Creative business is different. Sure, you all provide things at the end of the day. Photographs, furniture, flowers, lighting, food. However, it is never just about the thing.
Think about toothpaste. No one at Proctor and Gamble is moved when they see someone buy a tube of Crest, let alone brush their teeth with it. They enjoy selling the product and they are proud that it works well for the consumer. That is where it begins and ends for Proctor and Gamble. They are happy if they sell a lot of toothpaste, not so much if they do not.
Now think about your creative business, your art. If you did not care about the reaction to your work, you would not be around for very long. Every creative business owner I know strives for joy, for transformation. You want that look on your client’s face. The look that says you got them, go to them, moved them. For so many of you, it takes months, maybe years with a client to get that look. Layer upon layer of relationship, trust building, tension and resolution, over and over again.
If this is the essence of what you do – a journey to joy, why would you ever insist on looking like toothpaste? Make it all about the thing, the stuff, what the end product costs, instead focusing on what matters – how you are going to get from here to there, together?
Of course, the cost of production matters. No champagne on a beer budget. It just does not matter beyond expectation equivalence – you can create for them based on their budget or you cannot.
So what stops you from really going there with your clients? Really owning what it is you actually do (i.e., go on a journey, not sell toothpaste)? You can tell me it is fear. Of maybe not getting any business if you look different. Or looking too expensive since what is the price of the journey worth anyway?
Or maybe it is something even deeper – your willingness to erase yourself, to be in service instead of service to those who would pay for your work. Are you intimidated by your client’s money? Their profession? Their education?
Maybe it is a little (or a lot) of both fear and intimidation.
The answer has to be in the value YOU receive when you create. The knowledge you have earned in not just how sweet the end is, but the power of the journey. The reward you receive when your art, your creation does what is intended. Can you see your power and that of your art and your creative business in the equation?
If you can value your own joy, your own pleasure as part of transaction, perhaps you can see your own light. To know that you, your art and your creative business matter beyond the thing you provide. And if you go there, maybe, just maybe, you might refuse to have your creative business look like toothpaste. Art first. Stuff second.
