We have been trained to listen well, respect what clients say, answer their questions. Especially if you are trying to make a sale. Sometimes, sometimes you have clients who actually understand the why, how and what of your creative business and value the process you take to create the art you do. Most often, though, yours is a unique project distinct from all experience your client might have. Think social events, residential interior design and architecture, and non-commercial photography. These clients do not have the skill set, no matter their research, to truly understand the why, how and what of your creative business. They just know they want you and your creative business to create for them, transform them. Yes, clients in the corporate world are on a whole smarter in the how and what you do, though not necessarily the why. Depending on the situation, the why might be meaningless or it might be everything. Where it is everything, think Peter Marino for Louis Vuitton, the sensibility trends back to uncertainty.
What I am talking about is a fundamental mismatch between your expertise, your gift, your art and those seeking it from you. To me, what creative business owners have done with the mismatch in the digital age is to set in motion, if they are not careful, their own undoing. Translation: you answer dumb questions.
Access to information is not the same as wisdom, talent and vision. And yet when a client says “What about this?” as they show you an Instagram picture on their phone, you answer.
Here is a graphic analogy I hope you may not soon forget. Your client is a drowning victim, flailing away, you are the lifeguard. You can negotiate with them – “It will be ok, give me your hand” or “Swim over here”. Then you will drown with them. Or you can do what every lifeguard is trained to do: take control in any manner possible and get them out of the water.
You may not want to own the analogy for yourself and your creative business, but it does not make it any less true. The work of any creative business is a journey and requires a guide. You must be that guide and to act as such you have to know your own wisdom.
Wisdom is the conviction that your way is the right way for your clients. Your determination to keep clients focused on what really matters for their ultimate success, their transformation and, yes, your unwillingness to answer dumb questions. If you have established the overall budget for a project and are within the budget, what any one item costs is wholly irrelevant. Your clients trust you to spend their money well or they do not. And if they do not, the problem is not that the sofa costs $20,000, it is that your clients do not trust you and your vision enough to have you spend their money as you would choose.
Of course, there is an alternative to the $20,000 sofa. So good luck defending why you chose the $20,000 one. The real question is does your work transform your client’s vision? Did you really spend their money well and are they just scared at what the transformation might be without actually living in it? If clients could see the world you do, they would not need you. They cannot, so they are scared of what they cannot know. Yours is to restore their faith in you, your art and your creative business, not the sofa.
As much as I wish it were not so, I fear I am swimming upstream here. Why? Because access to information is a very powerful mistress. The instinct is to compete with your client’s access. You know more about the thing, let me show you. And so erodes the trust.
The real point is: it will always be how you use the information, the tool. What you create with the tool, the thing, the information is what only you and your creative business can. Your story is everything. My prayer for creative business owners: stand in your own light, do what you do without compromise, convicted in the power of your art and your creative business. And please please stop answering dumb questions. You cannot remove uncertainty, only live in the notion that you know how to get to the other side. You know because of talent, wisdom, experience, and a deep understanding of your ability to transform, to create joy. Live there.
