, same same is just not going to cut it. Do the work or please, for the sake of all creative business, exit stage right.
And if you insist that you must have packages, because, hey Sean, you do not know my market, my industry (blah, blah, blah buh blah), then please know that you are only allowed two (high and low) and the high package must be AT LEAST three times as expensive as the low one. Also, if a ten year old cannot understand what they get for their money and why they should pay for it, start over. You have to be able to define what your creative business stands for at every level. Your packages support your definition; they, themselves, are not the definition of value. Again, do the damn work of defining value promised, value delivered and when. There are NO shortcuts.
Speaking of why a client should pay for what you offer, do not forget about when you offer it. Time is relative and has relative value. For pure design, time is a silly measure of value. Flux Capacitor Issue (not linking, I have given the example many times and it is more fun to Google if you do not know). However, production of any design is a measurable event and can be estimated as to who and how much is needed to effectively produce the creation. For production, getting paid for your and your creative business’ time makes total sense.
The point is: your creative business offers different things at different points of a project. Stop getting paid as if you do one thing always. It does not mean you have to change the method of payment calculation (i.e., flat fee vs. hourly), it just means you have to clearly define the value proposition that exists at the particular stage of a project. Ahem, the value proposition needs to make sense. Or you can let your mind-numbing package/hourly rates do the work. Your choice.
Next, quit making the final promise and instead focus on checkpoint promises. Who cares if clients will love it in the end? A) Of course they will or you would not have a business; and B) even if they do not, what will you do about it then, the proverbial pooch will have already been screwed. Instead, give your word about the next step, give it again, then keep it. It really truly is about making outrageous promises and keeping them all the while honoring the outrageous demands you make to keep the outrageous promise. Incremental promises kept along the way make the final one inevitable.
Beware the cruel temptress of getting it done. It is too easy to just let it all slide, to just focus on getting the project finished. Everything in the name of moving on.
Slow down, especially in our world of instant everything. Evolving relationship, deepening trust, building investment are the foundation of transformation. Let your business be creative. It is there to support your creativity, not be the hurdle you and your art need to overcome to find success. Invest in the intimacy that matters – being the steady hand in the face of uncertainty. You need your business to be a reflection of that steady hand and the only way to do that is to have it be a reflection of who you and your art actually are. Make sense and make promises. Then keep them. No better recipe to create happy than that.
In the spirit of moving on once and for all and having the CF that is 2020 actually mean something, how about we finally, finally stop saying things just because or because everyone else says or does them and has forever. Three words/concepts that need to be eviscerated from creative business forever and ever. And if anyone uses these words — clients, employees, consultants (especially consultants), colleagues, please stop them and tell them to use another word/concept. Words matter and have connotations that bring us somewhere else. These words/concepts just bring us backwards. Community, promise, creation, custom, related, purposeful, transformative, investment — this is the language of creative business, how about we use these instead?
Package. One more time. You are not an all-inclusive hotel. The notion of saying “Here’s what you get” sucks. See above. You are an artist. They get your creative business to create incredible art for them in the best way you know how for which you are the best in the world for the client who seeks it. Telling potential clients they get what everyone else gets is exactly the opposite of what you want your clients to think.
Full Service/Full Design. We are a full service “____________” (you fill in the blank). As opposed to the self-service, sort of do-it-yourself shop down the street? If a client says “I just need”, they do not need a creative business. A creative business, ahem, creates. Specifically, it creates what a client cannot. You are not a helper, you are an artist. Act like one and do not apologize or remind someone that you are full anything. You just are.
Lists of Services. In the same spirit of Package and Full Service, giving me a list of what is included when a client hires your creative business starts a negotiation you do not want to have. No list of what a client gets is ever going to make (or even help) them understand the power of what you are going to create for them. The power of your art and your creative business has to be communicated intimately. Meaning human being to human being. It IS personal. There is not a full service, package list of services that will get around that.
If 2020 has taught you nothing but one thing, let it be this: sweat the details. Deeply, profoundly, empathetically and sympathetically understand what you are saying and to whom. Say it with intention and direction. The dialogue is there for you and your creative business first, client second. Pretending it is the other way around does not help anyone. You are the guide and you are there to transform. Clients are seduced by what you and your creative business has done for others, but they leap when they can see what the guidance and transformation will look like for them. Clarity and conviction require intimate conversation and responsibility for the challenges ahead. Purpose, intention and integrity live there. Packages, Full Design, List of Services and all things predigested simply do not. Fools will be fools but you, your art and your creative business need not play the part ever again. Abundance abounds if and only if artistry and creation is manifest. The rest deserves its own fate to the scrapheap of history.
