As we all set out into a new world order, to try to figure out if our creative business is relevant or not, or better, how we are going become ever more relevant in what we all hope is a new world order, we have to know that we have to take a risk. Even if you try to stay the course, that too is a risk. A few thoughts on moving forward then.
The time to risk it all is when you have everything to lose, not when you have nothing. When you have nothing, only one place to go – up. There is a safety in that. If you are wrong, who cares, you are at rock-bottom anyway. But if you are right, there is the way out. If things are going well or even okay though, being wrong costs you something – money, reputation, maybe even a little of both. Edsel, New Coke, Tropicana packaging, Google Hangouts. Do it anyway.
To the light means fully absorbing the brightness of the day. The fearlessness it took to start your creative business is the very fear that prevents you from risking its very existence. We often define success through money and it is a useful metric although certainly not the only measure. Fulfilled work, happy clients, expanding art come to mind as alternatives. But let us go with money for a baseline, even today.
Is your goal to increase by a percentage every year or even insure that you get back to 2019 – maybe grow 20%, 30%, 50%? To make a hundred thousand dollars? A million? What if you were to make your goal exquisitely unobtainable? Not ridiculous, just exquisitely unobtainable? If you make $250,000 in revenue now, what would $600,000 next year look like? What would you have to do to get there? Would there be compromises? Structural changes? Would it be worth it? It is too easy to raise the bar so high or so far as to make it a pipe dream and therefore forgive your unwillingness to even try. To use a sports analogy, you can touch the rim (almost) and you want to dunk the ball.
Incremental change is an oxymoron and you will never walk to the light if that is the goal you seek. Doing something a little better every year gets you run over by those that are out to redefine the game. Never more true than today. If you are fortunate enough to be doing well at the game you currently play or think that you will be the winner on the other side of upheaval – at the top of your market or even finding lots of clients coming your way, you can live there if you choose. Incremental change means doing what you currently do better. Nothing wrong with it at all. Just do not say you want to get to the next level or redefine your and your art’s relevancy. The next level is not a flight of stairs up, it is another building entirely. Why the cliché is so silly. You can maximize the level you are on and that is a wonderful vision with a lot to it. Going to another level though, redefining your value, that asks you to believe in a reality you cannot yet comprehend.
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am a Seth Godin fanatic. His mantra is that the connection economy, where making meaning, being an artist, is the new world order. Underneath the message is that change is the new normal. Resistance to change, the desire for predictability is its own undoing. Mass is dead, the Long Tail firmly ensconced. Delight your fans, forget the rest. Seth’s basic premise is that human relationship requires evolution, so too with creative business. Art transcends it medium precisely because trust is its economy. The foundation of trust is what allows change. This foundation IS the path forward through the pain and to the other side of what our world, our culture will become (hopefully).
Your fans will trust you as you risk what is next so long as you never forsake that trust. So give yourself permission to imagine a world just this side of impossible. Then walk to the light to consider leaping into that world. That is what the next level looks like. Change lives there as a compulsion to discover the possibility of what could happen. For those that want a tangible idea of what I am talking about, here goes.
To date, most design businesses other than fashion (graphic, interior, event) are buyer driven businesses. Demand is created with previous work and maybe some marginally interesting ideas (here is how you too can spruce up your bedroom), but mostly it is a reactive business. You wait for the phone to ring when the client has a project for you and your creative business. Nobody is thinking about how to reach into a client’s life to generate demand — to be in the business of generating ideas that compel demand. The future, which is now by the way, is going to demand that design businesses look like production houses for movie studios who are voraciously seeking fantastic ideas that they WILL execute on. I am not for a second saying that designers should set out creating idea after idea for nothing. I am saying that designers have to become so inextricably linked to how their clients live their lives that they are paid to generate ideas for how their clients can live those lives better. Profound intimacy and trust in a designer’s vision will be paid for first by the client, then the creative business will be paid again to make it happen. Turn a reactive industry into a proactive one. Radical change would mean radical rewards and opportunity for you, your art and your creative business.
And there it is. Proaction involves risk, it means choosing yourselves, reaching out for true conversation, building connection like roots of a tree instead of pretty cut flowers. It is not sexy, it is not immediate and it might not work. Then again, I know that your really do not have a choice. The question is only how long you can delay the inevitable until you are waiting (and waiting and waited) to be picked by an audience otherwise meaningfully engaged. Maybe then you will realize, if it is not too late, that the conversation is yours to start.
When you walk to the light you might find the other building was there all along.
