Creating art is irrational. The inspiration, thoughts and experience in coming up with what you do, as artists, are immeasurable. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes 10, sometimes it takes 10 days and other times just 10 minutes.

In addition, what you need financially in order to do what you do is also immeasurable as it is what you need to justify your commitment to the creative process. For some, it is a thousand dollars, others a million. If you ask why the difference, you will get an exercise in mental masturbation when the real answer is it is just what you need. As hard as you try you cannot make the irrational rational.

But try creative business owners do, to their own undoing. When you justify the cost of your art based on time: “this project will take me 10 hours and I charge $100/hr”; by markup: “we multiply our costs times three”; or by percentage: “we earn 30% 0on top of the cost to produce our design”; you inject an element of distrust into the process.

Why 10 hours and not nine? Why three times not 2.75? Why 30% not 25%? The usual answer is that it is what you need to sustain your business and create art, except that makes no sense if others are willing work for nine hours, at 2.75 mark up or 25%. You are trying to profit from your art and simultaneously sustain your creative business. They are not the same.

You profit from your art by receiving what you need to create the art in the first place. You sustain your business by earning a proper return on the assets you employ (staff, technology, materials, office space, and so on) to produce that art. The market controls what a proper return on your assets will be, you control what your profit needs to be.

A graphic designer might want to charge $50,000 for stationery, but I expect clients would never pay it if the same stationery were available for $1,000. The same cannot be said for what the graphic designer would charge for what will go on the paper. That number could very well be $50,000.

The more you keep the irrational irrational, the easier it will be for you to be wholly transparent about what is rational about your business. Transparency is not so much about revealing how you arrived at a rational price as being able to defend it.

In the space of rationality, you calculate your needed return to sustain the business and develop a pricing strategy accordingly. If however you bring in what you need to feel good (i.e., the irrational), you lose. On the other hand, if you do not apologize for what you need as an artist as a wholly separate matter (preferably first), then when you switch to the rational pricing of everything else there can be nothing but trust.

Of course, some creative businesses lend themselves more readily to compartmentalizing the irrational and rational, all designers for instance. However, even for those it might be more challenging to, photographers and florists for example, where the art is the product, compartmentalizing is still possible.

The goal is to be able to say to your clients (in your own way): “This is what I need to create what I will for you” and then “This is what it will cost once I do.” The irony is that the more you can live in the space of the unknown, indefinable with your client, the more you will have credibility when you do not.





Sean Low is the Founder and President of The Business of Being Creative, a consulting firm focused on providing practical advice to those in the business of being creative. Prior to founding The Business of Being Creative, Sean spent six years as the President of Preston Bailey Design, Inc. representing Preston in his business endeavors around the world. Sean has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his twenty years of business experience ranges from law, investment banking, financial executive to small business owner.