How to price your services

There's a wonderful story in Ingrid Sischy’s Vanity Fair portrait of Calvin Klein. As a child, Klein used to visit his dad’s grocery store. He noticed that there were grapefruits in two different bins – one lot priced at 29c a pound and one lot priced at 49c a pound. He asked his father what was the difference between them. His father apparently just shrugged and said, “Some people like to pay 29 cents and some people like to pay 49 cents.”

Hard time getting things done?

When you have a hard time getting something done – getting started – getting things just right – take a step back. Instead of beating your head against it, try to identify the obstacles to your success. What is stopping you from getting what you want? It could be something someone else is doing to get in the way, or it could be some habit of yours, or it could be something small and concrete. Spend some time figuring out what the obstacle is and understanding it. Learn where it comes from and how it prevents you from success. Understanding the obstacle – as a separate entity from the thing you are attempting – is the surest way to finding a way around it or past it.

Imagination - blessing and curse

Creative people have imagination. It’s what helps them see in fresh ways and come up with things the world hasn’t had before: solving a problem, or make something happen, or just because.

They are always wishing they were doing something else. Their imagination is working all the time whether they like it or not: conjuring something else - maybe better, maybe just different. So they either get unhappy because they are not doing it, or they off and do it and enter the next exciting cycle of discovery and imaging the next new thing.

So it goes.

That is the curse and the blessing of imagination.

Taking the first step

"If you are having a hard time getting started on something, maybe the first step is too big."

Think about it. Wish I'd said that.

Michael Pollock on TV!

CurrentTV asked me to do a promotion for current.com as part of their New Icons series. Here is what they showed - edited from my webcam account of what I saw on current.com.


Note that my affiliation is shown as The Cyrano Project - this is the nonprofit that I work with. Check it out.

Never Never Never Give Up

10 years ago I met a most talented and ambitious photographer: Steven Sebring. He had been filming the singer Patti Smith and had a huge pile of material in several different formats - and wanted to start putting it together.

I introduced him to Lin Polito, a wonderful and creative film editor, who over a period of months dug through tens of hours of footage and shaped the first 15-minute taste of the film.

Cut to 2008 and Sebring’s film, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, is a full length 1 hr 49 minutes, is in the Sundance Festival and Steven wins a Cinematography award. “Very well done” to all concerned.

I believe it was Winston Churchill who said, “Never, never, never give up”. Steven worked on this film for 12 years. It will be seen in 2009 on the PBS POV series.

Here is what Variety says about Dream of Life.

So who's in charge?

I don’t like indecision-by-consensus, and I've seen it too often. I am a huge believer in having someone in charge.

Much business success comes from the ability for leadership to make a decision and act on it. Yes of course you may need to socialize the decision in your organization and have a strategy for getting it implemented. But that is different from not being able to make the decision stick in the first place.

Having said that – if you have partners, by all means consult with them and show them due respect. One of the strategies I recommend is to have each partner responsible for making the decisions in their own specialty area. But there still needs to be someone who will have the final word, someone who is managing the budget or whatever is the constraint. One person: the GM, the President, whoever – but someONE.

And for that one person here is some valuable advice: make the decision and move on. If you are at all smart, most of your decisions will be right. Yes, some of them may be wrong, but most of them will be right. And if you put off your decision, the percentage of right to wrong will probably be no different. And you will have lost all that time when it hadn’t been made and all that time when you were sweating it.

So:

Have someone in charge.
Make the decision and move on.

Try it – you might like it.

Know what you do best

When you want a great pizza you go to the best pizza parlor. When you want a good steak you know where to go. That great steak and the great pizza are certainly not found in the same place.

Your clients view you the same way. They are looking for the best of something in particular. So you have to make choices and be clear when you express them. Emphasize your strengths and be clear about the value you offer. Decide how broad or specific your niche is. (are you Target or Waterfilters.com?) Some of this decision will depend on your what you like doing and what you're good at. But a big piece of it must depend on a good understanding of how your client thinks when he/she’s buying. If you don't know how or what your client is thinking, then finding that out is your Marketing Job One.

At Pollock Spark we say we serve "leaders of creative businesses, large and small". Is this too broad? Too narrow? We've helped partnerships made up of creatives and business guys. We've helped film directors and film editors where the company is just one person. What they all have in common is that they are creatively driven businesses. What do you think?

Your brand is ...

Your brand is the result of 1000 small gestures.

I met recently with the head of a company who told me how their brand had been blue and yellow, but last year they changed it to blue and brown.

“Blue and yellow” is probably not their brand. Their brand is the picture of them that their clients, investors and staff hold in their heads and their hearts.

Your company’s brand is the sum of the way your phone is answered, what is found on your website, how you react to a complaint, the quality of your ideas and work of course, your positioning and value proposition, your pricing, what your clients say about you, the cleanliness of your coffee room and on and on and on.

The ideal is for all those things add up to the picture that you want your clients, investors and staff to hold. If they don’t, then you have 1000 things you can tweak to get to where you want to be. One of them may be the color of your logo – but it is almost certainly the first one you should be thinking about.

Celebrate Everything

When I was purging my files for the New Year I found those two inspirational words on an otherwise blank sheet of paper: Celebrate Everything. I commend them to you - the positive feedback can have a truly excellent effect on you, your people and your business.

A talented artist/businessman I used to work with would smile wryly when anything went right – anything at all – and say quietly “it’s the small victories, the small victories.” In fact I am celebrating the finding of this note even now with a cup of tea and a blog entry.

Celebrate everything. Celebrate when your receptionist buys flowers, and your creative teams are excited. Celebrate the purging of your files and the call from a prospective client (one came in as I am writing this), celebrate the rewriting of your website and celebrate having a new idea.

You will feel good, your people will feel good - and all those small victories will start to add up to some really big ones.