Creator Notes#1: Create A Business, Not Jobs
On rookie errors.
“Most people create jobs, not businesses”, Edwin said to us on the tiled ground floor of a collapsing button-dyeing factory in Shoreditch.
Buttons cascaded from rows of cubby holes behind him, black buttons, red buttons, metal buttons, marbled buttons, rimmed buttons, raised buttons, buttons neatly selected and packaged in clear plastic bags, free-floating buttons filling boxes and sacks. Upstairs, a crew of ageing button prospectors led by a sagacious Scottish captain known only as “Tech” boiled great, rusting vats of dyes that belched thick clouds of steam out of the peeling windows, and sieved buttons through trays of an obscure, sand-like substance. Further up still, at the top of concrete stairs slick from the beads of condensation that spilled down the walls, was the door to a film company with three post-production studios, lights and camera gear; my film company.
I’d started the company, together with my business partner, three years earlier, when I was twenty-two years old, and we had taken the rooms above the button dyers on Rivington Street because the lease was cheap and flexible. The landlord, Ron, had inherited the building (and button operation) from his father, and in the ageless tradition of all those emancipated from material concerns via inherited wealth, had departed for the spiritual realm, in his case an obsession with car racing. Ron was a sixty-year-old man pre-occupied by the kind of thing that children are into, he didn’t give a fuck about business, and especially not buttons, and had sold the company to Edwin some years earlier, but retained the building.
Ron had been happy to give us a lease without asking too many questions, questions that might have revealed that we only had enough cash to last three months and so, for anyone who knows the first thing about business, were a matter of weeks away from evaporating back into the atmosphere alongside Tech’s dyes, accompanied by the same unhappy smell.
To the amazement of everyone however, force-of-will and the ability to tolerate unheard of levels of self-abuse had helped us to cheat death. After three years we’d outgrown the rooms on Rivington Street and were preparing to take over a four-storey building nearby on Cowper Street. For his own part, Edwin was packing up his buttons and joining the great proletarian exodus from the East End, the Empire’s old grey factories folding back into history as a dazzling future of high-finance, disruptor tech start-ups and sharp design houses swept in. The decaying building on Rivington would soon be empty, sadly awaiting its emasculated future as block of hipster studio flats and over-expensive Mediterranean delis.
Edwin was concerned that we were about to fly too close to the sun. I’d noticed this tendency soon after we started out in business, older businesspeople could spot us from the horizon line, they had a kind of internal radar on which anyone stupid enough to flee employment, and the benevolent dictatorship of The Man, beeped away in black and green, another vessel naively hurtling towards oblivion. These businesspeople wandered the grid like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, desperately grasping fellow entrepreneurs by the arm and screaming danger. Eventually I became one of them, too.
“You might feel that you’re doing well”, Edwin warned, “money’s coming in, work’s coming in, everything’s getting bigger, more successful. But all you’re doing is creating jobs, the work expands to fill those jobs, and then more jobs and, really, what are you getting out of it? You’ll find that there’s no more money, no more of anything that you might want for yourself, just a lot of jobs and enough money to pay for them. Happens all the time. Just be aware, is all I’m saying. And if you ever need someone to speak to, give me a call”. In three years I’d never once spoken to Edwin, but here we were, on the ground floor of the collapsing button-dyeing factory, preparing to leave, and evidently we’d beeped onto his radar.
The move to Cowper Street took months, we had acquired the building following the indolent flight of Pete Doherty, apparently, and it was in an advanced state of disrepair, the basement littered with chasing foils and discarded vinyl. I oversaw tens of thousands of pounds in refurbishment works, new partitions to create edit suites, electrical re-wiring, installing a kitchen. I stripped and varnished all the wood floors myself, down on hands and knees, shivering through the winter; convinced that this would all pay-off in more money, better work, more time to develop the non-commercial, creative projects that I was interested in.
When we started the company it had been just the two of us, now there were four full-time producer/directors, plus a roster of freelance cameramen, sound mixers, voice-over artists, editors, musicians and other creatives. We moved into the new studios drowning in work: twenty-one feature documentaries in the first year, plus a thirteen-part series, several shorter documentaries, a music video and a load of development work for a new business venture.
People shattered under the pressure. Several interventions were staged at the pubs and bars of Shoreditch - in The Reliance, The Aquarium, The Fountain, The Strongroom - attempts to revivify fallen soldiers through drink and commiseration. Relationships were damaged, there were screaming rows with clients, punctuated by the sound of slammed telephones, our most senior employee quit.
While smoking outside on the street one afternoon, I felt an Ancient Mariner grip my arm. “You’ve got to know where you are on your curve”, Kevin, who ran the small, artisan craft shop next door, was saying to me. He had spent years operating a high-intensity printing business, before shutting the whole thing down to open a distinctly low-intensity shop with his wife. Kevin raised his palm diagonally upwards, “businesses go like that”, he continued, “then like that”, he levelled out his hand, “and then either like that again”, his fingers pointed back up, “or like that”, he concluded, sombrely, his fingers now pointing down. “You’ve got to know where you are, and get out before that happens”, his hand plunged towards the pavement.
My partner and I had a series of frayed discussions, telling each other that we just needed to climb to the end of the year, when all the revenues stacking up would pay out and we could think about the future with money in the bank and a bit of breathing space, but the work, the pressure was unremitting. I ended the year in a thirty hour edit that could never be paid for, the client next to me pumping The Doors’ Break On Through To The Other Side and Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds out the studio speakers in a bid to motivate me through the relentless night.
And when the day broke and we sat down with our extra weight and injured livers to assess our “fuck off money”, as another Mariner had once put it, the money that bought you security, the freedom to tell anyone you liked to “fuck off”, we found that there wasn’t any at all, we were no better off than we had been a year earlier.
Our income had soared, but it had been swallowed by the shiny new studios and extra people, it had been sprayed at the problems clamouring at the door in a bid to hold them off, it had been squandered, because there simply wasn’t the time or headspace to see where it was all going. I remember scanning down the spreadsheet in a cold panic, my lips twitching like a drowning fish, asking how it was possible, how could it be possible, that four of us spent nine thousand pounds (at the time around seventeen thousand dollars) on motorcycle couriers?
We had created jobs, not business. Everyone but us had been paid.
Despite our efforts, this pattern repeated itself over the years. More Mariners called in, “you guys are over-delivering and undercharging, and it’s fucking your business”, one pronounced, “You can only live on your wits for so long, and you’ve been doing it far too long” another declared.
But when you start with nothing, and you’re a creative, and you have a dream, how do you put a price on it? How do you say “no”, when to do so might collapse that dream?
I’ve learned that you have to understand your own value, always charge what you’re worth, and more work is not the same thing as more business. During those years we made one of our clients millions, multi-millions, while they barely lifted a finger. This was in the days when you could make good money in the creative industries, before the tech disruptors “disrupted” the economic logic of everything, including the ability to earn a living. We were terrified that the client might one day withdraw their contracts, so we slaved to deliver their projects and expanded to satisfy their needs, all the additional revenues bled away by the increased activity, the extra jobs.
The client understood something that we didn’t: our value. And so he deliberately worked to keep us poor and hungry. In hindsight I can see that we wielded tremendous power, he was terrified that we might one day withdraw, we were essential to the escalating success of his business. We should have charged more money for less work, not taken on more undervalued work in the forlorn hope that it would lead to more money.
I’ve since become much better at making business assessments, although I remain convinced that it’s difficult and counter-intuitive for creatives to think in cold, unemotional business terms, it’s still not something that I have mastered. The single most important skill that I have acquired, and in many ways the most difficult, is the ability to say “no”. Almost every time that I’ve found the courage to say “no”, it has worked out well, because when you say “no” it’s not simply an act of negation, it’s an act of affirmation, it’s saying “yes” to the alternatives.
Back in that conversation in the dark of the button factory, I didn’t really understand what Edwin was driving at. I heard him, I thought I took his meaning, but I had to go through it, emerge stripped and bleeding to learn it. I simply wasn’t brave enough to take his message on faith.
It has now been twenty years since Edwin grabbed my arm, and I’ve learned a great many lessons since, but here I’m going to pass on that first advice, together with my own supplementals: create business, not jobs, understand your own value, learn to say “no” more often than you say “yes”, and always listen to the Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner.