This is an open letter to creative businesses.
Let’s cut to the chase, ‘fun’ in the creative business landscape can be interpreted in a range of ways. What I’d like to do in this piece is scratch the surface of the value that ‘fun’ holds for creative businesses across the board and what that might mean when it comes to motivating your team, building client relationships and talking about your business.
Fun for me is an absolutely critical element that powers every day and one of the core reasons work gets done. Without fun, there’s not much point *Sad face Emoji*.
So…let’s break the importance of fun down into a couple of key sections: ‘attracting new clients, motivating your team, building client relationships and how to talk about the value of your business.’
Personally, I don’t think the value in ‘fun’ especially when it comes to attracting new clients is about showing them that you have a Fussball table, a dense beard and that you buy the studio pizza and beers on Friday afternoons. If those things are all critical factors that you feel attract clients in say the pub games, fast food and um… manscaping industries to come and work with you then that’s fine. Otherwise, it’s nothing new and I would have thought that as a creative business ‘we’re nothing new’ is not what you want to show your clients.
To make my point really clear I’m not saying don’t do those things, definitely do if you feel it’s appropriate to your business. Just don’t go all David Brent and project the idea of ‘creative’ through stereotypes. Clients see straight though it as they don’t see the value in what you’re saying.
“Be aware that your company is a mixture of personalities”
Personally I think achieving your dreams whilst enjoying yourself is the name of the game in life. When you were 9 I’m sure you didn’t say, “When I grow up I want to be a massively negative person in a job that locks me to a desk all day and makes me want to leave at 5pm on the dot… but oh well, at least they have a fixie gear bike rack in the studio.”
In the same way that you don’t buy everyone the same Christmas present, all the people in your business want different things from coming to work. The name of the game is coming together to create a solid united and focussed team, that team is what clients want to work with.
If you are the person responsible for the running of your business then get to know your staff.
How do you know what they want if you don’t ask? But be prepared to listen… you may not like the results and you may not be able to provide all things to all staff BUT, you will be able to do some. By making sure your priorities are in the right place and that you are lazer focussed on making everybody happy will in turn engineer a ‘Fun’ working environment.
“Sell the sizzle, not the sausage.”
What does that mean for clients? Well… clients want to work with people who love what they do. An old boss and good friend of mine used to say to me “sell the sizzle, not the sausage.” In other words, the knowledge you already have but the passion is what will be the gift wrap round your proposition.
I’ve been working in the creative industry for almost 10 years now. I know that’s not that long in the grand scheme of things, but even I in that time have seen the treadmill of staff ‘incentives’ in full flow, over and over and over again.
Without getting on my soapbox, there’s one summarising point I feel like I can apply to all those situations.
‘Feature dumping’ staff motivation might keep the board happy as they feel like they are ‘doing their bit’ but all you ultimately end up engineering is a blanket of ‘motivation’ which might fit some people really tightly but might completely miss others and in turn demotivate them.
So, a simple solution is getting to know your team, what makes them tick, what they want out of their role and why they are working for you in the first place.
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”
If you owned a shop, when a customer comes in you wouldn’t just walk up to them and start dictating what they wanted and when they then promptly leave repelled by your service, you wouldn’t then turn round to your colleagues and say “I don’t know why they left? They came into our shop so they obviously wanted our products”… Or maybe they had an interest in what you had to offer but were looking for guidance and help. Same principle.
NBA royalty Michael Jordan once said: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”
100 million dollars a year (still) later, you can’t really argue with that.
In the same way that you treat your staff by getting to know them inside out, your clients need the same level of treatment.
“Think of clients as friends.”
They may already be, but if not, think of clients as friends and I don’t mean that in ‘corporate speak’. Literally if you treat them with the same care and attention as your friends you can’t fail. Call them to check in, meet up once in a while, make sure they’re happy and everything’s going well. If like your friends, you only get in touch when you want something they’ll start to see through it and might even start to move closer to a new bunch of friends, or in this case, suppliers.
So, to the point of all of this rambling… the value of your business could be a couple of volumes in its self, but in regards to the value of ‘fun’ if your business 1) Is united as one team all pedalling in the same direction 2) The space they work out of acts as a catalyst for productivity and 3) Everybody in your work ‘family’ gets along with your client ‘friends’ then having a blast on a daily basis shouldn’t be an effort. In fact everything should work so well that through good times and bad, everybody works together to achieve their end goals with a smile on their face.
At We Are Empire our goal with exercises like #16bitDreams (which we hope is the first of many) is to highlight what we are good at through a medium we are passionate about. It makes the ‘work’ we are doing so ingrained that we don’t even consider it work. In fact we feel like we’re having fun most of the time and in turn, we want to work with people both internally and externally that think the same.
Over the next month we’ll be exploring a wide range of solid topics that really effect our industry heavily like technical advancements, design and creative influence, the development of user interaction and culture. All of which will be explored by using early nineties gaming as a theme, which is something we are hugely passionate about and we hope you enjoy too, we definitely will.
We'll be investigating how areas that we work with such as user experience, technical delivery and creative execution have been affected by those little boxes that used to plug into our tube TVs.
