“Like all creative people, we only seek to create, and in doing so, somehow change the world.”
- Sep 22, 2021
- 2 min read
“Our thinking is our highest value product; we will not part with it without appropriate compensation. If we demonstrate that we do not value our thinking, our clients and prospects will not. Our paying clients can rest assured that our best minds remain focused on solving their problems and not the problems of those who have yet to hire us.” - Blair Enns
The above quotes are from the book titled “The Win Without Pitching Manifesto” by Blair Enns. It is a publication for us creatives seeking to sustain our creativity in an ever so challenging world that demands we give it away for free.
Although aimed towards graphic designers, I believed that there was valuable information to gain that could be applied by even photographers. So, in early August 2021, I picked up this book with the simple goal of educating myself on common business practices. As I explored its pages, I began to realize that the very term “common business practice” (CBP) was somewhat of an oddity in the creative world, my world. That not only I, but my fellow colleagues and artists as well were often forced, by choice due to lack of knowledge, into positions where our expertise and creative thinking went unappreciated. That more often than not we found ourselves with our hands stretched-out offering our talents and expertise to those who have not yet seen the true value of them, our clients. That it is not only “CBP” to select clients who see value in our expertise, but is also our responsibility to ensure that they do.
In this book “The Without Pitching Manifesto”, you will find twelve proclamations, twelve doctrines if you will, on how and why we should no longer accept the commonality of doing business undervalued. That we will follow its teachings in chapter one “We Will Specialize”, chapter two “We will Replace Presentations With Conversations”, chapter three “We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe”, chapter four “We Will Rethink What It Means To Sell”, chapter five “We will Do With Word What We Used To Do With Paper”, chapter six “We Will Be Selective”, chapter seven “We Will Build Expertise Rapidly”, chapter eight “We Will Not Solve Problems Before We Are Paid”, chapter nine “We Will Address Issues of Money Early, chapter ten “We Will Refuse To Work At A Loss”, chapter eleven “We Will Charge More”, and finally chapter twelve “We Will Hold Our Heads High”
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