Creative Truth

Start & Build a Profitable Design Business

Brad Weaver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317541554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Programación de juegos

Creative Truth is your playbook for starting, building, and enjoying a profitable design business. Whether you're a solo freelancer working from home or a small group of creative entrepreneurs ready to get to the next level, this is your roadmap to success. You're the CEO, CFO, CTO, Secretary, Janitor, Office Manager, and everything in between. Finding a balance between running the business and doing great creative work is a constant struggle. From learning how to price your work and manage your time, to setting up your business and defining your market, Brad Weaver covers everything designers need to know to run a studio without losing heart.

Highlights:

• Real numbers, real tools, and best practices in a toolkit that you can start using immediately in your business.

• A companion website that offers up-to-date resources, articles, tools, and discussions, allowing readers to continue learning as they grow.

• Practical tips for getting clients, being more profitable, building your network, managing your operations, getting things done, hiring help, managing contractors, and finding joy along the way.

Chapter 1
Full Measures

The Creative Business Mindset

“I flew the Atlantic because I wanted to … Whether you are flying the Atlantic or selling sausages or building a skyscraper or driving a truck, your greatest power comes from the fact that you want tremendously to do that very thing, and do it well.”

Amelia Earhart¹

Follow Your Passion, Fall Off a Cliff

In May of 2014, actor Jim Carrey gave the commencement address at a small University in Fairfield, Iowa. The speech went viral thanks to Carrey’s remarks about following your dreams, taking risks, and doing what you love. Social feeds were full of people waxing poetic about “following their passion.” The world was one big poster with eagles and mountains underscored by the word “DREAMS.” I wanted to join in and sprinkle pixie dust on the conversation, but it honestly made me want to punch a kitten.

People readily latch on to the idea of finding one’s calling in life and pursuing it to the ends of the earth. While the earth isn’t flat, there are cliffs, and blindly pursuing a passion is bound to take you over more than one. In an age where overnight celebrity and wealth are becoming increasingly common, the adage “follow your passion” is a message of hope that everyone loves to embrace. But it’s a terrible business strategy. Not every passion can earn you a paycheck.

When we’re in the thick of it, and doing the work, that fire isn’t burning as bright. We’re tired of doing yet another repetitive task for a client that asks for ridiculous revisions. We have half the budget we need to do a quality job, so we cut corners and turn in another final product that isn’t worthy of our portfolio. A few months or years go by, and you haven’t done anything “meaningful.” What happened to that passion? What happened to that fire? Now, it just feels like a job.

I love it when someone brings a deep and personal passion together with good business sense. People like Sara Blakely, Richard Branson, Tori Burch, Walt Disney, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Tony Hsieh come to mind. They did the work as business people first in order to sell creative and innovative ideas. They all had talent, but their focus was always on getting the solution into people’s hands. They knew that no matter how fun or enjoyable the work, if no one used it, it wouldn’t be around for long. We expect others to be infected by our passion. Typically, that isn’t the case. You have to sell your ideas, your solutions, and yourself. It’s no surprise that it requires a lot of hard work and energy to do so. It’s laborious.

“Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus—these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify … Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labors. Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.”

Lewis Hyde²

The Pursuit of Happiness

We’re raised to believe that tasks producing income are work, and anything else is playing. So when we spend our time doing something we don’t enjoy, like waiting tables or selling insurance, we’re unfulfilled. We feel that our work is distracting us from our true calling. Throughout our monotonous workday, we long to rush home and labor at our side projects and creative pursuits: our passions. We hear speeches and read articles that fuel the fire to quit our jobs and pursue our passion. We search desperately for ways to do what we love and have it be our primary source of income. So we tear off that apron, slam it on the table, yell “I quit” and go home to open a graphic design business.

And then six months later we’re on food stamps.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but it happens. The reason for failure probably wasn’t a lack of passion or even a lack of talent. Most likely, it was a lack of income. Reconciling something we’ve always done for fun to our financial livelihood isn’t easy. The truth is that most people who set out to make money pursuing their passion end up disillusioned, disappointed, and underemployed.

But why?

Get Your Mind Right

In the words of Young Jeezy, “you gotta get ya mind right.” A creative job will follow you everywhere you go. Being a garbage man or customer service rep isn’t likely to do so. You finish your work and you go home, there is no “labor.” We need garbage men, but “if we believe that personal fulfillment is really the ultimate purpose of labor, then who do we expect to do all the other jobs that are not so existentially fulfilling?”³

Garbage men and customer service reps aren’t defined by their jobs. The garbage man may be an incredible woodworker on the weekends and the customer service rep a great jazz singer at local clubs. Neither of them may harbor a desire to make a living at their creative pursuit. For them, a job is a job, and love is love. “It makes it seem like work is a very important if not primary source of love, and if you aren’t deriving pleasure from your work that there’s something wrong with you or something wrong with the choices you’ve made in your life—I absolutely reject that.”⁴

You don’t have to turn your passion into your career, but if you’re going to do so, know that there are challenges along the way. Turning your passion for creative into a bad business will suck out every ounce of joy. But that’s what we’re here to fix, so don’t be sad! I promise, I’ll put you on the back of a magical unicorn that’s riding through candy mountain—you just have to climb on.

If you get into this line of work because you believe it’s going to fulfill you or give your life meaning, prepare for war.

The pursuit of passion and great work is part of finding happiness in a creative business. The key is to change your approach and let the passion come from the work. “Don’t follow your passion, follow your effort.”⁵ If you get into this line of work because you believe it’s going to fulfill you or give your life meaning, prepare for war. It’s hard to be financially stable and find meaning from a creative business unless you learn to treat the work as a deliverable. You’re only a few pages in, so there’s still time to run away. If, however, you’re still with me, I want to help you do what you feel you must do and make a decent living along the way.

You, Defined

In “When You’re At the Crossroads of Should and Must,” artist Elle Luna asks a profound question, “what if who we are and what we do become one and the same? What if our work is so thoroughly autobiographical that we can’t parse the product from the person? What if our jobs are our careers and our callings?”⁶ Your life as “you,” the person and your creative life are then one and the same. The work is the outcome of your efforts, so it is your energy and your time being traded for an end product. You are the equipment, the tool, and the machine. Just like a factory, if a piece of equipment is used at full speed without rest, maintenance, and care, it will break. Getting to a place where we can relax and enjoy the fruit of our labor means being smart about how we work.

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

L. P. Jacks⁷

Business in the Front, Creative in the Back

What stands out among my successful creative colleagues is a dedication to the creative work and business operations that run in parallel. They are intentional about their day, week, month, and year as a business owner first, then a creative. They’re focused and tactical. When things go wrong, they aren’t lost without a map. They’ve developed systems and methods for working through the inevitable creative and business challenges. Those systems, as boring as they may sound, won’t stifle the creative fire. In fact, they make it possible to keep it burning for years to come.

In a creative business, misguided passion can be poison. Holding too tightly to your vision, your design, and your opinion can cost you clients, money, and personal peace. In the past, if your creative pursuits were just for play, the pressure was off. Now, it’s what keeps the lights on. Your attitude regarding your creative work changes when it becomes your job; it’s unavoidable. You have to become pragmatic, which doesn’t come easy for many creatives. Pragmatism means using success and experience to determine what works. It means being practical, which at times is the opposite of passionate.

It’s Just Business, Baby

Business, business, business. There, you said it. Your creative endeavor is a business, through and through, whether you’re working on the side for a few hours a week or full-time.

No matter how and when you start, having the business mindset from day one is critical for longevity.

But what is a business mindset?

• • Strategic thinking. It’s knowing what you want, what you need, and how you’re going to get it. It’s being intentional with your time, energy, and resources to move your business forward rather than reacting to whatever comes your way.
• • Making money. You have to earn money to keep a business open. There are a lot of ways to make money in your business, but the most common is to exchange your time and effort for client revenue. So you have to be strategic about where money is going to come from. It also means you intend to be profitable.
• • Having a vision. You’re getting away from mundane tasks and finally doing something you enjoy, so don’t muck it up by doing a bunch of mundane tasks! Dedicate time on a regular basis to think about where your business is going long-term and how your daily decisions affect that vision.
• • Marketing. You have to talk about what you do to people who may hire you to do that thing. That may be in person, online, or through other media channels.
• • Being uncomfortable. You will have to make sacrifices to keep your business growing. Being willing to make business decisions, fueled by pragmatic thinking, can be the difference between success and failure.

So, here’s your first hard truth: this shit is hard. It never gets easy. There may be times when things are going well, and all seems right. Enjoy it, because darkness can and will come. You can’t avoid every single pitfall that comes from owning a small business; it’s impossible. Success and sustainability come from mitigating risk and lessening the impact. Think of it as wearing a bulletproof vest but still getting shot. Above all, you have to create the maximum opportunity for optimism. The more control you have over the business side of things, the less panic you’ll feel when things go wrong.

Sold Out, Not Selling Out

How do you find the balance between doing great work and making money? And not just some money, not just enough money, but the money you need to find your level of happiness and fulfillment? Money doesn’t equal happiness, I believe that. But I can tell you that barely making it from month to month doesn’t equal happiness eit...