The Business Of Being Creative w/ Sean Low

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you’re probably going about pricing your film services in the wrong way.

Don’t worry, I’ve been doing it wrong as well, and so are about 99% of not only wedding, corporate, and commercial filmmakers, but creative business people in general.  

Sean Low is the Founder and President of The Business of Being Creative, a consulting company and fantastic blog (seriously, read Sean’s stuff) that helps artists build businesses that honor the art that is behind them. After starting his career as a lawyer, Sean found his calling working with creative business owners helping them transform that pesky business side of things that so many of us creatives struggle to maximize. 

One of Sean’s biggest criticisms is that through our pricing structures, we unintentionally cause our clients to value the wrong parts of our creative processes. By rethinking - and repricing - our offerings we can be more, creative, land better clients, and make a better living doing what we love.

We dive into some of the price restructuring I’m currently going through with my own wedding film brand, and Sean points out some of the inconsistencies in the way we price our corporate and commercial work versus the way we price our wedding and social work. It turns out that I - and probably a lot of you - are still using outdated pricing structures that made sense 20 years ago, but have little sense in today’s creative business climate. Not for long.

How do you currently charge your clients? After listening to Sean, what do your prices indicate that you place the most value on when it comes to working with clients? Leave a comment below!

In this episode:

- Some of the ways we as creative business owners consistently misprice our services, and the ways we should be thinking about these situations.
- How our businesses and pricing structures often send a different message to potential clients than what we tell them directly
- The importance of focussed branding and messaging to you clients

Quotes:

"Setting a process is not forcing creativity, it's setting the stage for creativity" [12:30]

"The power of design and the power of art, the power of real creativity is always on form. It's always in the front of things, and we're always kind of surprised by its power when we look back."
[18:15]

"When the cost of technology races to zero, then it's all about the creativity. When it's all about the creativity, then there's money to be made. But in order to do that you need to throw out the model that's based on the cost of production." [45:30]

Links:

The Business Of Being Creative
Follow Sean on Twitter

Preston Bailey

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