Why Your View on Money Could Kill Your Artistic Career

I’m convinced that the biggest thing that holds a person back from succeeding as a Creative Artist is money. Not the lack of it. Not the surplus of it. It’s the way they think about it. Nine times out of ten, a person’s attitude about money is the reason their career might never be truly fulfilling. When I speak to people who cite a lack of funds as the reason they haven’t been able to get anything going, it is almost always because they don’t think about their finances in terms of the bigger picture, but rather on a project-by-project basis, i.e. this project is going to get me this much, that project is going to get me that much, etc.

A Macro View

I used to think that way, too. And guess what? I was always broke. Now, I am careful to never think about my career in terms of project-to-project. Instead, I’ve adopted a much larger view of what my financial picture could and will be. I like to call this view a “macro perspective” on my career goals. What does that mean? It means that I define money a differently than I used to. Money, to me, means hours spent. Often times, it means minutes spent. Literally. Sometimes it’s that critical. But in order for it to mean that for you, too, you absolutely have to know what the very bare minimum is that you are capable of creating for profit. Most people never consider that concept. They just keep creating and keep creating, never considering what the act of that creation is costing them monetarily. Does it go anywhere? What is the return on investment (ROI) of those actions? If you cannot calculate that, you are literally just spinning your wheels with no absolute measurement of how much you can potentially earn and keep.

Example 1

For example, I know that I can create a certain amount of income in 60 minutes’ time. I’ve done it over and over for years. If I sit at my pencil and paper or my DAW or a piano or whatever writing tool is in front of me, I know that at the very least I can create a 1:20 cue that can be put in rotation in one of my TV libraries. That cue, in turn, will yield me a certain amount of money during a 9-month royalty period from my PRO. Guaranteed. So, if I need to take an hour to go to the store and buy groceries, the question then becomes whether my time is better spent at the grocery store buying groceries or in front of my DAW writing a track. If I choose “Option A: Go to the store”, then by calculation I’m losing a certain dollar figure in being absent from my studio for one hour. On the other hand, I could choose “Option B: Stay in the Studio” but the problem with that is obvious: Those groceries are not going to purchase themselves. Someone still needs to go and do that task.

At this point, you have another decision to make. Maybe you have a significant other who handles the household purchasing so that you can keep churning and burning. But if not, you have to outsource this to someone. That’s what my wife and I do, and in fact, it’s something I’ve done for a long time. I know what my bare minimum is that I’m capable of creating for profit. I know and have proven out what my rate per hour is as a creative entity. Because I know that number, I am then able to make an informed decision on whether it is better to hire someone for an hour to go to the grocery store and do my shopping for me. In my personal case, hiring someone to do something I could do but shouldn’t is far cheaper than the hundreds of dollars I will lose by not being in my creative zone for 60 minutes.

I do this for every menial task you can imagine — mowing the lawn, shopping for groceries, doing research, proofreading material (mostly when I’m writing a book or but also when some other reading-intensive task must be done)… basically anything that can be handled by someone else. Anything I could do… but shouldn’t. Now, yeah, sometimes I shop just to get my aching ass out of the studio chair and up and exercising. But overall, my time is way better spent doing the one thing that only I can do — write the music. It’s more cost efficient for me to spend time doing what I am good at than it is to spend time doing things I could do… but shouldn’t. That’s a “macro perspective” on money.

Example 2

Another example of viewing money through a macro lens is to observe how most people try to break into the library music business. Many beginners just start creating stuff. They just start pounding out cues… cue after cue after cue after cue after cue. Then they post all of those cues to SoundCloud, and they wait. They wait and they hope. “The phone will ring any minute,” they think to themselves. That is a very micro way of dealing with a new found potential income stream. Meanwhile, those of us who are macro thinkers… sure, we might write a few cues to get started or to have something to show, but as soon as we can we switch our efforts to the task that provides the most ROI: The hunting, prospecting, and pitching of potential clients for the library.

Here’s the thing most people miss: Doing your art won’t get you paid. Only “getting paid to do your art” gets you paid. In the above example, sure, you may get a few bites off the people who stumble on to your stuff and hear it accidentally. I’m not discounting serendipity. But the big macro money is in prospecting, strategizing, and executing. It is in finding a client who needs what you are selling, securing that client (read: signing a contract), and then being so great to work with that they want you more and more as their success increases. If you are in the car business, you don’t start making cars unless you’ve first identified a market full of people who are tired of walking everywhere they go. If you are in the medical industry, you don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to medical school, only to graduate and sit at home on the couch hoping a sick person shows up at your door. No, you have to go to where the sick people are — the hospital. Similarly, as a commercial artist, why would you ever create art without first identifying who it is you are going to sell it to? That’s silly.

Most Creatives don’t look at money in this way. They do it the micro way and then they wonder why they never get to keep anything they earn. At the end of a few years of doing it from a micro perspective, they look around for some evidence of ROI and wonder where all the time went.

A Practical Solution

Understand that I’m not talking about “managing your money”. That is an entirely different conversation. That’s wealth management, not financial perspective. But you can also be smart about how you spend your bucks to be sure that you are setting yourself up for a future of gain, not loss. How do you do that? There are many ways, but here is one that has worked for me.

I have two assistants: Brinda and Amy. Amy handles my executive stuff like SCOREcast, my speaking engagements, etc.. Brinda handles everything else and she does it all from her home office in Bangalore. I met Brinda when I was using a service called Brickwork India to outsource some SCOREcast data entry work we needed done. I randomly drew Brinda to handle that for me and I was so impressed with her professionalism that I offered her a job away from there after she was done. Now she works for me part-time and another composer in Hollywood the other 50% of the time and makes six-times the dough she was making at her old job. Brinda does a ton of things I could do, but shouldn’t. She researches a place for me when I’m headed somewhere unfamiliar, orders office supplies… you name it. One time I had to be in Singapore for a meeting and I left home without dress shoes. I had nice clothes packed… With blue Converse All-Stars for footwear. When I got to my hotel and opened the front door, there was a box of brand new dress shoes waiting for me by the bed. They weren’t perfect, but they got me through the meeting.

I’m telling you this to illustrate the power of multiplying yourself when thinking at a macro level. Think about what a pain in the ass it would have been if I’d needed to arrive in Singapore, find a cab driver who spoke relatively good English, and paid him to drive me all over town trying to find size 13 dress shoes. There’s no pretty way to say it — I would have been fucked. Instead, one call to Brinda and about an hour of her time plus the cost of the guy who delivered the shoes to the Futura Riverfront Hotel in SingCity, and I was way farther ahead financially than I would have been if I’d 1) paid the extra cost to do it myself in a taxi, and 2) been out the man-hours it would have taken to do so (don’t forget your hourly rate of worth!).

You could have a Brinda. It’s easy. There are hundreds of outsourcing services that can easily handle your iTunes library organization project, business setup/licensing procedures, or go through your cue sheets and PRO royalty statements to make sure you aren’t getting screwed. Just Google them, list them out, and start calling around. Find the one that works for you, and for pennies on the dollar you could have a virtual assistant taking care of the things that you could be doing… but shouldn’t.

Change Your Thinking

The world will not do anything differently tomorrow than it’s doing today. You have to be the one to change something if you expect things to go a different way the next time around. I would encourage you to consider the way you view money in your artistic business. If you find you are thinking about it from a micro perspective, consider changing that view to more of a macro one. You might get more bang for your buck, so to speak, by viewing your financial picture from a forrest-for-the-trees perspective.

One thing is for sure, if you are in trouble with this now, you don’t have much to lose by trying a new approach. It doesn’t have to be the one I laid out for you here, but for shit’s sake do SOMETHING. My hope and dream for you is that you get to be an artist for a very long time. Nothing will derail that from happening quicker than a lack of understanding in how to compound your financial profits to make more and support yourself during the lean times.

And if you haven’t experienced any lean times in your career yet… wait twenty minutes.