A lot of creatives may have a strong vision but because it’s not backed up by a system, the idea may never get executed on a commercial scale. This is one of the 12 Creative Insights I’m sharing in the book Your Creative Career:
You need a system to have a successful creative career unless you want to continue having a creative hobby.
There is nothing wrong with having a creative hobby but as soon as we want to create a sustainable business, we need to implement a system. Some artists hope that someone will do all the background implementation work for them. They feel that they have come up with the idea and this should be enough, that their work is done and someone else should do the rest. They may believe that artists create and business people implement the systems. They may even convince themselves that they’re not good at marketing, and other idea execution areas. These creatives may choose to spend their time looking for an agent. Or worse yet, wait and see what happens.
The danger of passing time and passion fading may make staying motivated and driven toward the idea more difficult. If the initial excitement and being in the flow of creation is not there anymore, we may get tempted by excitement of the new concept to move on from “the old idea” and start another business. This process of creating unexecuted visions may continue on if we let it.
Creatives need to understand that putting the systems in place may sometimes be more important than the originality of the idea itself. In simple terms a system is a set of answers to the question:
What are you going to do with your product?
Here are the components of the system:
Distribution – decisions around selling your product
Where are you going to sell?
Who are you going to target?
How are you going to ship/deliver?
Pricing – decisions around pricing your products
What value are you providing: one of a kind, popular, inexpensive, rare, quantity, superior quality.
What’s your cost?
How are you going to set your price based on the above?
Positioning – decisions about where your products belong
Imagine a shelf where your products is displayed. What’s around your product?
Where/how should your product be displayed?
Cost-effective production
Know the exact costs of producing and reproducing your products. Do include: cost of materials, labor, expenses and do add at least 10% accounting for mistakes – unsold merchandise, waste, unpredictable expenses.
Product entourage
Post purchase support – returns, exchanges, warranty
Packaging, discounts and promotions.
In order to create a successful system, we should make sure it is:
– Replicable. You are able to recreate the system.
– Agile. You are able to tweak the system based on circumstances.
– Efficient. You can automatically move in between the steps.
One of the reasons why there’s a coined term of a starving artist is because some creatives don’t think about the systems. They just make things and wait on what happens. You need a system to have a successful creative career unless you want to continue having a creative hobby. Using Steven Pressfields’ terms of amateurs and pros from The Work of Art, amateurs are visionaries, pros are visionaries with a system.
