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Do you want to know the best creative idea in the world?

The one people pay you to use.

This month’s Creative Networks speaker was fabulous, in fact, probably my favourite so far.

David Parrish is a business advisor for Creatives and said that his light bulb moment came from when he had attended a conference about 6 years ago which was lead by Creatives with capital ‘C’. You could tell that they were Creatives because they were wearing T-shirts instead of suits, which is where T-Shirts and Suits, the name for his book, came from.

He delivered his talk in a friendly informative way and held a captive audience for about an hour, providing them with juicy bites of information and anecdotes to take away with them. For instance, did you know that he was a published poet? He wrote a very short Japanese poem and was paid the princely sum of £5 for it. Which meant, in his words that he was paid more per syllable that JK Rowling.

He talked about being from Bury and opening a book shop back in 1980. He didn’t want to sell out to Capitalism, so when they actually made a loss in their first year of trading he was a proud man. In their second year when they started to make a profit, they fixed it so that they repeated their loss making pattern.

He also talked about how ideas don’t make you rich. This made me think of when I was visiting the Saachi Gallery, in London last week. My friend told me about visitors to the gallery who said, “ I could have made that.” To which the curator replied, “Yes, but we only exhibit things that people have actually made.”

What David meant by this was that, ideas don’t make you rich. That’s the easy part, its doing all the tasks after that, that are difficult, like getting financial backing and launching the product or design to market. He said “I don’t want my clients to be the poor pioneer; they need to make their product or idea work for them. Develop a creative entrepreneur, not a creative labourer.” By that he meant, make your product earn you money whilst you sleep. Secure the copyright to it, so that if someone wants to use your design, you can charge them for using it, but it still belongs to you. It’s then making you money, and you can reap the rewards of your labour.

He gave an example of George Lucas, the Star Wars creator. He said that George charged only $40,000 for the rights to his film, but also crucially 40% of the box-office sales and all rights to future sequels and ownership of all the merchandising associated with Star Wars. This shrewd move has made George Lucas somewhere in the region of $3.6bn to date.

So the next time you design or make something for someone whether it be a client or a friend, make sure you think about how you charge them for it. As far as advice is concerned, I think that its the best I’ve heard for quite some time.

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