BOBC Episode# 130: The Importance of Structure
INTRODUCTION:
So Slinky, you know the kid’s toy? Well when you stretch it down the stairs, it’s actually the same toy as the one sitting on the shelf. The only way it wouldn’t be the same toy is if you found a broken rib. So too, with your creative business. Structure really is everything.
BODY:
So I’ve had this analogy for, oh, as long as I’ve been doing this, and so you have the vision of the kid’s toy, the Slinky. And the Slinky, stretched and twisted all the way down the stairs until you, you know, unfortunately step on it and get all angry as a parent. It’s the exact same toy as when you compact it and put it on the shelf.
The only reason it wouldn’t be the same toy is if you bend or break a rib. And so the analogy to your creative business is exactly that. You can do anything you want, you can go and be as flexible as you want to be. Right?
But the point of this is that the ribs, the structure, the way that your business flows is the same.
The ribs, they never bend or break. They are always the same and how you are flexible in putting them out is what matters. And the reason I go here and give that example is, because of late, I have heard and understood that many, many people are getting lost in the business model. And the how much I charge or, you know, what this client is doing that thing and, and what about this way or what about that way?
And it all just gives me a headache, right? Because at the end of the day, the DNA of your business, are those ribs. Ribs of the slinky. And what does that look like? And you know, I’ve said them many times. Every single creative business only has eight stages. Potential client to actual client, idea to design, design to production, production to installation.
Those are the eight stages, and most important of those stages is the transition from one stage to the next. This much I’ve absolutely talked about many, many times, and I’ll continue to talk about them many, many times. And the reason is, is because the crispness of how you move through, how you onboard a new client to get them to understand what makes you iconic. And the decisions that are gonna be required for you to do your work is and fulfil your two promises, which just to review are only your best work. Only the ribs of the slinky, right? And that you’re gonna stake your reputation on anything you do.
So those two promises are what your clients rely on and you rely on as a business. And so when you put this all together for yourself it’s how do I move through those eight stages? And more specifically, how do I move through the transition of each one of those eight stages, is the work of how your business speaks, right?
And that is different from all of us, but what isn’t different is the underlying structure of idea to design to production to installation, once you actually have the client. And how, what kind of client are you gonna have that’s gonna give you permission to do those things in the way that you need to do them?
And specifically when we’re talking about design. The way that you choose to create so that you can get permission then to make it happen. That is the hardest thing in the world for clients to understand, my clients to understand, and for your clients to understand. Because everybody has their own vision of how it’s supposed to go.
Except there can only be one storyteller. There can only be one person there to tell the story, not of the art. ’cause that’s the easy part, right? Which in the sense of like, this is the thing you wanna create, but in the story of the business that’s gonna support the creation of the art and the way that most values what is getting done, when it’s getting done right?
And of course this is the three WSS in the conversation. Where were you? Where are you? Where are you going? And making sure that those are integral to your components of, you know, existing clients, new clients. All of that I think is really vital because you are the storyteller and if you lose control of the story, you lose control of it all.
And so it makes no difference whether or not whatever creative business you’re in, however, it’s gonna be. Time and the ability to control time is all you really have. Whether you have a hard deadline like someone who’s doing an event or coming up to finish something or there’s something relatively looser, it doesn’t matter.
Your ability to control time, your ability to move through time as you would wish to move through it, is exactly what is necessary. You can, and where this gets layered and complicated is that you can be in at simultaneously at different points in time at the exact same point of time.
And what I mean by that is like, let’s take you know, interior design for one second. You could be working on basically managing the actual construction of the house, which is a different skillset, than designing the decor that’s gonna go into the house. And you could be doing both of those things at the same time. And so each one of those has different flows, and each one of those might have different places in the process that you’re working. But knowing where you are given what the circumstance is, is everything because you’re the only one that does.
And making sure that you appreciate what those ribs are going to be for you, how that is gonna go for you is everything. And because once you set the ribs, they never move, they’re never challenged, they’re never negotiable. They can be. If what you wanna do is reevaluate and say, is there a better way for us to do these things and maybe then you’ll modify what those ribs look like, but at the end of the day, they aren’t. Right. And at the end of the day, you know the person that can never change that is your client, that the person who can never tell you that this is how this is gonna go, absolutely can never be your client because then they run your business, not you.
So the ribs are incredibly important for what you’re doing. And as we move through and people who are in different stages of being busy or not be busy, you know, it is so important that when you onboard a client that you actually spend the time. Going through time, right? How is this gonna work?
What are we gonna look to do? What are we going to be done? Because the irony of it all is at the end of the day, the client just cares about how much money they’re gonna spend, right? How much money is this gonna be in totality? What are your fees gonna be? What are the stuffs gonna cost? What’s it gonna be?
Because at the end of the day, it’s just a number to them. And if they’re paying you, $2 or $20, it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, it’s how much do they pay in the end, right? So the only way that they’re going to care about the money they’re spending when they’re spending it with you is if you ask them to care.
If you ask them, if you consecrate what that represents, right? So here’s when you just paid for, “creative”. Here’s when you just paid for, “production”. Here’s when you just paid for “installation”. Right? And that’s true for every single business. Yeah. And so making sure that you are on top of that and really defining what the value is, is incredibly important.
Now, some of you have business models that don’t make it be possible, right? ’cause you have literally told the client that every period of time is the exact same if you charge hourly. And you don’t have a different rate for the different things you do. That’s literally what you just told them, right? So you’ll have to overcome your business, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t say what things are. It doesn’t mean that you can’t honor the idiosyncrasy of what those ribs are going to be, because in the end, why it matters so much for you is that. If you don’t have a very specific sense of what those ribs are, you don’t have a very specific sense of why they are in the order that they are for you, how you’re very much moving again, from idea to design, design to production, production to installation, right?
Then what happens is that you’re going to really not have a very good sense of what is good business and what isn’t good business. So until the first move is not to change your business, model the price a different way. The first move is to understand why your ribs need to be what they are for yourself, right?
And then from there you can say, all right, how do we support that from a business perspective? How do we get paid to do these things so that we can move through our process the way that we want to, right? And that we can be storytellers and we can make it exciting. And within that, That overall thought, you can decide how much information you’re gonna give in order to make that go.
Some people give a lot of information to, you know, make sure the clients are comfortable, others don’t, right? It really is how are we going to entertain you, entertain you, so that you can feel that the next stage is ready for us. Of course, that’s being invested in the three Ws. It’s providing non-information, it’s doing all of those things that are necessary for you to be in control of what? Not the client, control of time.
Time is what you have to decide for yourself as to at this time we’re doing design. At this time we’re doing production. At this time, we’re doing installation, rinse and repeat until we’re done. Right? Again, knowing those eight stages, building your ribs around those eight stages is everything, and the transition through each one to the next has to be super clean and it has been proven out to me in the very long time that I’ve been doing this, that leaky valves make people dead.
Making sure that clients understand how you move through is, is the whole point of this conversation. And that the respect that you will get from making sure that they appreciate the value of moving to the next stage is how you find evolution to ultimately you create great work, right? And so what does this mean?
People don’t talk about pretty in the end, there’s a bias to everything that you do. What they talk about and what they really want to know is how you made them feel throughout the process. And doing that work and being invested in that is what is its own reward. Most of you out there, you’re not spending time doing that.
You’re not spending time. How we specifically go from one stage to the next because it. Doesn’t feel like you need to because your art is so strong and you might be right until you’re not. And then it’ll be very painful because you will find yourself with a client that wants to upend how you wanna do things, even if they were a great client up until then.
Once they start to up, end things, things just have a way of going south. So instead really double down, especially now when you have some time, hopefully to think about these things and really create, how does it look? What does that slinky look like? And from there you can be incredibly flexible.
Incredibly flexible to do all the things that you wish to do and to live in the idea that there is emotional resonance in the first part. And that emotional resonance is not happenstance. It’s. Structured. It’s a skillset. It’s a forethought, right? It’s like great service at a great hotel. It feels effortless, but it is anything but.
That’s my riff for today. Until next time.
