Chair Time With Eric Trine
An advice column for creatives. This month: When to hire, and reckoning with personal work—while not taking it personally.
This March, Wrong House debuts its first-ever advice column for creative types. Each month, we’re inviting our community to submit their conundrums—big, small, petty, logistical, professional—for a second opinion. Need to know when to call it quits on a project? Or how to scale your crafty hobby into a career? Or what to do when your product gets knocked off? Over the course of two decades in creative business, Los Angeles–based industrial designer, curator, and Opinionated Man on the Internet Eric Trine has seen it all—and isn’t afraid to tell you what you need to know. Have a question for Eric? Drop us a line. (Submissions will remain anonymous.)
Dear Eric, how can I find balance between creating personal work and not taking it personally when the work is not a “success”?
Let’s start with a level set: What are your goals as a creative person? There are many ways to define both “balance” and “success,” depending on your answer. So first, you need to identify how you are framing those ideas internally. Then you can determine if they are serving you and your work in the long run. How do you understand balance and success?
On balance: Try picturing it in your mind, visually. Is it like balancing weights on opposite sides of a scale? Or does it look more like forces pulling you in multiple directions? Now, think about balance as a feeling. When do you feel most in alignment? What are the qualities of that sense of balance? In visual arts, we can create balance in a composition without symmetry. We can make the composition feel whole, even when it is a constellation of disparate parts and energies. The goal is to identify what balance feels like to you, and to align your systems of measurement to achieve that goal.
Now, success: Everyone defines it differently, and everyone measures it differently.
To choose to spend minutes, days, hours on our own work—to make the things we do, in the ways we do—is a gift. That gift is first and foremost to ourselves. When we share our gifts with others, we will have widely varying results. Just think of a music genre that you can’t stand to listen to. Someone loves that music. Loves.
In my experience, the older I get, the less sure I am about what people will connect with. It’s often a surprise. And when that surprise occurs, it is a gift back to me. Sometimes the things I care the least about—the piece with the wrong shade of orange that I didn’t even want to bring to the show—is given this glorious reception. Sometimes our work is a gift to others without being a gift to us. That is a certain type of success, too.
How do you hold those two goals of balance and success, and what does it feel like to hold them both at the same time? Are they compatible, or are they in opposition to each other? When are they in conflict, and when do they work together?
Find out what balance and success feel like to you, and expand from there.
My furniture business is still young and developing. At what stage should I hire help with sales and marketing?
So much depends on your specific product category and distribution model, but the “stage,” so to speak, is there any time you are ready.
Rather than “what” the stage is, as in time, I think it can be helpful to think of the stage as one you’d step onto in a performance. You need to select which stage you want to perform on. You can rent out a venue—any venue. A whole stadium if you want. But who is going to show up? Are you ready to perform on that stage?
What type of work is required to perform on that specific stage? How much does it cost to play at that venue? $50,000? $100,000? How many tickets do you need to pull it off? One hundred, 1,000, 10,000? That’s a lot of tickets—can you actually sell that many tickets, and what’s your plan for doing it?
What I’m getting at here is that you can buy your way onto any stage, but the audience has to know about it, get there, and be willing to pay. The same goes for hiring. You can build your team whenever you want, but I recommend making sure your “concert”—whatever it is you’re selling—is well-rehearsed.
Have you ever thought, “How can we afford this?” after you made a decision? It’s dreadful, and a painful place to operate from. Now, how much better does this sound?: “We can afford this.” That’s a statement.
With my own furniture business, I did not hire anyone until I broke $500,000 in cumulative sales, which took me two and a half years. Then I knew it was truly viable. I hired one person, part time, and it was a full year before I bumped him up to full time and a salary.
If you are running a business, and you have a plan for that business to continue to grow, and you can forecast that plan, and you have the budget within that plan to hire someone at a competitive rate that gets them excited about your business and product, and and and you have the time to manage them, create your work, and all of that math works, then try explaining it to someone else. Does it make sense to them? If the answer is yes, then it’s a good time to hire. ⌂