Time Is Money

If you are in the business of designing and producing art for your clients, then your goal has to be to maximize the time between design and production.  Whether you are a baker, set designer, florist, stationer or caterer, the more time you have to aggregate orders, purchase inventory, optimize your design and plan for installation/delivery, the better you can do.

While the price of creativity is subjective, the price of its production is not.  What you pay for a flower, a nail, paper or a pound of butter is driven by market forces: supply and demand and inventory risk to the factory and/or wholesaler.  Presuming your business is large enough to matter to your suppliers (where they would notice if you didn’t buy from them), then the price you pay is driven by the absolute size of your order and your willingness to remove risk from their business.  Walmart gets the prices it does because of how much they buy of any item AND their willingness to commit to buy it no matter what.  When the risk of a sale goes away, the price becomes solely a function of production and not inventory.  The farmer selling milk to Walmart never has to worry that he will be stuck with his milk and literally watch his money go down the drain.  Same goes for a floral wholesaler if you commit to buy far in advance.  If he doesn’t have to worry that the flowers will go bad on his shelf, he can afford to give you a better price than someone who walks in the day (or even week) before to get their flowers.  And, for hard goods, like paper, linen, candles, etc., if there is enough time to ship them over sea or ground, rather than air, it will also be reflected in the price.

Most creative businesses that design and produce art are seasonal.  So extending the time between design and production will also allow you to aggregate your orders.  Instead of buying paint for the three sets you have coming up on a particular week, you would be able to buy all the paint you need for the thirty sets you have coming up for your two month season.

Apart from increasing your ability to purchase inventory more efficiently, having time prior to final installation/delivery will help make your production process more efficient.  We all get better with practice and, given the opportunity, skilled craftsmen will get faster at making your prototype the more times they do it.  Moreover, given enough time, they might be able to change the prototype (and still give you the art you need) to be able to build it faster and cheaper than you could ever imagine.

Once you understand how valuable the time between design and production is, you will be able to communicate that value to your clients.  Architecture and construction is a terrific example of how it can be done: once the plans are done, changing them is enormously expensive.  The larger point is this though: you want to provide your absolute best to your clients, not just the best you can do under the circumstances.  Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is the best version of your art.