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Why You’re Not Making Real Money - (Creative Pulse Fireside)
Chris Do explains the mindset shifts and work ethic required for creatives to stop under-earning and build a real business.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · February 23, 2025
Stop Asking What Your Employer Can Do for You
There is an attitude prevalent among a rising generation of talent. It is a question asked of employers, an expectation placed upon the world: “What are you going to do for me?”
This is fair. It is transactional. People work to the level of their title and their salary. They do what is asked, and no more.
Then there is another person. Someone who does the job they were not paid to do. Someone who stays later, pushes harder, and sees the work not as a line item on a timesheet but as a reflection of their own potential. In a sea of transactional employees, this person stands out immediately.
Chris Do, founder of The Futur, is blunt about this distinction. “From a place of an employer, when you do that, you stand out easily because everybody else is not doing that,” he says. This is not a lament. It is a strategic observation.
While working at the ad agency Cole & Weber in the 90s, Do’s commitment was a foreign concept to his peers. They went home at 5:00 p.m. He stayed, often until the early hours of the morning, simply because the work was there to be done. His timesheets were so astronomical they triggered a review from HR.
When the payroll manager, Dolly, called him up to her office, he assumed he was in trouble. His boss, a copywriter named Kevin Jones, was summoned. “Do you know how many hours Chris put in?” she asked. Jones’s response was immediate and unconditional. “If they’re not more than 24 hours in a day, he’s writing, pay him.”
Jones became a friend, a mentor, and later, a client. The lesson is not about working yourself to exhaustion. It is about understanding what a certain kind of work ethic signals.
Good people recognize really good people really, really fast.
If you have been in business for any period of time, you recognize it instantly. You see the talent, the hard work, the moxie, the initiative, the autonomy. It is a currency more valuable than a resume. Do was not trying to climb the corporate ladder. He admits, “I was trying to jump off of it.” But the relationships he built through sheer effort became the foundation of his own company. His colleagues became his first clients.
First, you must ask yourself: are you doing that? If not, what is the obstacle? Answer that, and you will have your answer to why you are not making real money.
The First Client Is Not a Mystery
Creatives often fixate on a single question: “How do I find my first client?” The question itself reveals a misunderstanding of how business actually begins. It is not a hunt for strangers. It is the natural result of your reputation.
Do’s own story of starting his agency, Blind, was not one of cold calls and desperate pitches. It was anticlimactic. “Friends and previous employers just hired me once they knew I was going out on my own,” he explains. “Because of the impression I made on each place that I went to.”
The network you build while working for others is not a passive asset. It is an active engine for your future. The key is to become a person people want to keep in their circle. This is not about being a sycophant. It is about being someone who solves problems and takes ownership.
When subcontracting or hiring, the most valuable trait is not raw talent. It is the attitude of, “I will figure it out.” Give that person the support they need, and you give them more chances. You want to keep them around.
Do’s first jobs came from a simple formula:
- Work hard. Be undeniable in your effort.
- Be talented. Hone your craft relentlessly.
- Be a genuine human. Build relationships based on generosity and trust.
There was another factor: being in the right place at the right time. Los Angeles in 1995 was the epicenter of the motion design explosion. But luck is not a strategy. As hockey legend Wayne Gretzky famously said, you must “skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s at.”
Do did not have a crystal ball. He followed his passion for the intersection of technology, design, and creativity. That is where he skated. For creatives today, the puck is moving toward artificial intelligence. “If you're not using the tools, being conversant, and transforming your own business, you're going to be totally hosed,” Do warns. The future has a perfect score, and those who fight it always lose.
The opportunity is not in replicating the past. It is in recognizing the new curve and getting ahead of it.
How to Manufacture Confidence
Confidence is not a personality trait you are born with. It is a byproduct of belief, and belief is a choice you make before you have the evidence to support it.
“The confidence precedes your ability to demonstrate it,” Do explains. “When you can demonstrate it, what is confidence for?”
This is the essence of what many call faith. Not in a religious sense, but faith in your own capacity to solve problems. Do you believe in you? If the answer is no, no one else will either. This self-belief is forged in the trenches, not in a classroom.
When Do attended ArtCenter College of Design, he was surrounded by peers with every conceivable advantage. European students steeped in a culture of design, wealthy classmates with unlimited resources. Do grew up in a Vietnamese refugee family in San Jose, with, by his own admission, “really bad taste in design, in fashion, in colors, in typography.”
He had a single advantage, and he knew it. He would outwork everyone.
“When they went to party and when they went to sleep, I was in the library or the computer lab,” he recalls. The library, with its stacks of expensive European design magazines, was a goldmine. He did not just look at them. He consumed them, page by page, educating his eye and rebuilding his taste from the ground up.
Slowly, an unshakeable belief formed. “I'm going to beat you,” he thought. “I will beat you. It's inevitable.”
This mindset is what allows entrepreneurs to say yes to opportunities they are not yet qualified for. After his work was featured on the Adobe After Effects CD-ROM, a result of a class project he almost did not submit, calls started coming in. “I never thought I was a very good animator,” Do admits. “I thought my work was okay.”
This reveals a critical truth: “You are the worst judge of your own work and its value.”
When a prospective client called, he said yes, then figured it out. This appetite for manageable stress is a hallmark of the entrepreneurial mindset. It is not about recklessness. It is about having more faith in your ability to learn than fear of the unknown. As he explores in his talk on building a personal brand, this vulnerability is a source of strength.
The Portfolio Is a Trap
Creatives obsess over their portfolios. They polish, they curate, they agonize. They are focusing on the wrong thing.
“A portfolio is only as good as a person who's looking at it,” Do states. If your stunning album art is shown to a client in the financial sector, it is irrelevant. The work is not the point. The problem you solve is the point.
This leads to a simple, powerful mantra: People do not care about what you do until they know what it could do for them.
Stop showing your work. Start demonstrating your understanding. Look at your ideal customer with forensic detail. Understand their wants, needs, hopes, dreams, and fears. Then, ask a brutally honest question: “Do I solve any of those problems with this work?”
The work is only evidence of a philosophy. If your philosophy is wrong for the client, the evidence is useless.
This is where the idea of niching becomes critical. Many creatives, fearing they cannot survive in a narrow category, spread themselves thin. They offer logos, websites, social media, and video, thinking more services mean more opportunities. The opposite is true.
Do illustrates this with a food court analogy. “Let’s say you sell pizza and you’re not that good,” he begins. “So you’re like, let me add tacos. And that doesn’t work. And then you add chicken wings.”
Now, you are not just competing with better pizza places. You are competing with the taqueria and the wing spot, too. You have unwittingly invited competition from every direction. By trying to be everything to everyone, you become the best option for no one.
The solution is not breadth. It is depth. Develop a T-shaped skill set: go deep on one vertical first. This is where you build true confidence, through the repetition of solving the same type of problem over and over. As Do puts it, “drills before skills.”
So how do you find that niche? It is simpler than you think. In his book Book Yourself Solid, author Michael Port defines a niche with a simple formula that Do endorses:
Your Niche = The Market You Want to Serve + Your Passion
That is it. Pick a market. Layer in what you are passionate about. Do you love photography and rock music? Your niche could be taking behind-the-scenes photos for touring rock bands. The only thing standing in your way is your attachment to a vague identity and your resistance to commitment, something Daniel Priestley also discusses in his approach to finding better clients.
Embrace the Inevitable: AI and The Future of Work
If you are not feeling the threat of AI, you are not paying attention. “Everyone who fights the future loses,” Do repeats. “And the future is now AI.”
For knowledge workers and creatives, this is not a distant existential threat. It is a present-day business reality. Information has become a commodity, and AI has crashed the price to near zero. An education platform like The Futur feels this acutely. Why pay for a course when you can ask a large language model to generate a detailed plan for free?
You cannot argue against it. You must adapt.
Consider the personal trainer. For a few hundred dollars a month, they offer a fitness plan and coaching. Now, you can prompt a tool like ChatGPT:
- Act like a world-class personal trainer.
- I am this weight, with these goals, and this much time per day.
- Create a 20-minute daily workout plan, including macros and links to exercise demonstrations.
- Optimize this plan for my ethnicity and local climate.
The AI will deliver a nuanced, highly personalized plan for a subscription that costs less than a single training session. The value proposition for many service providers is evaporating.
The only way to compete is to change the game. “What we’re going to do is we’re going to use the robots to fight the robots,” Do declares. “We just have to make better robots.”
The Futur is developing its own army of specialized AIs. Imagine bombing a sales call. Instead of wallowing in defeat, you upload the transcript. An AI, trained on Do’s sales methodology, analyzes the conversation line by line. It scores you on eight metrics, pinpoints where you broke rapport, identifies when you were pitching instead of listening, and suggests better questions you could have asked. This level of analysis from a human coach would cost hundreds of dollars and take half a day. An AI can do it for twenty dollars in minutes, a concept he touches upon in his workshop on closing more deals.
This is the new landscape. The value is no longer in providing information. It is in implementation, transformation, and creating better, more specialized tools. You must disrupt your own business model before someone else does.
Find a Master, Follow the Rules
There is a recurring story in popular culture. A rebellious student, beaten down by the world, finds a wise, unorthodox master. The master agrees to teach them, but only under one condition: do everything they say, without question.
We watch The Karate Kid. We cheer as Daniel LaRusso protests, then has a breakthrough. We see the wisdom in Mr. Miyagi’s methods. We see the same pattern in Kill Bill. We consume the art, feel entertained, and promptly forget the lesson.
“I think they're messages from the future you trying to tell you you need to know this lesson today,” Do says. The lesson is simple: trust the process. Surrender your ego.
This is the kind of student Do looks for. “I love to mentor people who just want to do what the hell I tell them to do,” he states. Why would anyone pay for advice and then argue with it? Yet, it happens constantly. People are more committed to their misery and their stories than they are to the possibility of change.
The path to expertise requires a period of apprenticeship. Do followed the instructions of his typography teachers, his advertising mentors, and his business coach of 13 years, Keir McLaren. When his coach told him to stop selling and start asking clients what they want, Do’s first reaction was skepticism. “I thought maybe it was rude, inappropriate, like not creative,” he recalls. But he did it.
He started asking a simple question: “What’s your budget?”
The world opened up. He learned to ask better, more strategic questions, a skill he details in The Art of Listening & Communication. It was not one big revelation. It was one lesson, one instruction, followed by another.
To accelerate your learning, adopt this same principle with books. Stop reading to finish. Stop reading to apply. Read to teach. This intention changes everything. Read one book on a topic you want to master. Then read it again, and again, until you know it as if you wrote it. Then read four more books on the same subject from different authors.
After five books, you will not just know the topic; you will have a unique synthesis of the ideas. Add your own stories and experiences, and you are no longer a student. You are a teacher.
Simplify Your Way to Profit
Value-based pricing is the holy grail for many creatives. It promises to uncouple your fees from your time, tying them instead to the immense value you create for a client's business. But it requires confidence, skillful discovery, and a willingness to have uncomfortable conversations.
What if you are not there yet? What if the process just adds stress?
Then do not do it.
Do tells the story of a designer in Australia struggling with value-based pricing. His project budgets ranged from $50,000 to $150,000, but most were clustered at the low end. The constant negotiation was exhausting.
Do’s advice was radically simple. “Why don’t you just tell every client to work with me it’s $100,000,” he suggested. No more complex pricing tiers. No more gut-wrenching value conversations. Just a single, fixed price.
The designer was shocked. “That’s it?”
That is it. If all his clients paid him $100,000, he would be, in his own words, “really happy.” He would make less on some jobs but significantly more on the majority. He could eliminate the variability and stress, bank a huge amount of profit, and build a war chest. The idea echoes principles from the classic discussion with Blair Enns on establishing a minimum level of engagement.
With that new foundation of financial security and confidence, he could then decide if he wanted to pursue the next level of pricing strategy. Or he might find that the simple, flat-rate model is all he ever needs.
You do not need to make it more complicated than it has to be. The goal is not to adopt a specific pricing model. The goal is to build a profitable, sustainable business.
If a flat price gets you there faster and with less stress, that is the right price.
You do not need permission to be profitable. You only need permission to be clear.
TRANSCRIPT
if everybody here isn't already feeling the threat or has been displaced by AI you need to be on this train right now everyone who fights the future loses and the future is now an AI and if you're not using the tools being conversent and transforming your own business you're going to be totally
hosed a portfolio is only as good as a person who's looking at it people don't care about what you do until they know what it could do for them look at your customer be super specific understand their wants needs hopes dreams fears and ask yourself do I solve any of those problems with
this work I'm going to ask you this question and you have to be really honest with yourself do you care about your client's real success you know one of the things that I've seen with videos and just watching people approach you Chris is people will sometimes say like how do I find my
first client and that's an interesting question but I'm interested in what it looked like when you were starting out can you tell us a story of Landing your first client first of all I want to apologize for my voice I don't really sound like this normally it's like 5 days in a Canadian
wilderness yelling at my friends Pull Your Rod up that'll do it to your voice so I'm going to try and keep it together for the next hour and a half is that how much time we have okay so the first way you get a client is you go to the top design school
that you can get into which for me was Art Center then you graduate at the top of your class and you try to be generous and gracious with your efforts and your energy and your creativity by helping all of your classmates so then when you get out of school you kind of like
land on your feet so I worked at an agency advertising agency for a brief period of time then I worked at Epitaph records for even briefer period of time and I just thought these things don't work for me I'm unemployable I'm just too headstrong too committed to doing it my way that I'm
I'm thinking I'm just going to start a business and so the way I start my business is friends and previous employers just hired me once they knew I was going out on my own because of the impression I made on each place that I went to So Co Weber the Ad Agency my
former boss hired me to do a commercial which I was underqualified to do and to tell you how underqualified I was we did a commercial for K2 Skis and I hired one of my friends from school to do the work and he was already three times better than me as an animator so
I just worked really slowly to let him do all the work that's how it worked out and then my previous employers at or my colleagues at epap records the other place I worked at they just hired me to do punk rock album art and that's what I W up doing and then other
places I freelance just wind up giving me their overflow work so it wasn't that hard to get work the the moral of that story is you have to work really hard be super talented and be a genuine human to have your network work for you and in addition you have to be at
the right place at the right time Los Angeles in 1995 was a great place to be if you wanted to be at the birthplace of motion design and I just happened to be there at that time so now you're sitting there thinking well I'm not the right place at the right time so
what what kind of opportunities can I create for myself you're in a different place at a different time what you have to do is be ahead of that curve what w grety would say skate to where the puck is going not to where it's at and it's kind of hard to be able
to do that and I didn't have any crystal ball I just knew like this is where my heart is this is where my passion is and I like this idea of Technology coming together with design and creativity that's where the the puck was going that's where I skated to you say it's un
replicatable but I think the Nugget that I hear from that is you became a person people wanted to keep in their Circle which is replicatable right like that's something that I think of as somebody who hires subcontractors and other creatives and and my own team is like some people they're fine and other
people you just want to keep you want to keep you know what I mean and it sounds like people recognize that in you really early on so wait let me ask you a question yeah who do you keep around it's the personality that you're looking for which is I think maybe why this
nugget is valuable people the personality of somebody who says I will figure it out just give me the time give me like the support I need and I'm I'm going to do a good job that's that's what I look for especially when we're talking about Juniors kind of starting out on their own
you know sometimes when somebody's just going to do a great job on their own I they go freelancer studio and so you give them more chances so I guess if I was looking for the Nugget is like reflecting on am I behaving like somebody that is entrepreneur am I taking on the responsibility
that make sense yeah it makes sense I I know this might offend somebody we're going to get started right so I'm going to just offend some people right away boom just so you know how it's going to go I find that young people and it's a big broad statement I don't know Millennials
and younger there's this attitude like what are you going to do for me as an employer and I'm old oldfashioned and so I'm like what wait so what they do is they work to the level of their title and their salary yeah and they don't do more and that's fine that's fair but
then there will be somebody who does what the kind of job they weren't paid to do or asked to do and those are the ones you keep an eye on and it's very apparent so from a place of an employer when you do that you stand out easily because everybody else is not
doing that and it's sad because I I don't want to tell you who told me this but a prominent author that I look up to he goes you know it's becoming harder and harder to work with people from the West like Eastern Europe they like to work they enjoy work they are grateful
for work and I'm like what happened to that I know we're not in America but that American Spirit like I like to work I want to do a good job that's why people recognize me right away when I was working at Cold Weber people literally went home at 5:00 which was a foreign
concept for me just while I was in school cuz I I worked at 2 in the morning I so I just stayed there and I just kept working and working and my time sheets were ridiculous right so Dolly who runs the HR payroll stuff she called me up to the fifth floor and
I knew I was in trouble and she goes Chris your time sheets are off the charts I'm like am I in trouble she goes we got to get Kevin to approve this so she calls Kevin my boss who's copywriter amazing human being Kevin Jones shout out he went up to the fifth floor
and he goes what's wrong she goes do you know how many hours Chris put in that he's working cuz I was working literally till 5: in the morning right I didn't know I was going to get paid I just filled out my time sheet and he goes if there're not more than 24
hours in a day he's writing pay him and so Kevin wound up hiring me for jobs and we became friends and he and he and for the brief time that I worked for him he became a mentor of mine and good people recognize really good people really really fast if you've been in
business for any period of time you recognize Talent hard work Moxy initiative autonomy you know that right away so I wasn't trying to climb the corporate ladder I was trying to jump off of it but it still worked because all my friends that were there my peers were trying to figure out a
way to hire me and I was not hirable but you could hire my company and then then I did the work are there any questions about that it's pretty straightforward right so the question is are you doing that and if you're not what's the obstacle that's getting in your way and then if
you can answer that you'll have the answer awesome so jumping from that period of working from others and then going off on your own was there a transition were you freelance for a period Then started blind where you're like [ __ ] it I'm just going to start blind right away like how
what did that look like that transition period yeah I think I freelanced for about three weeks I'm really impatient I'm so impatient because after quitting Epitaph records I only worked there for like a month and a half the reason why I quit there was the wrong fit and that's maybe there's a lesson
there uh Epitaph records in the 990s was like thermonuclear The Offspring was selling gazillion albums Mr Brett when he hired me he was like we just grew our company by one ,000% and I couldn't even fathom like what does 1,00% growth looks look like you know there was a lot of drug sex
and rock and roll in that place for sure and that's not an exaggeration but it was a wild place but I was like I'm not even punk rock I don't even listen to the music what am I doing here and my boss the reason why I was there this creative director who I
really admired when I was going to school his name is Fred Fred was no longer there they let Fred go and hired someone else so my only reason was to be there was to with Fred so as soon as Fred left I took a breath and put in my two weeks notice they
offered me more money they offered me different kinds of things but it's a wrong fit I already knew it's wrong fit so then I'm like what now luckily there were freelance opportunities and the thing that got the other parts of the story about how do you get your first client was some of
my student work appeared on the Adobe after effect CD ROM when Adobe bought it from kosa and I think I was one of six students that the work was being sent out all over the world some of it happened to land in LA and those people looked at it and called me up
and here's the really weird thing I never thought I was a very good animator I struggled really hard in that class I thought my work was okay but the design was pretty good I didn't even want to put it on the on the on the Reel because I thought it's not that good
so the lesson there is you are the worst judge of your own work and its value you are just the worst cuz you're like this is dog trash please don't show it to anybody but the fact that it was on that disc got me uh two clients and some friends that I still
know to this day some almost 30 years later and it's wild these guys happen to be in Hollywood where I was there's a lot of coincidence happening there right and so then they called me I was like hey I saw your thing can you go and do this work I'm like yes maybe
that's lesson number two say yes the things you can't do and then figure it out and I think some of us suffer from that oh I'm not going to say yes until I know 1,00% I can do it and maybe that's the prudent way but I'm not very prudent either so I get
myself into trouble and maybe my my uh just this obstinance this determination was like I'll figure it out I'm okay with the stress I'll figure it out speaking of stress I mean there's a considerable amount of stress that comes with starting an agency with payroll there's a considerable jump in overhead and all
of those um risks um what did it look like navigating that early on for you you know it was I didn't look at a stress the world gives you all these inputs and how you process those inputs will determine your feeling of that reality like your words shape your world so for me
it's just a challenge to overcome and Conquer I didn't look at I was like oh I'm going to stress out over this so my goal because I told my girlfriend later my wife like how do we know we've made it babe she goes I don't know and I just made up an arbitrary
number in my mind if we can afford to pay three people full-time salaries with insurance and dental and eye coverage or whatever I think we made it and so my obsession was get to three employees it didn't matter who they were I just wanted three and when we got to three I'm like
three feels pretty good how about four and they were all working believe it or not in my house they're literally working at my house the best time in our company's history ever was when we ran our production company out of our house a three-story mod postmodern house in Venice literally a block and
a half from the beach in the weirdest part of Venice and they literally would walk past the second floor which is all the bedrooms to the third floor and just start working and I told them do not come here before 9:00 a.m. because I'm still ugly at 9:00 a.m. don't do it so
literally some of them would just park outside and wait I'm a bastard I know just wait for me and then they came up and they worked and we would eat together we'd watch TV we'd go skateboarding it was just awesome that's weak special time um I know that there's a lot of people
in this room that are looking at that similar transition between kind of a solo maybe sort of that fluid agency to really wanting to be recognized as a studio or agency and are struggling with budget and are stressed you know that perspective isn't there as as a challenge what is the advice you
have for folks in that position what is the challenge the challenge is growing to being an agency without having the budget in place to hire full-time staff okay not a popular answer not every everybody who wants to be an entrepreneur is an entrepreneur entrepreneurs like Risk entrepreneurs are totally comfortable with the unknown
entrepreneurs just figure the S out they just do and if you're not that person I know it's like sexy on Instagram to talk about your ENT entrepreneurship Journey entrepreneurial Journey but you're not made for it a lot of people I know are not made for it when I tell them you need to
do this I I I can't so be an employee it's totally okay nothing wrong with that so you have to like take a hard look in the and say is this what I want does not knowing where the next job come from brings me excitement like I've told this before and I'll just
say it right now the future as a company is down a million dollars in revenue from 2022 to 2023 and we're not doing great right now either everybody's like are you stressed no because I'll figure it out I'll figure it out this is what we do and I get excited about figuring out
the next puzzle piece like I feel like as humans or at least for me I have an infinite number of answers I'm just looking for a good problem to to solve and sometimes you invent the problem and sometimes the problem is made for you I don't know is anybody here like making educational
info product raise your hand a book a course uh something a guide anything educ how are sales for you up down sideways right everybody's like and do you know why that is information is cheap and it got a whole lot cheaper as more and more people use GPT and I can't even argue
against it I don't want to argue against it because if you say okay let's say anybody here in the health and fitness industry okay just small group of people let's say you're a personal trainer right you're like hey pay me $300 or12 $200 a month I'll put together a personal fitness plan for
you I'll coach you virtually all good right you can tell GPT to do that and it's more nuanced than your personal trainer can tell you you say act like a world-class personal trainer I'm this weight I only want to work at this much I want to eat this and you give all information
put together program that only takes me 20 minutes a day including macros exercises with links to YouTube videos I don't know if it does that but it probably could describe in detail the exact plan optimized for my ethnicity where I'm from and the weather and it will do it what does it cost
for GPT $21 a month if you're feeling fancy you can get it guys if we're $21 a month is a fancy we need a new definition of fancy if you can't afford 21 bucks a month it's free I can help you but you know let's get out of that mindset right away the
number one thing I realized about entrepreneurs and I think of myself as an entrepreneur until I meet like a real entrepreneur they will spend crazy amounts of money because they look in in their mind if I spend $10,000 or $50,000 for a mastermind they know they'll get $51,000 back they go into these
programs knowing this in their heart and then they can execute we talk about you know risk being what just not really you didn't doesn't sound like the perspective on risk was the same as as most people if you're an entrepreneur where did you find the self-confidence early on when you didn't have the
big portfolio with the big names um blind early on in that Journey um yeah how did you how did you find that when you were talking to prospects I think the confidence comes from this belief that you can solve problems then the confidence precedes your ability to demonstrate it cuz when you can
demonstrate it what is confidence for I've won 55 tennis M you know tennis match championships well you're tennis well of course I'm confident tennis it's the belief that you can do it before there's evidence and you know on This fishing trip with the the people in the front and some over there these
20 friends of mine we talk a lot about like this idea of surrendering in faith like faith is acting despite having evidence so for I'm I'm not talking necessarily about God but do you have faith in you do you believe in you cuz if you don't believe in in you I don't believe
in you and a lot of you just don't believe in you so you know when I was in school I was doing work I believed in myself now here's the truth I'm not trying to say this in a way that makes me seem more more humble or grounded because I'm I'm just whatever
I am whatever label you want to put I don't really care is I I grew up in a traditional Vietnamese American Family who were refugees from Vietnam no one in my circle was a creative human that was not starving there was no blue print for that and I grew up in the valley
like Silicon Valley in San Jose kind of not the cultural Hub of the world I had really bad taste in design in fashion in colors in topography I was excited about some things but I just really had bad taste I go to Art Center they're Europeans there because they just shut down the
art center Europe C campus oh intimidating like you guys grew up with culture and you guys invented a lot of the stuff that I'm looking up to and then you have a bunch of Rich Kids rich white kids and then you have rich Asian kids over there because to be a a foreign
student you have to be able to afford no scholarship no financial aid so everybody was richer than me I found two people poorer than me but that was kind of it but you know they had taste they had education they were raised in culture they had every Advantage but they didn't have one
advantage and I knew that at that time I would just outwork you so when they went to party and when they went to sleep I was in the library or the computer lab all my friends knew if you don't see in the library who be in the computer lab either I was working
there or I was just there all the time cuz I didn't have my own computer and so slowly but surely I'm like look at this wealth of knowledge in this Library like for me not having a lot of money the Art Center Library was just like Gold Everywhere I I know it's not
a lot of money now but like $60 European magazines on car interior design and they had every Magazine from every country I would just pick up that stack and put them there and just go through it and I didn't realize that time I was educating myself on what good design looks like I
had a lot of time to make up for and eventually my taste improved and I just believe that I'm going to beat you I will beat you it's inevitable that's interesting you know one of the things you've kind of mentioned a couple times here tonight is uh you know when things either weren't
working out you mentioned the Futures had some challenges over the last couple years or or challenges that you faced early on one of the things I've personally been reflecting on over the last few years is goals right I've I kind of started out on my own very hustle and then there's periods where
things don't work out so I'd love to hear like you know it sounds like you're kind of in it in in some ways when things don't work out on a personal goal when the team isn't hitting their goals how do you manage yourself how do you manage your team how do you stay
motivated in those periods what's the perspective there what period in life you want me to answer that question because depending on what period I have a different answer's say this one then I guess with what you're dealing with the future oh okay so if everybody here isn't already feeling the threat or has
been displaced by AI you need to be on this train right now again not a popular opinion don't fight the inevitable the future always wins it has a perfect score everyone who fights the future loses and the future is now Ai and Everything You Touch look at is AI enhanced and enabled and
if you're not using the tools being conversent and transforming your own business disrupting your own business you're going to be totally hosed so AI is disrupting the future right because you can get an education from AI I don't know if it's good but you can get it for a lot cheaper than what
we can afford to sell it to you for so what you know what we do we fight AI with AI so one of the things I've always wanted to do to help people with implementation and it's very hard to do implementation because it requires people to help you design a website or to
help you write your copy or to analyze a sales call or to help you navigate like your positioning statement those are people and I don't want to build a company that is heavy on people because that's overhead that feels like a job to me I want to be as lean as possible so
we're working on creating an army of robots specifically trained to solve one problem I was talking to some some folks that I was hanging out with this past week which is you thought you bombed your last sales call now I asked you what if you had the transcript or the other audio file
and you sent it to our robot and it analyze it for you along the eight metrics where we score you and it tells you where Rapport was broken where you were pitching presenting and selling as opposed to being totally present it'll analyze it line by line and tell you what questions you could
have asked or how you could have rephrased one of the questions in areas for improvement now if that call analysis was done by a human it would take maybe half a day maybe longer and you'd have to pay a couple hundred bucks for it but if it cost $20 to do it maybe
you you'll do it so what we're going to do is we're going to use the robots to fight the robots we just have to make better robots but I believe that's the prologue to like Terminator 2000 how Skynet begins right hey if we're all going to die let's enjoy the ride on the
way out that's it right why not you've mentioned AI like a lot has changed since you first published pocket full of dough one of the questions I got from from folks was are there any previous principles that you put in the book or just uh has been has been radically updated since since
that period anything you reflect on you're like yeah that that one needs an update I can't answer that question I I just stay present look forward I Don't Look Backwards if I spent any time rereading my own book I'd probably just cry you know what I mean like N I wasn't good enough
why did I phrase it that way I'm just ready to write the next book so I'll write a book on sales I'll write a book on personal branding which is literally what I'm working on right now and you know this you look at your student portfolio what idiot made that work let me
spend a lot of time looking at that that'll build up my confidence I'm pretty sure of it you know what cuz you're learning evolving machine that was just an artifact of your intelligence your creativity your curiosity at a moment in time let's keep moving forward but I like to think that the principles
in the book aren't technical that they're timeless it should be Evergreen content but if somebody reads it and tells me yo you got to update that go ah and send it to me I I'll try and figure it out but I'm not going to do that myself sweet uh you know you mentioned
portfolios that was something else a lot of people were asking like what's the right way to Showcase work um I think reflecting on your past work with blind like you worked with uh pop stars and Airlines this wide variety of of types of clients like what is I guess what are the ingredients
of a good portfolio if you're trying to update that for yourself that's a question that needs context a portfolio is only as good as a person who's looking at it meaning if it doesn't matter to them I don't care how good you are if I come in with a portfolio of album art
or music videos and the person is in the finance space like what is what what are you showing me this for and and believe it or not even financially relevant so we had clients that we work with directly and they would literally say we don't want all that that's too much for what
we have like you're saying like we're not even telling you the price they just look at it like we can't afford that what so context does really matter um I'm not sure if this is a phrase I've heard or I'm just you know invented but uh like people don't care about what you
do until they know what it could do for them so I don't care what your portfolio is look at your customer be super specific understand their wants needs hopes dreams fears and ask yourself do I solve any of those problems with this work the work is an Evidence of a philosophy so the
philosophy and what you do isn't correct it doesn't matter what the evidence looks like yeah that that kind of leads really well into I guess the challenge of the internet in some ways right pre- internet if somebody calls you you're like yeah I want to work with you you're only going to show
them the work that matters to them right now we've got bads we've got our website ites all these different elements so is this a case where niching helps uh or is there a different approach where you create category pages on your portfolio how how do you I mean you talk to creatives I
assume with this challenge quite a bit um what are the different levers it can pull yeah there's you guys understand the difference between breadth and depth right I almost guarantee whoever asks that question or who feels this you don't have have enough depth for one category yet you're worried about breath I I
I okay I'll tell you the story do you know the the way I got my first job professional job post like uh an education design I worked for an ad agency and one of my friends one of my acquaintances or classmates had graduated before me because I took a couple semesters off to
focus on academics she was a copywriter she was in ad department so I had two classes with her that was it two classes she got hired col Weber and the way advertising works is they pair copywriters with art directors so one day she reaches out to me while still living in La she
goes Chris I got a job I'm like congrats I need a partner I'd like to recommend you first of all I haven't finished school I didn't study advertising I didn't even know what to send so I I go through whatever portfolio I have I said okay these are four pieces that I think
are most aligned with advertising I didn't send them 30 pieces I sent four pieces in a FedEx box and I was thinking I'm never going to get this job I put it in I send it off and they say we'd like to hire you and that was a very valuable first lesson in
the business world it's like you don't need a lot if it's really good and if it's not good then you then get good CU I don't need the volume of it so what people do is they have this false idea and Dan mauls here up in front you can probably get a lot
of viice from him as well is they make this mistake like I don't think I can survive in this industry so you know what I'm going to do I'm going to spread myself out so in case they want something else I can offer all to them what you don't realize is you've unwittingly
invited all the people in those other categories to compete with you too it's wild right so let's let's put in some context let's say you're in a food court there's a lot of food courts in malls everybody knows what that is let's say you sell pizza and you're not that good the crust
isn't that good the sauce is not that good so you're like let me add tacos and that doesn't work and then you had chicken wings and now you compete with the chicken wing place you compete with the Mexican takaria place and the places that make pizza better than you that's what happens so
what's really important is for you to get that t- skill first like really deep on one vertical and you know what builds confidence doing the same thing over and over again it's called drills so drills before skills if you could just do that you'll have the confidence and then you can go and
I've learned this recently instead of the t- shape you can have the pi shape which is two verticals with a crossbar so you can go deep on two things and you can do that usually when you're a little bit older you know for all of people think um I'm I'm a polymath I'm
a multi-hyphenate are you if you're like 40 or 50 years old and you have a master's degree in multiple programs yeah maybe but you're 18 don't tell me you're multi-if in it because I just don't think you've been alive long enough I know that's ages I'm just going to throw it out there
it's okay I once had a mentor who said uh Chase two rabbits capture none and uh he was this billionaire founder um that had multiple companies and I think this fits really well with what you're describing he's 80 years old he's like yeah I've got an Empire but I did it one at
a time right so wait wait I I just want to add this cuz this I'm going to update my references you guys watch the Olympics there was so much Buzz about this one guy who just did the horse I think it was called and he didn't do any of other events he just
did this one thing and the team needed him to nail that and boy did he shine and the internet like exploded like see I'm like Focus I mean they're like Focus Niche just do one thing don't worry about anybody says don't follow convention where did all these Specialists come from like they you
were not championing this idea and now you're like on that come on you see what you can do you can win an Olympic medal for your team focus focus we have a question over there you say it I'm going to repeat it for the recording for the recording that was understanding what your
purpose is makes it a lot easier to be helped in the first place that's that's great well I mean it seems pretty obvious to clear you are about what you want the more likely you are to get what you want right so if you're single you're like anybody will do well anybody will
do but if you're like you know I want this person with this kind of intelligence sense of humor they look like this and whatever it is you want be super clear so that when that person appears on your life you're like boom I think we're meant to be together they might not feel
the same way about you but at least you're clear half the B I'm not giving dating advice I'm just saying be clear right and I'm going to give you guys a little hack here okay I'm just going to throw this out there I've been thinking a lot about this you guys like to
read books or listen to them now I guess that's what people do I'm a visual learner right so I want to ask you this question whatever your favorite book was Could you teach it today without any preparation some of you can most of you cannot you know I I would do this okay
um I read this book called The win without pitching Manifesto by another Canadian uh Blair enss who I admire a lot and once I read it I'm like this is freaking good so I bought a bunch of copies and I gave them to my management team I'm like read this book let's talk
in a week it don't take that long to read it doesn't it's very short book he's got an economy of words that I just really admire as my friend Jose would say it's a two poop book you could read in two poops you can that's how short it is all right it's true
so I gave it to him I gave him a week to read it and I said so you read it they're yep yep read it read it read read it read read it okay what's it about they're like I what do you mean I mean give me a summary or tell me a
big idea they're we don't read like that like none of them in the room could tell me anything about the book I'm like tell me one vague memory of the book I think that's how most people read they read a book to finish the book not to actually learn okay so you're already
in level two if you read the book because you want to be able to apply it but I'm going tell you read the book on level three which is read it to teach it so your intentionality affect how you read the book so the hack I have for you is this and it's
very simple it's so dumb stupid simple that most of you will not do it I've got a theory that some of the people you really admire and you look up to that are super successful more successful than me will read a book over and over again until they know that book like it's
their book and then they read four more versions of that book so by the time you read five books on one topic from five different people I think you can feel pretty confident that you know something and if you start to synthesize those five ideas and add your own stories on top you'd
be up here instead of me how long does it take to read five books good answer okay who said that someone's paying atten somebody's trying to outshine me right now my God she's fast those are really long poops you might have blisters and your yeah my feet Falls asle it's that long you
know what I'm talking about old people know what I'm talking about it's like oh my God you got to shake it out before cuz you're all wobbly you know what I mean come on let's be real I was just reading like this week about how the the phrase well read today means reading
a ton of books but it used to mean reading a handful of books really really well that's what well read used to mean to the Ancients right so that's kind of an inance interesting parall for for the rest of our conversation I want us all to measure time in poops fair so how
long how long you been in business 8,000 poop okay this point forward right Fair that's a new t-shirt I think um okay so we're talking about uh the breath and depth of of of experience and skill um there's that old cliche of the riches being in the niches uh which is nice on
another t-shirt beside the poop t-shirt uh but how do you actually go about as a creative figuring out which Niche overlaps with your interest and Commercial viability oh that's super easy uh I was reading in Michael Is It Michael Porter's book book yourself solid and he wrote that your Niche is the market
that you want to serve plus your passion that's it it didn't have to be that complicated so if you want to do graphic design for financial institution if you can just add one more dimension of what you're passionate about I think you already have your Niche we don't have to get super crazy
about that doesn't have to be that complicated do you want more I want more yeah well can challenge me then okay so when I first started out as a photographer I was just like uh niches they're supposed to be good so I I chose like uh uh dramatic portraits um for for commercial
Brands right so kind of this meaningless sentence that that has no meaning really um and and I think I was a pretty decent photographer but I really struggled to actually leverage that as any potential Niche so it's a mistake I see other people making is that they will focus on the passions part
of that VIN diagram a little heavily which may lead them down the wrong path and so if you're talking to 19-year-old Amy right now making this mistake how would you how would you steer okay so let's apply the formula together yeah so what you do photography and who do you do for your
Market who do you do it for commercial brand so agencies and and uh and businesses needing eating dramatic portraits it was that's that part of the VIN diagram that was weak that's pretty weak you're like basically anybody who has money right businesses I you know you guys say that too like who do
you work for uh you know entrepreneurs yeah yeah I think it's [ __ ] right now but this is me and hindsight well we're here now yeah you know that's a past problem so we have to look at it like okay you take photos for who you just got to tell me the
market it has to be one market that needs to be clear okay what would that be or or we can start with your passion 19-year-old Amy's passion about what yeah it was well music was a big part of it okay that's that's enough yeah now we have your Niche right what are you
photograph for right drama what kind of music pretty wide breath there but um what just say one one genre of music you like um well Jazz but I don't think they Jazz you're going to be broke yeah so that would be a problem with your Niche yeah yeah let's say you like um
rock rock sure okay so I take um behind the scenes photos for rock bands that tour the world it's not that hard right is it you know what's really hard is your attachment to your identity and your resistance to change and commit that's all it is you get past that everything's super easy
so you know I I I try my best to give my very best advice to people and I know it's super frustrating from your point of view because I've heard from you oh you make it sound so easy it is really freaking easy so then I have to figure out cuz it's not
easy for you because there's something that's holding you back and until I get to know you better I don't know what that is but then if we find out what the limiting belief is and I tell you what it is you still don't want to let it go I coach lots of people
at scale and individually and people just don't want to change that's the bottom line the minute you want to change it'll be super easy so as miserable as some people are as broke as they are as frustrated and as stressed out as they are if I say just walk through that door and
there's a pot of gold everything will be solved like no I like my misery that's how it feels for me I just don't understand it right I had this question before maybe it was on the boat was that UT I don't remember I had so many conversations it's like but oh it was
you we were it wasn't on the boat it was at dinner and we were talking about like how you look for students or people you coach that was you right how how you look for people you like to coach and I told him and I'm not sure he was super happy with the
answer but then he's like but how were you like maybe he was surprised so I'll tell you right now I love to Mentor people who just want to do what the hell I tell them to do cuz all of it is a waste of energy you know I'll teach you how to be
rich I'll teach you how to be successful I teach you how to be happy just follow the steps Trust and Believe trust in your teacher believe in yourself trust that I picked you and you picked me and I have good things designed for you that that's all I want just do what I
tell you to do okay and you've heard me say this before there are allegories in pop culture that are trying to tell you the story over and over again you go to the box office you'll watch the movie you'll feel great and you'll forget the lesson right I grew up in the 80s
the Katey kid right and now you're oh shoot here we go I've watched it I didn't learn the lesson and I think there's something really wonderful about art paintings literature poems movies I think they're messages from the future you trying to tell you you need to know this lesson today but we freaking
go to them and we consume it and we're like haha that was entertaining and we don't do what it tells us to do so just to refresh some of your memories okay Daniel laruso gets his ass kicked all the time by I forget the guy's name Johnny Johnny who Lawrence Johnny Lawrence Cobra
Kai you know they're bullied and they're not nice guys and he's like a kid from out of town he's poor and he just gets his ass kicked all the time and they're cruel about it so you know he's super desperate and he gets he tries to get revenge whatever he gets jumped by
the fence Mr Miyagi you know super short Japanese guy comes out and kicks all their butts and he goes oh my God what is that and Mr Miagi is not interested in his kid not at all so he begs him to teach him do you remember what Mr miyagi's rule is for you
non- Karate Kid fans I only have one rule do everything I tell you to to do go watch it again see if I'm lying that's it without question he goes yeah yeah cuz you know Daniel's desperate follow the the Japanese man or get your ass kicked pretty straightforward decision so he commits to
it shows up M what does Mr Miyagi do freaking wash these cars but very specifically wax on waxs off so he does it and you can tell being this strong independent American boy he's like okay then he said what's next paint the fence Daniel paint the fence paint the fence paint the fence
and after finishing that he goes you know what I just feel like you're getting me to do all your dirty work you said you're going to teach me karate he says I've been he goes what are you talking about so waxs on he hits him he blocks it and then Daniel's like oh
my God so why is that and and they're telling you this thing you know you watch Kill Bill um Thurman Headstrong I don't need to learn from Pim and he's like if you can hit me with a sword you're the master she can't do it and so he breaks her spirit she does
what he tells him to do and he actually cares for her like a father to a daughter teaches her the eight Palm strike move that he taught nobody spoiler alert what are these movies trying to tell you to do and if you look at a lot of like Eastern Cinema you know which
I grew up watching it was always the same freaking story rebellious Punk kid Jackie Chan steals is unruly stubborn finds a a master always with the beard you know whatever teaches them a style and he has to learn these lessons so that's who I want to work with I want to work with
a student who trusts that I know what I'm doing to tell you what to do in your best interest and I know it sounds really weird just like just do it and then they're like well you don't do that Chris is well you know what I did do that from my topography teachers
from my advertising teachers to my mentor who I worked with for 13 years I'm not here without him and I don't know why anybody pays someone money and time to get advice and then not do the advice Kier said stop selling on your calls ask them what they want I can do that
Kier just ask them what the budget is if they were going to hire someone else other than you and I did did and it just opened up my world I'm like What's Next and he would just teach me one thing after the other and I didn't need two lessons I'm a one lesson
kind of guy I'm cheap like that why do you all just sit here in therapy for 10 years do you think it's a therapist or do you think it's you I worked with a family therapist and I met her 11 times the best money highest Roi I've ever had in my life and
my and you know my business Coach K he's like do public speaking okay and it was horrible I said I was bad he goes let's find something you like you like making images don't you I'm like yeah he said just make a bunch of images together and just make up a story between
all those images I could do that and that's what I did so again ask yourself this thing when someone tells you what to do the internet a book some idiot like me why don't you just do it what are you waiting for cuz you are waiting for something and yeah I would just
do it so the the the lesson here is pick a master don't overthink it just go for a while for as long as you can handle it and if if it didn't work you knew you gave it your all so a lot of times and maybe we're going to do a fishing analogy
here fishing is one of these weird things that everybody thinks are an expert with zero experience right so where we go in the Canadian wilderness they have fishing school they teach you how to fish a very specific way to catch a very specific species you a minute everybody hits the water like we'll
do it our own creative way they said hook it through the head we'll hit it we'll hook it through the butt they said drop it 10 feet they 50 feet sounds pretty good they just get creative with the instructions so how do you know the instruction was bad or it's you when you
don't follow the instructions you just don't know and happy to say every person who went fishing with me caught a fish many have never fished before the one exclusion he's not here so I could still say everybody who's here caught a fish right and they didn't know what they were doing but they
just follow the directions it's weird when you follow the directions that it just works right Tim I mean you just do what you told and it just works so why don't people do that somebody's going have to tell me to answer cuz if I can solve that I'll be really rich why does
anybody know okay who said that hi me why we have no mics for you what and yeah waiting for permission okay is you're waiting for permission or they're waiting for permission yes you're waiting for permission who would you like permission from you're right though I was waiting for permission too it's true an
older version of you is going to figure it out how far in the future is that going to be maybe the next minute or maybe not all I know is you have this minute we can play that game of like tomorrow will be a really great day and something could happen to you
where you you no longer can function the way you function today why you wait for tomorrow I don't know why like I'm I'm pretty I think I'm pretty smart I don't know why I didn't ask the clients what they wanted before my business coach told me to I thought maybe it was it
was rude in inappropriate like not creative to ask what they want I had all these stories and I was thinking to myself who told you those stories and I couldn't find the source of them so it must be I told myself those stories and and the minute he's like just ask him what
they want I'm like what does that sound like he's like what's your budget that's it that's what I'm paying you for I'll try that what's your budget and they get really weird and then some of them tell you I'm like oh my God this works what are you looking for what inspired this
idea in your Ideal World when we're done with this what does that look like how do you feel about it and then all of a sudden the questions just keep flowing I mean find whoever you need to get permission from and go get it and you realize you just need permission from yourself
that's awesome I'll sell permission later yeah super cheap 1,000 bucks one of the things that I think a lot of people want permission about is this this idea of like value based pricing there's a lot of like confidence and good question and exploration that's required to do that at an effective level are
there cases where you look at someone's business and you're like value based pricing doesn't make sense yeah a lot of them um there was a guy I was hanging out with in Australia and he was telling me Chris I struggle with value based pricing I said okay I'll help you right now you
don't need to do it okay you just don't need to do it man it's like you know my wife's not that hot it's like who said you're supposed to have a hot wife who cares she's great so your business model can be great just don't chase after this thing that you don't know
how to do and you're not confident about so I asked him this question what is the budget range of they they were in like ux web design right and so what is the range of budgets from low to high that you get I'm making up some numbers now he's like 50 to 150
Grand okay let's just say that's a range easy number 50 to $150,000 I said are they more on the 50 side or more on the 150,000 side he's like more on the 50 side we get a couple 150 so he said why don't you just tell every client to work with me it's
$100,000 if all your clients paid you 100 Grand would you be happy with that he goes really happy you don't need value based pricing he's like that's it I'm like that's it you need more permission it is going to cost you money and he's like okay I said dinner's on you man why
do you need to make it more complicated if you take out all the variability and just say it's a th000 bucks if you're poor if you're rich it's 1,000 bucks some jobs I'll make less than I'm supposed to but I'll make a lot more than the jobs I'm getting so if they consistently
book $100,000 website jobs they'll have a new problem which is now they want to do value based pricing but they have made so much money in the meantime they reduce all the stress on their landing page it's 100 Grand there's no mystery about it right now and they can just fall over piles
of money until they want to go to the next level level and they may never want to go to the next level and it's totally okay yeah one of the gifts of of taking value based pricing seriously is that it forces you to behave or it encourages you to behave a little bit
more like a Strate strategic adviser which is I think what a lot of people in this room want they don't want to be order takers um and some of us are in the position to do that right we are strategists we're we're at that level but what about the people who are either
junior or they are um delivering you know social media assets they're they're kind of lower on the on the Strategic scale how does somebody like that navigate this challenge of feeling like an order taker um yeah what advice for scenarios like that there's a lot of things here to unpack this one's complicated
to answer I mean so I I I think if we strip away the word strategic because that means too many things to too many people I'm going to ask you this question and you have to be really honest with yourself do you care about your clients real success okay and if you care
about their success you'll do everything in your power to put that need ahead of everything else so when they say I need a new logo you have to say like what will that do for your business because as much as I like to take your money how will it impact anything and if
they can't you should not take their money now I know people do this a lot I'm not saying anybody's room but you say we're strategist because you think you can charge more when you don't understand strategy and you actually don't care if their business succeeds or not and you don't have the business
Acumen to make decisions that will impact their finances their marketing their customer the user experience you just like that term because it sounds better than the term you're using so that's when we use labels that aren't appropriate you haven't been trained you don't really understand these things that that kind of gets into
a weird place to be honest yeah so if you're more Junior be happy to work with clients who love what you do and just charge enough money so that you feel really excited to do the work and everybody here will have a different number you know I was talking to somebody like Chris
I hate my client I just hate them I'm like okay I said what did they pay you now I don't know what number they said I said ' what if we charge twice as much well they're mildly annoying what if you charge four times as much oh I think I'd like the work
is it them or is it you now you see because you were afraid to ask for the amount of money that would bring joy to you that's all it is because you know what I've done really exciting projects I've done not exciting projects but I loved all my clients because they paid me
a lot and you know what it is maybe you're like that's so capitalistic it's really not because because somebody worked really hard to make that money and they know they have a boring job to give you but they're going to say you know I apologize for such a boring job or I'm a
pain in ass client I know that or we're we're disorganized but we're going to pay you the money to help some of the pain go away maybe that'll help you out with like uh your your kids college fund or maybe you can pay down your student tuition that means a lot to me
you know we take it for granted that money is easy to get it's not you know how hard it is to get so when someone gives you that amount of money that's a vote for you we have to elevate ourselves beyond the work that we do you know I'm so delighted that some
of the clients I've worked with from 20 30 years ago will call me out of blue and say Chris I love where you're going with your life can we do something together like 30 years later that means that seed that was planted 30 years ago was handled in such a way that they
felt positive residual energy how many of your clients would call you 30 years later right yours would great it was a rhetorical question but good nailed it he's like oh me seriously me right now me you know that's cool one of the issues that maybe every industry but particularly uh afflicts creatives is
when a client says yeah we're on it's happening this is the start date or yes I will give you this asset at this time uh so that you can do what you need to do and then they they flake on those dates um I don't think it comes from a place of uh
you know they not they don't mean any any harm by it but it happens um and it happens to the point where it starts to hurt businesses right they can't take on other project projects because of this uh common common issue how do you advise somebody who's facing this on repeated basis super
easy number one charge more number two have penalties for missing deadlines those are just healthy boundaries to have okay then just ask them I mean if somebody says we'll start on our project but they haven't given you money sometimes people say that just to make you go away sometimes people change their mind
it's totally okay you change your mind all the time and I know it's really weird but we're really stuck in our commitment to what it is that we say and sometimes to your own detriment you know if you say uh I'm going to pick you up at 4:00 and then you realize it
was your anniversary what do we do we go pick the person up at 4:00 and we get divorced when you're like you know what John Mary I effed up I said I was going to pick you up but I I flaked it's my anniversary take an Uber I I'll reimburse you okay it
was my bad we have the ability to change our mind it's a beautiful thing and sometimes we get trapped and Tony Robbins talks about this he's like the number one thing that drives human decisions is the need to be consistent with ourselves and I'm stuck here just like you are it's a human
thing so sometimes we need to say wait wait what am I doing I need to change course right now we just have to and it's really difficult to do because you'll feel like you're not a good person but when doing what you said you going to do hurts more people than it helps
change your mind so you do this that means your clients can do this and all you have to do is say it feels like this is no longer a priority to you let me know if it if that changes and move on with your life and if it's one of those deadline things
just say as you know as we previously talked about you have this much time and we're over that time this is a grace period now and if you go beyond that we have one or two options I'm going to kill the job send you an invoice for the work that was done and
we'll pick it up but it won't be the same price because we're starting up again or you're going to have to pay this amount because I can't have my team idling by it's like leaving the car running we're not going nowhere and business people know that a business can't be sitting around waiting
for you to make a decision that's all yeah I find that Freelancers particularly feel like they have to be the most flexible person in the room and and kind of accept that behavior well are we using the same terminology when you describe a freelancer I'm afraid we're not uh solos I guess is
what I'm talking about what is the solo somebody who works independently are they a business or are they a freelancer because they're different h a business being well why you tell me the difference a freelancer sells time usually for a boss a freelancer cannot hire other people to do the work for them
often times a freelancer has to show up on site or at least be available for that person we assume if you say you work eight hours that you given the eight hours and you're not going to double book yourself how many people here a freelancer under that definition see that's a problem with
the terminology so only a few people whereas before you took that poll most people you guys are independent business owners who just happen to have one employee you and that's totally okay you do marketing you sales negotiations contracts Freelancers don't do that they say when where and how much and then you get
booked that's it so we use this term kind of interchangeably because it's a popular use of the term but uh if you talk to Jonathan Stark he'll tell you the word freelancer comes from a Lancer who used to sell the services you're a mercenary in medieval times is that you are you you
mercenary I don't think so you're you're a cells sword in Game of Thrones terminology right you're not a freelancer you're an independent business owner so you have to learn how to do content marketing customer service relationships you have to do sales there's a lot of skills you have to acquire you just don't
have any employees right now except for you so now let's reframe the question what is question again um well it was a comment it was comment on cells sword being the most flexible person in the room when we have the least capability of it we have less buffer than a large larger business
but we generally feel like they're hiring us to to bend over backwards and so we take the the the brunt of that behavior over and over where other businesses would just be like no this won't work that's a colorful way to describe freelancing if if you feel like that don't be a freelancer
you do literally sell your time and I've worked with hundreds maybe thousands of Freelancers I love them I pay them they do their job they range to gamma of very low money to lots of money and it works they have no stress in the sense that they get booked and they get paid
no matter what I don't consider bending anybody over backwards I've not done that to anybody you pay them on time everybody's good now when you're an independent business owner you get to dictate the terms of how you want to work when you accept terms that you're not happy with you bent yourself over
backwards nobody bent you because you don't have boundaries you don't have clear definition of scope and you accepted it because you're afraid to have that conversation cuz you're afraid of some tension you know what here's what I've experienced in my life if you're brave enough to have that tension people respect you more
it's really weird we think no no friction okay and then the person walks away like I'm not sure they understand how this stuff works when you meet somebody it doesn't matter in what trade it doesn't matter when they say okay here's how most clients work with us they do this and they do
this and this happens and it'll be here and this whole onboarding process you feel relieved you've done this before and when I come to you to give you money you're like and I'm like when do I expect things how does this work my confidence is not exactly High a question I got that
I found interesting was somebody said that they've been in and out of the field for for two decades and we're wondering how to stay passionate and design and it I found it interesting because the last time we did this you kind of relatively on the Fly Like whipped up some promo graphics for
us and you I can tell that there's still very much a like a passion for the craft you don't have to do that like it's not something you had to do um so decades in the field how do you stay in touch with that passion um through the ups and downs of the
business okay I'm I'm going to segue into soapbox moment I'm just going to let you know okay people have asked this question before Chris I'm just not that passionate about this what I do I'm like get out this was not meant for you if you ain't got it get out you tried remember
that whole the need to be consistent with yourself because you told someone you're going to be an NBA player it's not working you're not doing it you're not a standup comic it's not working get out do something different but what what I describe as passion as something that you do that you would
do for free something that you obsess over something where when you do you lose track of time so when you told everybody here our mission there was a important component that was missing in the description which I don't blame you for but it's to help a billion people how to make a living
doing what they love without losing their soul so the love part is really important because you know what I mean we're half joking that Skynet will be here upon us but let's just assume we don't have that much time left how are you going to spend the rest of your days because every
day you have one less day we're all in states of dying from the moment we're born we're all in states of dying right so accept that part so if we don't take that we have tomorrow for for granted do something that you really love that you're super passionate about it's your competitive Advantage
I believe if you imagine that you're all the byproducts of some super alien species that you were sent to Earth as the last of your kind to live with earthlings and you were raised by human parents who taught you about human limitations but your parents knew that being on Earth would give you
an advantage and you had all these gifts and then because you're raised by humans with human limitations your Society you're socialized to believe certain things and the thing that kills you the most you're socialized to be normal so we feel weird is abnormal but if you look at what is normal normal just
means average the norm is average right who here like like grew up thinking you know what I'm going to be I'm going to be average so somehow we've made being average good and it's really weird cuz the deepest insult you can have for a creative especially if I was your teacher was for
me to say you know what John Mary your work is average that would cut a hole through your soul to say it's bad would be better than to say it's average to say I don't understand it would be better than average to say it's weird would be better than average yet somehow we
want to be average if we understand that that we can do some good work together so all those gifts are waiting for you to unearth but you have to remember you're not a human you're superum and if this sounds anywh familiar you might think maybe I'm super man or Superwoman cuz that's the
story a little bit different than that but I believe that so I'm also of that person who discovered what it is that made me weird and different my passion so for a long time I believed you know what I need to be an entrepreneur I'm going to make commercials and music videos for
a living this is going to be freaking awesome and I wasn't wholly fulfilled and then I was like I'm going to teach cuz that's going to make me great I'm like I was financially fulfilled it wasn't until I started to bring all the things that I forgot about about the things that I
love and I'll tell you all the weird things I like and some of it will start to make sense to you and I put it in a place where people can see it that's the important part then I found my passion cuz you know I'm not a young man anymore but I'm so
energized by what it is I'm doing I just can't wait for the next day so I can do more of it and the fact that I get paid to do it it's just a bonus so I'm really into just business Concepts I'm really into learning and reading into teaching because it fulfills me
and I have experience running a business and I'm a creative person I'm a designer motion designer I've worked with clients and I'm into mixed martial arts and skateboarding and weird typo typographic weird things Oddities and comic books and narrative I'm a nut for movies and I can bring all that together and I
like to draw diagrams and weird stuff now you can see if you look at our content like duh why did it take me until 42 years old to figure that stuff out so when we say like I'm not passionate about this anymore it's like maybe you weren't and that's okay follow your highest
passion without expectations to the highest of your ability and you will live well without expectations of financial gain or anything else and every time I've done that in my life things have worked out pretty freaking good what is the question that you wish people ask uh that I haven't done tonight that or
crowd like this what do you want to share okay I want to do something different I did write something on the board over here I thought there was going to be a Q&A session so I was ready to do whatever you want so whenever people ask a question they ask horrible questions you
know this if you watch anything and listen to anything what I do is like my patience for stupid questions like about that much right and no matter what we say everybody falls down the same freaking steps well Chris when I was born this happen and then my mother met my you know it's
like why do I need all that I don't need that so there's this formula for story it's a character wants something that there's an obstacle that's all stories if a story doesn't have an obstacle or want or an interesting character it's not a very good story it's a story still but not very
good one so when you follow this really well it works really well okay so you are the character so when you ask a question just say I'm a designer I'm a you know a mechanic I don't care what you are just say whatever you are I want the but the obstacle is this
if you can just say this 99% of the problems baked into your question and then here's a really cool thing if you can just frame it like I'm this person I want this is what's standing in my way you'll be able to answer your own question and if you learn this trick you'll
be up here answering questions of people you never met it's not that hard and I will show it to you live demonstration how to find the answer in the question so a well- constructed question is like at least 50% of the answer it's really weird and you'll see and I'll diagram it for
you but I need a good question to start what happens inevitably is you ask terrible questions it takes me so long to get through but once we were able to get the question on the board the answer will be evident to almost everybody except for the person asking it that's how that works
right so what is your character I don't need your biography your Wikipedia page just give me a little bit of I'm of this I want that and this is what's standing in my way now I added some parts to this later today cuz I thought people were going to ask me about how
do you make content and things like that trying to anticipate some of those things if you write your next LinkedIn post Instagram story with I wanted this but I couldn't do it because this happened but what I learned was this your story is will be 10x better than it is today people do
not follow basic formulas because you know why because you don't follow directions we already know that we established that already right and the one little thing you can add is at the end of it ask some a reflective question tell me about a time when you experien this tell time when you were
stuck and then what happens is they start answering this is the beginning of dialogue and we know that the algorithm loves engagement but most of you fail to ask a reflective question and then when you ask it follow up with people so you know what I love about the community that's gathered around
the content that we get to make is they should show up for the comments it's an educated group of people there's some dumbass people but there's some really smart people in there I'm like wow I didn't know that you asked an even better question back of me let's dialogue and some of those
people as such good questions or have such great responses I feel like I have to add them to follow them and keep in touch with them that sounds like a warm lead or at least a future friend so you just follow that very basic formula it will work for you okay and you'll
see it's not magic some of you guys will give me a really dumb story I'm like well what stops like what's what and then it's like it becomes a good story I could do it most times just freestyling my head because I understand Frameworks and I know how to apply them so let's
take on a question I don't want to ask myself a dumb question it just never makes any sense okay so somebody who's got a really good one because you're going to blow it for this group they not be happy with you think about the character that's you don't ask for a friend it
needs to be you you have a want it could be any want and what's the obstacle okay all right you have the most interesting shirt so you get to ask the question yeah you what's your question I am a designer and I want to find interesting scenarios where I can help people through
design and what's standing in my way is um being able to reach them and talk to them and find out what they need to do okay okay stop so that's a generic question bro what kind of designer are you I'm mostly a spatial designer architecture okay now it got even weirder you're you're
you're a spatial or or you're a special designer spatial architect space you're an architect yeah why don't you say I'm an architect why you got to make it so complicated are you an architect I'm not registered but yeah I'm not going to call the board okay what the heck is wrong with you
guys well I've not passed the exam yet I didn't put in my you're a freaking architect just say I'm an architect God dang it see what I mean you guys make it too complicated I'm an architect you want to do interesting things we Bann the word interesting it doesn't mean anything mhm cut
through the bat are you Canadian yeah just cut through the BS man just tell me what you want in basic baby fifth grade language okay this is the other problem we use abstract language and before our our friend over here says be as my son would say Pacific be very specific okay be
pacific what do you want don't say it in a complicated way I'm an architect I want what say I want what design cool buildings I want to design cool buildings cool does that sound like anything like what he said before not even close you know I know you're all laughing but I know
the next person going to do the exact same thing be real what's the problem with being real I want to design cool buildings right what kind of buildings residential commercial retail um Hospitality hotels Boutique Mega hotels larger yeah what's large um between Boutique and massive Resort how many rooms man 100 100 I
want to design cool hotels 100 plus rooms what's your obstacle you don't have a [Applause] license hey go get your license next you see a well formulated the question the answer is right there do you do I need to write out the rest of it you're just early right um I'm sorry I'm
early you're early you don't have your license yet no I'm not in that yeah it's a little more complex so I don't want to do the architecture part necessarily it's architecture is complicated but I want to do the more of the initial stages like the concept design why don't you say that then
you see I told told you how this is going to work it's going to take us half an hour to get a person's question out so you want to do conceptual designs mhm so that you don't need a license no is that right yeah what do we call that special [Applause] design there's
a reason why I only do these talks once a year you guys test my patience here it's not spatial design it's a four poop spatial design guys yeah come on man design Direction design Direction sure yeah is that what it's called that's what I'm calling it there's an like well we can do
we can do something we can actually invent words by combining words people already understand we can you said or we can't we can okay take two words people already understand put them together and that's what you want to do I wanted to do design direction for cool hotels but so I because I
don't have a license right and you don't pay Jack no no he wants to do the visual Parts all the fun stuff that Architects have to call experience design it's but then it gets mixed up with like ux that kind of so yeah experiential design okay we're we're in trouble yeah we don't
know who the character is here it's getting really confusing so here's what we do know though if you can't articulate the question our chances to find the answer are pretty hard it's really difficult that's right right so work on your question and then we'll figure it out but we do know a couple
things you like to do the fun things not the hard things and you don't have a license so some of those things can work so do you want to work with Architects and help them to visualize or you want to do the visual part like who's going to pay you to do that
so I've been doing this for like I work with like property developers I've worked inhouse for property developers and I have done this process now I want to see if I can do it as an independent as a as a comp as a consultant okay so we can probably construct this question a
little bit better who here paid attention to English class you want to Workshop this hand it hand the microphone to somebody else raise your hand if you're really good at English and understand how to rephrase this question okay hand it to gentleman who talked about Focus okay friend you're going to rephrase this
for us he wants to be a conceptual designer of architecture yes I was waiting for somebody to say that he's focused on concept and design for architecture that's it and he wants to find clients but doesn't know how to right yeah so he could say like I want to design cool conceptual architecture
for hotels that don't exist yet but are looking for a preview of what it could be you get one more shot say what you want man be clear um I want to be the vision Setter for um large uh Hospitality projects um doing the experiential design uh of those spaces and my uh
obstacle would be as you said correctly how how to um find those clients okay okay we'll work with you okay because how much time we have okay we're going have to end with this so we're going to finish this okay so we'll write it down I want to be a vision Setter for
cool large Hospitality projects yes right and create the experience MH use your words again create the experiential design aspects yeah wait hold on I I can't listen and right at the same time and create the experience what create the experience for those projects that's it experiential design that's good enough okay but what's
your butt the obstacles I the obstacle is for me to be able to find those um clients but I don't know how to find the clients yes okay we good yeah give us back the mic all right okay [Applause] okay this is a much better articulated question with specificity now I know who
you are and what you want to do it's pretty clear I don't know why you didn't start with that like I told you guys be clear before you raise your hand okay so he wants to do Vision Center I understand what that means for cool and large two conditions for Hospitality clients that's
very clear that's your market right and to create the experience something something but I don't know how to get to find clients okay now here's a really cool weird part of all of this what is the most important part that we need to help them figure out okay what have you tried what
have you tried friend okay that the answer is try something much what's wrong with you friend you haven't tried how about you try a couple of times it's clear right well you know the thing is there are lots of people who teach you how to find clients sometimes I do it other people
do it better than me try doing some of those things can you guys see the answer already up on this page what would the answer be it's clear he doesn't how to find clients because he hasn't tried so the first part might be to try but beyond that like what do you think
the answer is okay I would add something here go ahead I think that one of the sneaky bits is that the hospitality clients aren't the clients that the clients would be the developer that may be trying to raise investing money they need concept to what has said here okay well now we have
to say who are the clients who's going to actually give you money for this do you know who is it okay that's fine you know your business so it' be developers or hotel groups right okay so we we need to know who the clients are before we can sell them something that seems
pretty clear so then the rest of it is pretty easy what do they want what do they need what are their hopes and fears what's a big problem they haven't been able to solve you're looking for problems okay here's how you do this it is a very simple formula I'm just going to
Freestyle I don't have it perfect in my mind right now you would say something you know how Hotel developers get into cost overrun uh invest in projects that don't wind up materializing fulfilling the experience they hope for I help solve that want to know how some of your content needs to sound something
like that so when we get clear on who we're working for what the problems are assuming that you understand it then you need to put that where they look for that kind of information probably not in behance I'm guessing right you probably should write articles for people who are rich and where they
read and solving these kinds of problems and then you could become a thought leader in that space to be known for this okay so I I I I I can't emphasize this enough if you can articulate your question clearly with specific information then you start to understand what the problem is and everybody
already knew how to find we didn't even need to hear this first part you could have said I need clients I don't know how to get them and we could have worked with that cuz all the other stuff was just extra information believe it or not okay and then we would start to
unpack this and so there are so many resources out there on how to find clients you just need to figure out who you're working for it's not that hard then right so the gentleman up there about Clarity of purpose and vision if you get clear everybody can do this and then you all
can see the answer right can you so I'm going to say this because I know I know we're out of time if you guys can just work on your content describe a character that wants something and there's an obstacle and the lesson that you learned is this now I was asked this question
what if the character and the one and the obstacles not business related and if you read a lot of my posts on LinkedIn it's actually not business related at all it's a very personal story but what you do is you build a bridge to the business lesson you connect that and that's the
gift of creativity you bend the story to this thing and you make it work and there's a thousand ways to do that and then ask a reflective question hopefully what that'll do is it will create interest in the clients that you want to work with that you don't know how to find if
you do that over and over again and you connect these things eventually somebody's like that's fascinating your perspective about building cool conceptual designs for large scale hotels I want to talk to you [Music]
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