All the stuff they don’t teach you in film school

Below is a list of resources that have had a significant impact on how I think about having a creative business and how to provide value for clients and price it accordingly.

Keep in mind that some of the content in these resources is directed at agency leaders or people who are already established as experts or specialists in their fields. When you’re just starting out, you will most likely be a generalist, unless you happen to have a very clear target market that you want to serve. Otherwise, just do as much work as you can and then along the way figure out where you are naturally skilled or have a strong interest before trying to niche down. That being said, I am a firm believer in learning above your pay grade. Take in as much information as you can about where you’re going before you get there so that you’ll be prepared when the time comes to take the next step.

Here are a handful of principles that I’ve picked up from the below resources to get you started:
  • You start your career saying ‘yes’ to almost anything and end it by saying ‘no’ to almost everything as demand for your services increases.
  • Your price carries information about more than just your quality, it also communicates: your confidence, the demand for your service, and your supply (i.e. availability). Remember, everything comes back to supply and demand.
  • You reinvent your business one client at a time. Meaning, when you want to change anything—price, policy, service offering, etc.—it’s usually easier to do it with each new client, and then either your old clients will cycle out at some point, or it becomes easier to move them to the new price, policy, etc. because there is now a precedent of other clients who are already doing it.
  • Think about who you want to help, and then think about what their biggest (and most costly) problems are and how you could help them solve them.
  • The sale is the sample. How you start a relationship with a client will typically indicate how the rest of your working relationship will go, so be mindful of how you present yourself and how the client presents themselves in the beginning. You don’t have to work with clients who give off red-flags in the initial meetings.
  • Finally, the person with the most alternate options or willingness to walk away from an engagement has the most power in the sales negotiation. When you’re starting out, this will usually be the client, but as you build a client base and become more sustainable and in-demand, you’ll gain the ability to say ‘no,’ so keep that leverage in mind. And no matter what stage you’re at, try not to appear desperate to the client, that’s the fastest way to loose a foothold in negotiations.

Essential Reading

I read most of these as audiobooks and have since purchased physical copies of almost all of them to keep as reference. Try to find the most up-to-date edition of some of the older ones (E-Myth & GTD in particular). It might be worth noting that books, and any other resource for that matter, will resonate differently depending on what phase of your career you’re in. I picked up a lot of these after I was already feeling a need for the topics they speak on and I found them very relatable to things I had been experiencing. All that to say, read them, but if they don’t seem relevant in the moment, then hopefully they will help you avoid the issues that made me pick them up in the first place, or at least keep them in the back of your mind and circle back to them later, you might get more out of them.

Business

The E-Myth Revisited – Absolute 101 for wrapping your head around the idea of yourself as a business owner as well as how to run a business with a consistent customer experience. The idea of working “on” your business rather than just “in” your business takes people a long time to figure out on their own.

The Win Without Pitching Manifesto (see Blair Enns below) – Specifically targeted at creatives to give them principles for selling based on mutual conversation with clients rather than simply taking orders. This is a very short book but packed full of useful info.

Productivity

Getting Things Done – Basically every productivity guru that you find online these days has based their advice on this book in some form or other, so just go to the source. Even if you don’t end up following it completely, it gives a lot of great frameworks for managing your time and effort.

  • For an immediately applicable GTD crash-course, watch this talk called Inbox Zero

Deep Work (see Cal Newport below) – On building working habits that minimize distractions and “context switching” and prioritize accomplishing significant, valuable work.

People I Follow Online

Jonathan Stark

Stark is the guy for thinking about creating value for clients apart from time-keeping. His target audience is typically freelancers or “solo-preneurs” in a variety of fields, but his advice is often pretty broadly applicable.

  • Daily mailing list – I highly recommend signing up for his mailing list. Each email is very short but very insightful. You can click through the backlog or try his 6-day value pricing bootcamp email newsletter. When you’re just starting out on the list, if he ever links to old posts you might as well click through on them to catch yourself up.
  • Ditching Hourly Podcast – He doesn’t release podcast episodes very regularly, but my favorite episodes are his coaching calls. I’d dig through the backlog and find a few of those that seem interesting or relevant.
  • Free Resources – From proposal templates to booklets, there’s some useful stuff in here.

The 2Bobs Podcast
by Blair Enns and David C. Baker

The 2Bobs Podcast is great for getting a peek into the world of how creative agencies operate. Blair Enns is a pricing specialist and David Baker is a consultant for creative firms. Every other week they discuss a variety of topics that will help you start thinking through principles for working with clients and managing creative teams.

Blair Enns

Blair runs Win Without Pitching which is a company dedicated to helping creative agencies learn how to price creative services.

  • YouTube channel – They don’t post content here very consistently, but if you can find some of the role-play videos, those are great for seeing how tough client calls can play out in action. This playlist would also be good for getting started.
  • This YouTube playlist in conjunction with The Futur (see Honorable Mentions below) dives into the principles from the Win Without Pitching Manifesto (see the Essential Reading list).
David C. Baker

David has a consulting firm called Punctuation. Some of his content is a little more high-level (for instance, he helps when one agency wants to buy out another), but a lot of it is just really good, practical advice aimed at leaders of creative teams which can help you get in the mindset of running a creative business.

Cal Newport

Cal Newport is a computer science professor with a side business producing content for knowledge workers about improving productivity and minimizing distractedness to live and work more intentionally. His content is very wide-ranging—he writes books, hosts a podcast, and has a blog. Thankfully he also has a handy Start Here page where you can find a variety of content on the major topics he focuses on.

Honorable Mentions

The Futur with Chris Do (YouTube) – This is a pretty popular YouTube channel for teaching business principles to creatives. I don’t follow it on a regular basis, but the stuff is pretty solid and I found several of the people that I do follow regularly from interviews on this channel (see: Jonathan Stark, Blair Enns, David C. Baker). Those episodes are probably pretty good places to start on each of those guys.

Taran Van Hemert (YouTube) – This is more of a technical recommendation rather than a business one. Taran was one of the lead editors of the Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel for several years, but has since gone solo. He mostly talks about very nerdy and detailed video editing topics, but has also branched into some business and freelance advice.

  • Taran’s four-hour video editing tutorial sent me down a rabbit hole of improving my editing efficiency with keyboard shortcuts and other tools.
  • He also gave this talk to some high schoolers that has some pretty good advice for getting started. You can probably start at 25:50 where he starts talking about getting a job after college.

Creativity, Inc. (book) – It’s been a while since I read this, but it was one of the first business books I ever read and I got a lot out of it. It’s part management advice, part memoir by one of the founders of Pixar all about the lessons he learned in the early days of the studio. All the advice is wrapped in behind-the-scenes stories from the making of the old Pixar films (like how Toy Story 2 was at entirely deleted from their computer system on accident in the middle of production).

The 4-Hour Workweek (book) – This is another one of those books that was pretty influential when it first came out, so you’ll also find a lot of modern advice that traces back to here. I put it here at the end because some of the specific applications apply a little differently in the current internet world, but the overall takeaway is a crash-course in working efficiently and building a business with systems to handle menial tasks so you can focus on the important things. Pretty much all of the content here is covered in the other books on my Essential Reading list, but if you like those you might check out this one too.