spiral, which eventually leads to resentment.
I think the only reason my business didn’t go under in those early days was because we had a huge number of projects on the go at once with a constant flow of cash and low overheads – it was just me and one other staff member working on them (Mel is now my deputy editor at The Collective, so she’s obviously forgiven me for nearly driving her to a breakdown). My biggest problem was I set absolutely no boundaries. Mel still tells the story of the time a client rang her at one o’clock in the morning. A naked Mel leapt out of bed thinking there was an emergency and sat on the stairs outside of her bedroom talking to him, so as not to wake her sleeping husband. What was the emergency? He wanted to change the colour of the font on his book cover. Seriously! She says she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and thought, “What the hell am I doing?” She really is the employee of the century.
I kept convincing myself that I loved what I was doing so much, and that I was so lucky to be running my own business, that it didn’t matter what I was charging. I kept convincing my staff (and by ‘staff’ I mean Mel) that it really didn’t matter that we were a smidge broke (I was driving a Mazda 121 that you could only get in and out of via the window and Mel and I shared a phone – she would put people on hold with her hand instead of a hold button because we didn’t have the funds to get a proper phone system). The world was ours! We would never go hungry because our bellies were full of passion and ambition. Right? Wrong, Lisa, very wrong!
In my case, I had fallen into the trap of mistakenly believing that my passion could replace the need for profit – and I don’t think I’m the only budding entrepreneur to do this. Think about it: when most start-up founders embark on an adventure, it’s generally because they’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with a project, a product or a good cause. They’re driven by the belief they can make a real difference, and often the relief at escaping cubicle life in a big corporation.
As for me, three years after starting the business of my dreams, I had reached a point of total resentment. If I’m honest, I just wanted to say a great big “f**k you” to all my clients, even the ones I loved. I wanted to scream as they walked out of my office, “I’m getting paid practically nothing and you don’t seem to care!”
I can say without doubt that if I’d continued in this way, there is no way my business would still be standing, and certainly no way I’d be holding myself up as a good example. So, what changed? Well, those of you who’ve read my previous book Daring & Disruptive may remember me talking about a seminar I went to, which I paid AU$1200 to attend (despite the fact I was so skint at the time I had trouble affording toothpaste).
The seminar was run by an incredible Australian motivational speaker and an expert on leadership, and it turned out to be one of the richest weekends of my life to date, in both the emotional and financial sense. From this man I learned the importance of valuing your time (at the time he charged AU$1000 an hour, worked for 120 days a year and spent the rest of the year with his family) but it was the other keynote speakers who also had a lasting effect on me. Their overt selling-from-the-stage tactics had me in knots and wanting to run the other way – it was so garish. Yes, you read that right. But they certainly had an impact.
That weekend a dozen or so keynote speakers took to the stage to lecture our group on how to make money and many were everything I didn’t want this book to be – aggressive, egotistical, competitive, preying on other people’s insecurities and desires. I’ll never forget one speaker who stood on stage and announced something like, “Right, the first 20 people to run to the back of the room and hand me a cheque for AU$20,000 can fly to America and do a course with me.” I was glued to my seat but you should have seen people running, pushing and shoving to get their spot.
Yet, for me, it was the best thing I could have witnessed because it was such an extreme antithesis to my own mindset that it forced me to find my own happy medium. Okay, I definitely never wanted to be like that man on stage, selling his services in such a hideous manner, but I also quite liked the notion of making money. At least a little. At least what I deserved for my hard work. And just like that, I got hungry for change… and for cash.
MODESTY AND MISERY
I recently read a blog post that really resonated with me called ‘The Myth of the Starving Artist’. It argued many people buy into a romantic notion that art is somehow more legitimate if its creator is a broke one. Just think of the struggling writer typing away on a dusty typewriter or – in the start-up world – the entrepreneur who uses their final $100 to launch their business and has to sleep on their friend’s futon. There can be a certain glorification of destitution. We all love a ‘rags to riches’ story.
In the blog post, the writer uses the example of a “starving artist” he knows who makes handmade buttons at parties. For $3 he will come to your house, do a custom painting on a 1-inch canvas and then turn it into a button. All for less than a fiver! As business models go, it’s utterly terrible – generous but flawed, unselfish but not at all sustainable. And yet, he is seen as a more “authentic” an artist for not chasing commercial gain.
Now, look at the opposite end of the artistic spectrum and the backlash creatives such as Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol have faced when they started selling their work for six-figure price tags. Okay, personally I’m not sure that I agree a painting of a vintage Coca-Cola sign is worth US$57.3 million, which is what Andy Warhol’s ‘Coca-Cola [3]’ was sold for in late 2013, but I don’t need to agree with it. The worth of that artwork is totally subjective, and if someone is willing to cough up that eye-watering sum, then why shouldn’t the artist (or the artist’s beneficiaries) accept it? Okay, the material used to produce it (casein on cotton) would have cost barely anything but factor in the talent, the time spent creating it, the brainstorming, not to mention the years upon years of networking and relationship-building that artists such as Andy Warhol had to endure to get noticed in the art world, long before he was considered acclaimed. Why shouldn’t you take the money when the buyer willing to write the cheque obviously believes that it is worth it, either as an investment opportunity or because looking at it brings them so much pleasure?
Is it any wonder that so many of us undervalue our services when there’s such a stigma around money – you don’t want to look greedy, you don’t want to be labelled a sell-out, you don’t want to ruin your reputation. The Hollywood actor Dustin Hoffman didn’t admit until he was well into his seventies that he actually co-wrote the screenplays for many of the famous films he acted in, including Kramer vs. Kramer. Why the modesty? He was worried people would think less of him. “There was a dignity to being a failure,” says Dustin of his early days as an actor in New York. “If you were in a soap opera – or, God forbid, a commercial – you never admitted it. That was what was nice about being in the theatre – if you were unemployed, it meant you hadn’t sold out.”
We live in a discount-centric economy, with half-price sales, discount warehouses and posters in every shop window boasting they have the biggest savings. From the customer’s point of view they hold more power than ever, but what about the knock-on effect for companies? Look at the recent wave of discount sites – at the end of quarter two in 2014, nearly 92 million customers had downloaded an app for one such website, so they could search for discounts. I’m sure the customers are grateful for the savings, but according to a story in Forbes, the merchants themselves usually lose money on the offers, which is why they usually use the websites as a way of attracting new customers rather than a medium for repeat campaigns.
A few years ago, a blog post written by a company owner who had regularly used a discount website went viral, after the café owner in Portland, US, called the discount campaigns, “the single worst decision I have ever made as a business owner thus far.” Jessie Burke, the owner of Posies Bakery & Café, had offered a deal on Groupon where her customers could get US$13 worth of products for US$6. BUT – and here is the kicker – she agreed to give Groupon 50 per cent of the revenue for customers who signed up to this offer. Why would she do that? Well, she was convinced it would be good publicity, amplify her profile and that most customers would probably buy more once