As recently discussed in this space, I am building a small software company. I’m not going to retread the history of that company, but you can read up on it if you want.
I’m only really here to share one tip. Kinda like a stock tip, I guess. It’s a tip I am increasingly convinced should be seriously considered by a variety of business owners in America.
The tip is this:
Hire artists.
No, wait, hold on. It’s not that simple. Actually, it sort of IS that simple, but not in the way you’re thinking. You need to understand what I’m proposing here, and to understand what I’m proposing, you need to understand the following story.
The Story
In March 2010, I was in trouble. A year previously, I had released the second version of my product, QLab 2. As a product, it succeeded. It brought new customers. Many new customers. Too many new customers.
In 2008, I sent about 600 QLab support emails.
In 2009, I conservatively estimate that I sent 6000. (But that’s really low-balling it.)
There were days I’d wake up in the morning, start answering emails at 6 am, write responses until 6 pm, take a break for dinner, answer a few more that night, and go to bed with more email in the inbox than when I’d started.
Serious problem. Seriously AWESOME problem, but, you know, still a problem. I needed help.
Now, I already had some help. Meet Sean:
Hi Sean! Sean’s an awesome dude. He was a friend from college. He is an OS X developer too. The summer before, Sean and I had joined our two companies together. Aside from helping with the code, he had already become an invaluable help in answering all those emails in the months leading up to March 2010.
But it wasn’t enough. I needed another person. The time had finally come to, you know, hire someone. Not just join forces with a friend, but flat-out, does-this-mean-I’m-an-adult-now? hire someone.
Meet Luckydave
Hi Luckydave! Luckydave, in case you hadn’t noticed, goes by the name “luckydave”. In March 2010, Luckydave had already been a QLab user for years. He is a working video designer in New York. A really good one. But more than just a user, Luckydave had been a champion. And by “champion” I mean he sold our product harder than we did. Luckydave wrote posts to the QLab mailing lists that rivaled ours in their detail and helpfulness. Luckydave acted like it was his personal mission to convert the world’s theaters to QLab. Luckydave was known to announce that he’d “drunk the QLab koolaid”. Luckydave knew details about how video codecs work “in the field” in ways that we simply did not know. Because we were not in the field.
Luckydave was, in short, awesome. And I, it will not surprise you one bit to know, wanted him on our team.
What I Did
I offered Luckydave a job.
Surprise!
Well, yeah, big deal. But here’s the twist:
I offered Luckydave a job based on the needs of his life as an artist.
First, I told him we wanted him on the team. Then, I told him we would create the job based on what would work for both of us. We talked it out, and we constructed a position specifically for him, with these properties:
- He can sign up to “work support” in units as small as a single day, or as large as a full month.
- He only needs to tell me one day in advance if he’s working the next day.
- He can work the hours that fit his schedule for that day.
- When he is not working for Figure 53, he can do whatever the hell he wants. Including go make art. For a week. Or a month. Or whatever the gig requires.
We created this framework together, and then I asked LD what it would take to make this structure worth his time. He replied, “When I have been the least worried about money, I have been making X dollars a month.”
I could afford X dollars a month. I said yes.
I wrote down the above terms, put them at the end of the legal-speak from the lawyers, we signed it, and it was done.
This all happened at the end of March 2010.
What Happened Next
When someone writes to support@figure53.com, our help desk software tracks how long it takes us to respond. Now, one thing you need to appreciate is that we have customers all over the world. We get questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is no such thing as “standard business hours” for us. Art doesn’t take a vacation. If someone writes me a question at 10 PM, and I wake up at 7 AM to answer it, that person has waited over 500 minutes to get that answer. When your customers are in Australia and you’re in Maryland, that’s a real wait.
Keep that in mind, and then take a look at this graph of our time-to-first-response for the past 9 months:
There are at least two things here worth noting.
Number one: Since joining us at the end of March, Luckydave has helped us pull down our overall response times significantly.
Number two: Those little green bars for the last few months? Those show that our median time-to-first-response since adding Luckydave to the team has been around 20 minutes.
20 minutes. 7 days a week. 24 hours a day.
NOTE TO SKIMMERS: HERE IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL
So far the story has been pretty good. I found a wonderful teammate. We made a job for him. It measurably helped the company. Life is good.
But I’m hiding one stunning fact from you, and it is this:
Barely a few weeks into Luckydave’s new job with Figure 53, he got a call.
A call from a temp agency. The temp agency he used in the past, to fill his free time between gigs.
Because, you know, that’s what working artists usually have to do. It’s hard to make a complete living in the arts.
And yet people do it. People like Luckydave, who are passionate about what they make, they do it. They temp if they must, but they do it. Because that is the drive of these people. They care. They care very, very much.
And so they temp. And so Luckydave temped. And Luckydave temped for a financial agency in New York. And he learned to operate financial…software of some kind. I’ve never fully understood what. But something tricky to use. Something important to fancy financy-type people.
And Luckydave, it turns out, is really fucking good at this financial software.
Not just a little good. Best-in-the-world good. He is fast. He is efficient. He is really. Fucking. Good.
Which? Is not actually so surprising! Luckydave is the kind of guy that uses QLab like a musical instrument. I couldn’t keep up with him if I tried. He makes things in QLab I didn’t even know were possible. AND I WROTE IT.
So the temp agency calls to say, weeks after Luckydave accepted my offer, that by golly, the financial company would like to hire him to drive THEIR software. Full-time.
With a starting salary of 80,000 dollars a year.
Kapow.
Ka.
Pow.
Now it is not my business to share what Figure 53 is paying Luckdyave, but I will tell you this: it is not 80,000 dollars a year. Not, I am afraid to say, even close. I wish it were. But we are not fancy financy-type people, and we don’t have that kind of cash at the moment.
So by all rights, that graph up there? That graph up there should have started going back up in May.
But I note to you that it did not.
I note to you that Luckydave thought over that offer for a few minutes, and then?
He said no.
I want you to let that soak in for a second. I’ll wait.
{he waits}
Pretty crazy, huh.
Well, pretty crazy if you just focus on the money. But for many (all?) of the best people in the world, money stops mattering once you have enough to not worry about it.
Is 80,000 dollars enough for Luckydave to give up his life as an artist? Turns out, no. Turns out, robbing him of his life’s passion costs more than that. Turns out, I can’t afford to pay him nearly so much, but I can support him as a creative human being who doesn’t fit in a 9-to-5 structure. Turns out, what I get for that support is one of the most dedicated, cheerful, creative, committed, hard-working teammates I could possibly ask for. Turns out, his battery is charged by being him more than it is by counting dollars.
So here’s the thing, here is my tip, and here is what I want the business owners of America to think about very hard:
Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general rule, does not fully get this. Show me a good artist and I will show you a highly educated, highly creative, highly passionate, highly driven human being. If they’re a performing artist, I will show you someone who breathes teamwork. I will show you someone who eats healthy critiques for breakfast and grows an inch that day because of it. I will show you a communicator, and a thinker.
I will show you someone you want to hire.
And all you have to do, is not destroy the whole reason you want to hire them.
All you have to do, in short, is create jobs built for artists. The result? Instant competitive advantage.
I think this is a big deal.
I’m sorry it took me so long to get to the point here, but I didn’t know how to do it any more compactly and get the depth of this point across.
I think this is a really big deal. I think the failure to employ artists is an inefficiency in the system. I think it doesn’t need to be this way. I think there’s no reason we can’t collectively set up the same kind of win-win situations that Figure 53 found with Luckydave. I think we should do it.
I’m going to continue working to build my little company. With luck, and work, and grace from the unknown, we’re going to keep making things, and grow enough to make things we couldn’t make before. It won’t be about getting big, but it will be about getting big enough, and every person will count. I don’t have a ton of money to make this happen. But I have enough money, and I have the good sense to give people things more valuable than money.
My tip to you is that you, too, have things more valuable than money. All you have to do is be smart enough and willing enough to give them.
46 Comments
Enough waxing poetic about how artists are an amazing “species”, hiring artists is a smart business decision. Right-brain thinking has become critical, since any process that can be mapped out and mass produced is now being automated and/or outsourced to other countries.
Efficiency is out. Imagination is in. All hail the right brainers!
Brilliant stuff, Chris! Thanks for your post.
I am a theatre director, and have worked between projects on Wall Street for, lo, these many years. The management understood for a long while that they got smarts and focus in exchange for some flexibility, AND they didn’t have to spend money to retrain. Alas, they have lost the plot since the financial apocalypse, and we are all fleeing back to garden-variety temping as they restrict the scheduling to 5 days / 40 hours or else-ness.
smart writing, smart thinking …
now to stretch it, when you get a little larger, put a yogi on your board …
see, there is this thing called vision, insight, intuition, perception of connection, and only meditators and travllers have this .. thing .. that “science” doesn’t even know how to measure ..
great read, thanks
so true.
money is out. after basic sustenance and bill paying, people realize that in the end they just want to have fun in their own way.
Fantastic post!
I wish more employers thought like this.
Artists need nurturing and freedom, trouble is not many people want to allow this.
great advice :)
Brilliant Article… I wish more businessmen thought like that…
“This site doesn’t work with Internet Explorer”
Perhaps you should prioritize and hire web developers before artists. Then maybe your site would work in the most commonly used browser on the planet.
Thank you so much for this! As an artist (musician) working on trying to make a living and never fitting into the 9-5, I can truly appreciate just how LUCKY Dave is!
Great anecdote… reminds me of Dan Pink’s lectures on how the traditional corporate system of motivating people with money actually leads to decreased performance for creative tasks…
Impressive story about being passionate about our jobs and most importantly about our lifes. This post reminds us that money doesn’t necessarily make you happy. It always depends on a lot of other factors!
Chris and Luckydave: you rock!
Absolutely spot on, and well done for writing this up so coherently.
I’ve spent all my adult life half running a business, and half being an artist. I’ve always felt guilty that I didn’t give each part enough attention (especially when turnover dwindled, or when an artwork flunked) and I’ve never been able to integrate the two halves properly, partly because I felt that it was impossible to acknowledge both alternatives.
But your post is a beacon of clarity and shows me that the only way is to accept both sides of the argument. If you’re a business-head, hire an artist. If you’re an artist, start working like a business. Creativity is the power behind both personas, and being able to integrate both is most certainly going to give you an edge, either way you look at it.
shut the fuck up
What a great article!
I’m impressed that you made up such flexible conditions for luckydave to work in! Not everyone would dare to try that and I agree that business owners should really consider this as a serious option!
Wonderful!
Cheers from Germany,
Oliver Peiss
AWESOME post. LOVE it! I’m a working artist too (commercial/editorial photographer) and this is a great point to make to people. It applies to every person though, not just artists. We should all seek that job that fits to our needs, not just what offers us the pay we’re looking for. For many years, I’ve been very specific in the kind of wedding photography I offer. It hasn’t gotten me every client, but it has gotten me clients who like what I can do for them.
I also serve on the board of a local arts nonprofit (www.awe-inc.org). Their mission is to get more art education in the schools. You don’t need to be a “certified” artist to apply some creative skills. We ALL have some level of creative tendencies and if those can be nurtured, then I bet we’d come out with better students, better graduates, better workers and better citizens!
Again, great post,
Troy Freund
Milwaukee, WI
p.s.-I found this post because Derek Sivers RTed it on Twitter!
There have been a lot of studies done over the years that prove again and again that money is “not” the motivating factor that so many people seem to think it is.. Once you hit a ‘comfortable living wage’ based on your needs, which LuckyDave did when he hired on, the most important issue with employees is freedom..
Freedom to create, to learn, to expand themselves as people.. Not make more money..
I think that it’s exciting to see a real life example of this posted online and not just another study that people will ignore.. Congrats to you and LD, I think you are both lucky..
Inspirational post! Question though, did your agreement involve paying him per unit-days of work done? Or did you just say, “Ok, I’ll pay you $X a month, and just work when you can?” It seems like the latter would be much harder to insure you’d get your money’s worth if you didn’t have someone who was already a huge evangelist of your product. How did you agree on a minimum amount of work that would be done for a certain amount of pay? Do you think that would work with another artist who wasn’t as big of a fan of your product?
Thanks
Nice. What a great story – and a great idea to hire luckydave.
Tom Peters said:
Advice to Corporate Leaders: “Consider the metaphor of the windmill: You can harness raw power but you can’t control it. … Hire artists, clowns, or other disrupters to come in and challenge your corporate environment. … Hire a corporate anthropologist to analyze how tolerant your organization is of deviants and other innovators. … Once the anthropologist leaves, hire a shaman to drive out the evil spirits of conformity. …”
Source: Ryan Matthews & Watts Wacker, Fast Company (03.02)
Wow, so this is what serendipity looks like! Happens I’m an artist, second career, but not a career, you know; and, I’m starting a social network driven online biz, modelled after http://www.paulfrank.com but way more interactive; our key character is B-fUn2, (c) etc.; it’s a bot, reads kidz stories, in x language of hearer/viewer choice, blah blah………………….inspired; PS: Any cool computer science types out there, please contact me: jbpravda@angrysponge.com / 407 230 4618/
Thanks, Derek
I’m an artist.
You’re a genius.
:)
The key to this was the flexibility to allow your employee to do his job on his terms. And you chose someone who could do the job well.
So many companies cannot get past a 9-5, come into the office, work at a desk, go to a meeting mentality. So many jobs today can be converted to flexible, work where ever, whenever, however you want. But you have reconsider the job based on the necessary outcome and not on the way this job has always been done.
People will raise lots and lots of issues and 90% of the issues will be: “but you won’t be able to do X.” Well, X is just a method. Its a process that is currently in place – but does it have to be that way? Is there another, better way to do it?
Dear Christopher,
Great Post! I’d simply like to thank you for a truly inspirational read – so many of your observations ring true with my personal thoughts and experiences and I very much appreciate you conveying them so succinctly.
I’m unsure if you are aware of other like-minded thinkers/doers but I’d certainly recommend you checkout a video, I won’t post the link for fear of being seen as spam but I’d certainly recommend searching YouTube for ‘RSA Animate – the surprising truth about what motivates us – based on Dan Pink’.
I wish you and your company continued success, and I hope to meet you and Luckydave at some point in the future *~)
Positive thoughts and Paulo Coelho proverbs,
Carl @FellowCreative
Great story, and great core point! cheers for putting it out there. I’m sure it wouldn’t work for everyone but as an artist (composer of obscure and commercially unviable music) I would love to have the kind of job that lets me continue being an artist, while allowing me to help people with something that I love using anyways.
I do love my current gig (music lecturing in a large university), but I really see the attraction in this.
Inspirational! My business is built on the fact that we all need to be using both sides of our brain – and because I am an artist who actually likes to feel financially secure.
This has given me new ideas for how to hire people. Even though I am offering a service, not a product, there are things that could be done much more flexibly that would improve the service – or allow me to offer additional ones.
I wish more companies saw employment the way that you do – as an artist who doesnt really mind working in an office, is actually good at it I actually enjoys the balance of team work to solitary studio practice.
I do get resentful and unhappy when I go above and beyond my work to do my best work for the company and when I have an amazing opportunity come up in my artist life and my boss wont let me take the time off to participate – it just develops resentment and less drive to be a good employee. I have left many jobs that I was good at and respected for because there just has not been the flexibility to keep both parts of my life alive.
I also think artists have a knack for seeing the systems view of an operation and are able to approach any venture, business or art, from that angle. They can be more of an asset to a company than other employees who tend to see things as task oriented and just what concerns their job and not the business as a whole.
let’s also flip the funnel to the supply side- EVERYONE is an artist, in their own way. we employers MUST help our team find their art, and support where it goes. and if they fly away, they fly away better. the world is better for nurturing the artists. let’s all step up and do that.
What a great post — thanks for sharing. As the workforce shifts to Gen Y, with its focus on fulfilling work and good work/life balance, this will probably become even more important — working to live, not living to work.
This article was forwarded to me by someone. It was heartwarming, and as a musician, encouraging to me. Being an individual who has been wearing as many as four hats, it’s imperative to me that I could have flexibility in my work hours. I think that the key to this article is that it took place within a smaller company. Corporate structures of larger companies don’t see the individual. And being creative is all about individuals.
Having said that, it seems like the internet has created a climate to foster these type situations. They are certainly the wave of the future, as people look to think for themselves and not focus on the status quo of society.
Chris,
Love this post! I’m best known as an artist and designer, but relaxing makes me tense, so I tend to put in a lot of hours on diverse projects. The art is my sole source of income but as an early pioneer of selling art online, I’ve consulted with companies including Six Apart, PayPal, 1000 Markets and others to help build better tools for artists and small businesses to succeed on the web.
I’m fond of saying “you couldn’t pay me to take a day job,” which is true… there’s not enough money in the world to make me interested in a 9-5. But I’m highly motivated to work on interesting projects where I get to be creative and change the world in some small way that matters to me.
I’d love to have you speak about this topic on my weekly podcast, Art Heroes Radio: http://artheroesradio.com. I think it would make for a great episode.
Well that’ll teach me to post something right before I go on a trip.
Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and comments. It’s been fascinating and instructive to read them.
@Sid Our arrangement is to pay by the time unit. When LD is working on other gigs, he is paid by those gigs. We decided not to use a unit any smaller than one day because smaller units (e.g. hours) started to become more about counting pennies and less about having a day of great support. We were trying to simply create a comfortable mental space in which he could kick ass and not be thinking about clocking in or out or how much money he was making that day. I knew him well enough already to know that he’d go above and beyond on anything he did, which gave me confidence to leave the structure loose.
@kamran Word.
@John It’d be an honor; I’ll email you.
@The World: I’ve edited my “doesn’t work with IE” text to be less snarky. I wrote it in a moment of frustration and, frankly, didn’t think anyone was reading this blog anyway.
@daveyboy Hello, nice to meet you.
So when you agreed to pay him $X a month, did you divide that by 20 working days to come up with the pay rate for one unit day?
@Sid Yup, more or less that.
Luckydave is my hero.
I’ll be waiting for your version of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. I could put up an amazon link, but what do I know :) In any case, the point here is, this is a great story, and that’s the thing.
Thank you so much for this. I am an actress with a permanent 40 hour a week day job, and if someone created a position like that for me I’d have snapped it up in a second. On behalf of all artists, those of us with permanent jobs and those who temp between acting gigs, THANK YOU.
I like the sentiment, but it sounds like this LuckyDave guy is a savant. And that you got lucky (enough that you should call yourself LuckyChris). First and foremost, artists are also people, and your results may vary based on who you hire.
Still, particularly in the Theater where you can’t just decide when to work (unlike, say freelance illustrating from home or something) it would be nice if employers had some harder facts to turn to that would reward this type of hiring practice. Maybe if they had a larger sample size, and not just an isolated case of one great employee, I’d be more convinced. This is coming from an illustrator who doesn’t often get time to do so.
This essay made me cry.
I’m an artist — actor, writer, monologist, theatre teacher — and I’ve been fired from every office job I ever had, NOT because I’m not smart and literate and eloquent and good at administrative tasks (I am, in fact, a fantastic writer, speller, grammarian, editor, Word Processor, web researcher, collator, coffee replenisher…), but because at some point, in the course of every office job, my supervisors got tired of me taking time off to tour a show, or go to an audition, or leave work early to perform a gig at a college or community center or theatre festival. And “tired” on their part quickly turned to “really annoyed”, which segued into “extremely resentful”. One supervisor actually told me “Look — you need to make a choice between being an actor, and being an administrative assistant!”
Wow! I need to make a choice! It is SO VERY HARD to contemplate WHICH of those career paths to choose!!
Anyway. Over and over, I was fired, and over and over, my self-esteem plummeted and I felt bad, and evil, and incompetent, and wrong. Because no one, ever, not ever, made me feel like it was actually awesome and valuable that I was, in the rest of my life…an artist.
Hearing the words of someone who feels differently about his employees is making me weep. I want to know what it feels like to be a Luckydave. I want to know that sense of value and flexibiity, of having a day job that I don’t hate, that likes me for who I am and what I can do, and doesn’t resent my other passions.
Thanks for hiring artists, Chris. I hope your philosophy spreads like wildfire. Peace out.
I just can’t tell you how empowering your article is to me. I’m not just a crochet designer, but was also the daughter of an entrepreneur and I’m a musician. And one of those few musicians who could bridge worlds into technology and office management too. I am passionate and focused about everything I do and I don’t just consider that someone is investing in me during the hiring process, but that I am investing in them. Their ethics and vision are very important to me. However, few employers are really and truly looking for someone who can do twice the work in half the time with better results, part-time.
Oh my God. Seriously? Seriously, you are amazing. PLEASE run for president ASAP. Thank you. <3
Amy, what a humbling thing to read your comment. Thank you for sharing that.
An article about Groupon.com, the group-buying service, mentions an interesting nugget: “About 70% of Groupon’s customer service reps are connected to the local theater scene. Joe Harrow, Groupon’s head of customer service says theater folks are a great fit. They are high energy, friendly, outgoing, quick on their toes and fun people. Plus, they need day jobs. On my recent visit to Groupon HQ, Joe showed me a wall in the customer service area decorated with pictures of team members. He mentioned that you can tell who the theater folks are by their professional head shots.” http://www.churchofcustomer.com/2010/07/in-customer-service-groupon-is-the-new-zappos.html
WOW! I love your thinking…and love the way you put it!
Thank you for supporting artists….now how can we get everyone else to do the same thing?? I would love a job opp that allowed me artistic freedom. My ‘dream job’ would be a client that I could work for from my studio…fit them in & me in at the same time. Looks like you found the perfect person to work with!
Again…thanks for this great article.
Is it possible for inhabitants of the twenty-first century to love art for its own sake? If so, why does the twenty-first centurion demand that it’s round pegs fit into square holes? Has the appreciation for genuine works of art fallen to a new low? How has this come about? Has the eye of the public body become jaundiced by continual exposure to the onslaught of commercially driven media? Is it possible for true artists to survive without the control of its technologicaly driven patrons? Why are established art galleries closing, leaving artists to their own devices? This kind of artistic desperation is a sure indication of our cultural decline. The general welfare of any nation will be judged by future historians on the basis of its cultural legacy. What great works of art will technologically harnessed artists be able to bequeaath to the inhabitants of the future?
Thanks for that article – and insight.
So often the things that artists value don’t seem to be valued by society.
I’m a writer. I feel that I have a gift and that I need to share that gift. The bank, however, doesn’t feel the need to as freely share their gifts with me. Neither does my cable company, my phone company or my Internet provider.
And that’s why we need people like you – to bridge the gap between the “art world” and the “business world.”
(That’s also why I’m married to an accountant. Well, plus he’s awesome, but that’s another story.)
Awesome post! I am a visual artist myself. I consider myself to be a person guided by principles. I understand Luckydaves decision quite well. I have myself been in similar situation (with smaller figures involved) and made similar choices. There is in fact no amount of money in the world that could tempt my into forsaking my creativity. It just isn’t possible not to be who I am.
Sure, I get Luckydave, what surprises me most about this post, is that you get Luckydave. I am personally grateful that you do. Moreover, I am grateful that you’ve taken the time to write this so well as to relay the point of the story to anyone reading it, (Even the skimmers) Bravo!
It it unfortunate that there seems to be an overwhelming opinion in “the business world” that people of principle can be an obstacle or even a land mine. I thank you for showing how a person of principle worked their principles in your favor. Clearly you as well are a person of principle or else you would’ve merely taken advantage of foolish Luckybob rather than venerating him.
Alas, literature is an art, and you too are an artist as well. . .
a person of principle. Thank you!
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[...] really admire this recent article on hiring aimed at employers: Artists, as a species, are amazing people. And America, as a general [...]
[...] My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists Chris Ashworth, owner of the software company that makes QLab 2, discusses the advantages of hiring artists to work for him, and points out that when artists are allowed to design their job around their needs as an artist, their employer prospers and they are happy! [...]
[...] shift in an article I’d like to share with you from the technology world. Start with reading comment #38 here and then scroll up to the top and read the actual article written by Chris Ashworth entitled: [...]
[...] upon this story about how one software company was able to hire an artist, (as creatives are so in demand) and do [...]