Maybe you are the lucky artist whose phone never stops ringing with amazing opportunities that you get to cultivate and prune. For the rest of us mere mortals, finding and securing meaningful opportunities is an ever present challenge. Sure, there are marketing/PR/advertising/social media strategies that can help drive business to your door. I am not the expert there and I defer to those who know much better than I here, Seth Godinvery much front of mind.
However, there is another layer beyond getting someone to show up. What will your creative business do for the person/business across the proverbial table and why, exactly, does it matter? Are you there to highlight the strength of your client/partner or are you there to provide an avenue for expansion that they alone could not? If you are a florist, doing beautiful flowers professionally is expected, so showing how wonderful your work is and how easy you are to partner with is, well, boring. Boring meaning every professional florist on the planet has to do what you are going to do. How about drawing? Providing education for those that care? Demonstrating, through your process, that you are there to develop not just visual drama but drama for the other senses? Hmmm.
In order to not be boring you have to contemplate who would want the “other” and how it might push their business/experience forward. In the florist example, if the person hiring you sees flowers as just pretty, then you are toast. On the other hand, those that believe in, say, the power of smell can use your willingness to educate as an asset to their business. And that is the thing — asset not nice touch.
Another example: many interior designers enjoy being part of the construction process, whether ground up or major renovation. The idea is that they can help set a beautiful stage which their decor (or in some cases another designer’s) will shine on. It is just that architects, contractors and other professionals are driving this bus and it is where they make their money. So designers can compete with these professionals (good luck with that) or find a business model that supports these players. Definitive answers are incredibly valuable, so being an unbiased consultant who provides clarity on the implications of choosing elements is a big deal. What if there was a service to develop the plan with a flat fee (monthly, meeting, etc.) without agenda for ultimate design? Would that be of interest to an architect trying to expedite their work? Not every game is about power, sometimes playing the role of arbiter is enough. Perhaps this is an avenue to find yourself at the table where you can demonstrate your own expertise while still honoring those of the other professionals in the room.
The overarching point here is that it is not enough to solve new problems for those who might offer you opportunities, you have to have a business model that encourages that behavior in the first place. This model will be based on making conscious choices that you have to be comfortable with. Being a consultant means that you are not invested in the outcome regardless of how much you are trying to influence it. A designer, on the other hand, rests her entire reputation on the outcome and is, therefore, wholly invested in the choices made. If the opportunity depends on your willingness to be a consultant when you just cannot get there, you have to let it go no matter how good it looks on paper. At the end of the day, you have to be who you are as both an artist and creative business owner. On the other hand, if you can get there, then you have to go all the way there and be okay with what you might be giving up. In the interior design example above, no guarantees as a consultant that you will be their interior designer when they get to that point.
Sitting around waiting for the phone to ring is an exercise in frustration if there ever was one. Instead, work on thinking about those that should care for reasons far beyond the obvious. Everyone expects you to be brilliant at your core, so figure out what an extension of that core could mean to them beyond the work. This is how you become indispensable — the very thing they must have but never knew they needed. Erase the box so you can start a wholly new conversation and before long your language will be all that matters.
