The Entrepreneurial Journey: From Trash to Triumph | Garett Dailey

I think that's one of the things where I am like evolved to be really good at feast or famine. That it's just normal for me. But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I used to do when I first started freelancing, I would do Twitter headers for people for $100 and I would make it $50 on the weekends because I would go get money for like buy food and beer or whatever, which is pretty cool. I mean, you know, you could like that first time you realize like, oh my God, I have a skill where I can just go get money if I just like say, hey, this, right? Do some work for an hour, get paid. That was awesome. But it was hard. And it was also, you know, especially earlier when I was more of a creative than an entrepreneur, even— I mean, it kind of been in entrepreneurship for a while at that point, but it wasn't like— not now where I'm like, you know, more of an entrepreneur than I am a creative. The transition to that is, is difficult. And then understanding you have to make weird compromises or do nonsense Hey creative, are you ready to discuss profits, the money, the ways to make it happen?

The Profitable Creative Podcast is for you, the creative, how you define it. Videographers, photographers, entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, you get it. CEO of Core Group and author Christian Brim interviews industry experts, creative entrepreneurs, and professionals alike who strive to be creative and make money at the same time. Sound like you? Tune in now. It's time for profit.

Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Shout out to our one listener in San Marcos, Texas. No idea where San Marcos is. Maybe our guest Garrett Daly of Lucid Consulting joining us from Austin, Texas, might illuminate that for us, Garrett? Yeah, any idea where San Marcos is?

Yeah, San Marcos is like, um, 30 minutes south of Austin, I would say, between here and San Antonio. Uh, okay. It's actually the best shopping in the area. They have this— like, Austin is a wonderful city for a lot of reasons. They don't have places for, uh, men to buy clothes for some reason, unless you want to spend like $200 on a flannel. There's a place that does that, for some reason. I don't know what the market is for that, but, uh, they have really cool outlets in San Marcos, so that's the only reason I know where that is.

It's very nice. Okay, well, now I know something that I didn't know before. Don't know if I'll make it to San Marcos, but who knows. I didn't make it to Austin several times, so there, there is hope. Garrett, tell us a little bit about Lucid Consulting, how that got started, what you guys do.

Yeah, um, it's hard to grow your business when you don't know how to talk about it. My company, Lucid, helps you talk about your business with clarity so you can close more deals. So that's obviously a very manicured little statement.

Very good.

Very good. I like to start with that because that gives me a talking point later on when we talk about like the nature of messaging and stuff like that. But I have, I have probably the weirdest work history of anyone in the world. I've had— before I was like properly an entrepreneur, I think I've had like 28 jobs or something like that. And that was a sign. It's a lie.

That's a sign.

Yeah. Uh, what's, you know, I don't know, everyone's like, what do you want to be when you grow up? Um, and I never had a good answer for that. And I think, you know, if you're— I imagine the people watching this are creatives or smart enough people that they have options. When people ask, what do you want to be when you grow up? If you have enough options, it's impossible to pick. True. But I, you know, uh, I kind of was always into things, creative stuff related to design in some capacity. I, you know, way, way back in the day would do pixel art signatures on forums for people. And, you know, it was like when I was a teenager, my uncle helped me acquire some 3D modeling software. I was trying to teach myself Maya and eventually Blender later on, you know, getting couldn't afford Illustrator, so using like GIMP or Inkscape or some of the other like really subpar free ones. And then I don't know, that's, you know, I went to school for marketing. I was only there for 3 semesters. I really wasn't a fan. I didn't feel like it was— I was not a great time in my life and ended up dropping out, starting a business. In the process of doing that, I ended up doing all of the design for the company. So I designed the brand, the website. Which has ended up being stuff that I did for a long time.

So yeah, what was that? What was that first business you started?

It's Freedom Way Waste Valet. So it was a valet trash service for multifamily housing. So the people at your apartment that take your trash out for you, we frankly, I think we had the best brand in the entire industry because it's not a good industry. All the companies are very old. We tried very hard for a year We went to a trade show, we did a coat drive, we, you know, got little dollhouse trash cans full of candy with business cards in them and gave them to the people we were targeting. We got absolutely nowhere. There's stuff that you learn. Also, I was like 20, uh, so there's stuff that you learn way after the fact about how old industries work that it was just never— we would never have known that at the time. Like, you're supposed to show up at the trade show 3 years in a row before anyone talks to you seriously, right? The largest complex manager that we targeted, she was probably in charge of like thousands of units in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where we were at. Right. She messaged me on LinkedIn 3 years later and said, we're ready to talk now. So my big takeaway from that was like, we did something good enough to be memorable 3 years later, which is cool. Yes. But also, man, I really wish I had done something that wasn't trash that I cared about so I could stay doing it. Intel kicked off, right? And so from there, I kind of floated around for a while. Um, I, I got into, you know, I was blogging for a long time. I had a relatively, uh, popular philosophy blog when I was working at Tesla. And at the time, I also— my job at Tesla was very like, um, menial, so I had an infinite amount of time to be on Twitter. And I started doing lots of podcasting with other people that were writers or content creators on Twitter in 20— around 2017, 2018. We started a small company called ION Media that did like multi-streaming podcasting when it used to be really hard to do that. So we ended up writing, writing a book as a group, like an ebook, and we did a, um, like 30-something speaker digital conference. And at the time, I just wasn't really good at selling it. We made really cool stuff, but I never figured out how to sell it, you know what I mean? So we just didn't make very much money. Came back— that was in Reno. I came back to Raleigh and got a job as director— wait, I got a job at a design agency. By the end of that, I was director of ops. So I had been freelance designing a little bit, you know, didn't really understand the process or anything, but I'm naturally somewhat talented and experienced with that. But working there really taught me the process and the procedure for how to, you know, sell things for 10 times as much and like provide a much higher quality product. So a year and a half of that, I was like, I should just do this myself. The guy who runs this is like not super ethical and I really didn't like the way that he did business. So I did it myself and I just was an agency of one for 3 years. And then that kind of segued into Lucid where I brought on my co-founder Brian and we kind of retooled to be more focused on what I would say now is helping people communicate value, whether that is visually or verbally.

Interesting. So I'm going to go back. You, you dropped out of school to start a garbage company, which is the best story ever. We talk about on this show about this, this paradigm of, you know, doing what you love versus doing what you have to do to make money. And it sounds like at that point in your life, you weren't real sure on what it was that you loved because you clearly didn't love trash. So what, what, what went into that decision to go into that business? Like, what, what was— what were you thinking?

Yeah, full disclosure, this is what happened. I was bailing out of school because I was really depressed and I knew I didn't need to. The only reason I went in the first place was to get out of my miserable hometown, which is like super rural North Carolina. It's like a dead-end, terrible place. Um, so I went to school and I knew I didn't want to be there, but it was a way to get out. And when I was there, I was like, okay, I don't know what I'm gonna do. But I had kind of resolved that I was gonna like— I was gonna get— I, I'd always been really into philosophy. I was like going to start writing and figure that some of that stuff out. Um, I had not really hadn't fully formed itself while I was there. I used to do sales. I both had a movie store that we had like a sales program where you sold memberships and after that a hair straightener kiosk in the mall with a bunch of Israelis. And some of the guys that I worked with were starting this trash company because I guess one of them downloaded like a course on Facebook, like start a cash flowing business or something. I learned that later. Uh, but they called me and they were like, hey, we're gonna do this, you want in? I was like, okay, I have literally nothing else going for me. I had no plan, but that turned out to be awesome. And that really kind of like immediately was something I was much better at than school, where it was like trying to figure out, hey, we have an unclear problem to solve, uh, we have to put all this stuff together, we figure out how to market it, we have to do some business modeling, all that kind of stuff. And it turned out I just had like a natural skill for a lot of the entrepreneurial stuff, whereas like the structured kind of organized, follow the rules world of corporate and, and school and all that. Just never— I'm just not built for that. Pure serendipity that I ended up doing that at all.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Well, I, I think it's interesting because what, what you're describing to me is, is what I preach on this podcast, which is thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur first with, with certain skills. So you're an entrepreneur with sales skills or an entrepreneur with messaging skills. You're not someone that is locked into whatever skills that it is that you know or have at the time. And I think that's important. Even though it wasn't your passion, you stepped out of that, you stepped into that world. And once you're in that world, it's impossible to go back. I mean, I think for 99% of the people, I mean, when they get across that line, it's like Okay, this didn't work, but I know, I know a couple other things that, that might. So talk about the transition from, from your agency to what you're doing now with Lucid. Like, tell me more about how you refined that, what, what, what that process looked like.

Yeah, so this is, uh, probably the most relevant story for all of the audience here. This is, I think, just like directly applies to everyone who's thinks of themselves as a creative. So I was working at a different agency. That's actually the agency that did the brand for Morning Brew, right? So this is like not an unserious place. And I just didn't like, you know, the people that did the brand for Morning Brew left right before I got there, and I didn't find out why they left until I was on the way out. But all kinds of issues. But the people that used to work there were very talented, good, good people. So I started my own. And one of the things when I, when we had run clients when I was at this agency. I wanted to do more development of what I was calling like brand philosophy or like business philosophy, right? So we had these exercises we would do with clients, and we did them for a very short amount of time, and we would just take whatever answers we got in the short amount of time. I was like, what if we doubled the amount of time we spent on this and we waited until we got the right answers to cut it? And I started doing that with my clients. There was a whole system that I had built out that I wanted to use for all of our clients there. We just never— I could never get a project like moved on. I would always get reassigned to different things. And I was like, dude, I can't do this. I want to do things my way. So in the process of my agency, what I— my premise was business philosophy and design, which this is the most like pet project arts art experiment thing ever. It was impossible to pitch. It never— I never was able to make it make sense to people. But people that already got it and were like predisposed towards like philosophical thinking thought it was really cool. But it wasn't a good angle for selling. It was just for me, it was very validating to try to do this thing right. And we did really good work. My clients loved it. Everyone was happy. I had, you know, I almost had no issues with anyone the whole time. But it was always very, very hard to explain until after people had gone through the process of working with me. That they were like, oh yeah, this is really valuable. But so this taught me something that I think is a really important lesson, which is I try to never be in the business of educating people. I don't like it. There is a business for educating people. I think that it's a lot, a lot more for larger companies that have time and patience. If you're small, you should be solving a problem that somebody has right now that they already understand. That's a big thing that helped me. It's like, I'm not going to— no, yes, I think your business's philosophy over the next 10 years is going to be important. But if you're a startup, that's not your problem. Your problem is we don't have any money, our brand is ugly, our product sucks, whatever, right? Uh, we're running out of cash. So part of, part of moving to lucid— that line that I said at the beginning was the beginning of lucid, right? So this, around actually almost exactly this time last year, I was at my friend's house. He was hosting Tony Robbins Business Mastery, which is phenomenal, highly recommended. I've done it twice now. It's just a great program. And one of the things they talked about through the program is like getting your one-line description of your company together. And I had never really was able to do that, even though I'm really good at helping other people do that. That was like something that, you know, I've always done with people. And we just like drilled in super hard during that, and I figured out that line that we had because my buddy helped me. We stayed up like 4 hours after it's over, and this is like, you know, 5 or 6 days of 12-hour days. So we were up until like 3 in the morning. We got that line. And when I got that line, I understood what the business was because it required me to kill the desire for my business to be an art project in exchange for letting the business be a business, which is the real important insight here. So for me, when I could say, hey, I can do art for myself, I can do things that are artistic, but art has to do the job of art. Which is to be beautiful, to be awesome, to be amazing, untethered from being the thing that makes some money. So you think about like, um, there's a movie called The Fountain, which is my favorite movie of all time. It's the most beautiful thing ever. The giant flop. Uh, it's very, very out there. I mean, it's just, it's super artsy, but it's a fantastic movie. That movie is like as much art for art's sake as something can be, and it made no money. And it's like, retrospectively regarded as a cult classic. Right? Versus, let's say, Fast and the Furious, which I am not so highbrow as to say I don't also enjoy those movies, but they're not high art by anyone's definition, right? They're dumb, they're corny, they're clichéd. It's popcorn stuff. That is a business decision to make a movie like that. That is a money-making decision, right? And movies are interesting because they can straddle the line, but you have to make movies that people want to pay for. To get away with doing the art, right? So when you look at your business as this has to be something that makes money, when the business part is sorted, which is your first priority, you are then free to do stuff really well. The art can be the art if the art doesn't have to pay the bills, right? The business stuff has to pay the bills. The art can come along for the ride. And the way that I look at this is like if you look at like the Medici, right, who are not known as great artists. They're very, like, profitable. They're super, super rich for their time. Like, adjusted for inflation, they would be like $100 billionaires, right? But they funded da Vinci to do art stuff, to do weird nonsense, right? And if you look at through, like, history, all of the best art came from patronage, not from artists figuring out how to monetize the art itself. It's very rare. People sometimes they figure out how to do both, but really, you understand, if you look at it like I'm going to let the business be the business and the business can patronize, be the patron of the art. That for me was very freeing because I was trying to make them agree with each other. I was trying to make the art the business and sell this like convoluted thing that was very like meaningful to me. And as soon as I stopped trying to do that, I've actually freed myself up to be more artistic because I'm not trying to contort the art into something that makes money, which I think sullies it.

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There's a lot to unpack there. My, my, my first thought is this conversation and what you just said is very similar to the conversation I had on the episode where I interviewed my daughter, who is a figurative oil painter. And she talks about the divine inspiration of art and how it essentially can't have a commercial intent to be, to be truly art. And, and kind of what I, I bring to the table and want to bring to the table for, for creative entrepreneurs is this idea of, of not forgoing your creativity, rather reapplying it and using that same passion and skill set in a different way. You can always do art for art's sake as long as you don't have any intent to make any money with it. But the entrepreneurs that leave creativity off the table and are really missing out on the transformational changes, the 2x and 10x type differences that, that happen. Because linear growth is, is very predictable. Creativity is unpredictable. And, and you're never going to have a business that, uh, is, is wildly successful if you don't have some element of creativity in it.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the Ironically, the best example of a company that does this really well is Apple, which everyone— when you think Apple, you think, oh, it's the most artistic mainstream company that exists, other than like, I don't know, like Braun at one point was like Apple, but they were never as big as Apple is now. And yet Apple charges crazy amounts of money so that they can afford to do the art for art's sake stuff that they do with some of their more fancy stuff. And, you know, we could debate whether modern Apple as good as it used to be, but it's still like when you think creative business, it's Apple, right? There's like almost no comparison. I don't know anyone else who's like immediately jumps into the conversation like that. And it is, you know, it is creativity is this divine act. It needs to be this like thing that is allowed to be fun. And this is where like I, you know, I've noticed and what might, you know, as, as the business progresses, I'm trying to remove myself from more of the day-to-day design tasks so that I can be creative again in my life. Because when my job became doing creative stuff all day, doing it in my free time became very difficult. I used to write for, you know, I would write like 6 hours a day, 3 or 4 days a week. When I worked at Tesla, my job was brain dead. But when I had to do, you know, 40 hours of design work for people, I stopped doing it for fun, which is unfortunate. And I miss that. And now it's like that I've become more of a business person in my day-to-day and less of a creative. And we're slowly moving to a place where we're, you know, building a team and doing all this stuff. My hope is that I can get that free time back to just be creative for without any intent behind it. You know, if I'm like, it's what I know this is, it's weird. Maybe this is a little bit ahead of like the average creative path because they're sitting in creative mode and that makes business hard. When you go from creative mode to business mode, it makes creative hard. And I think like where I sit now, it's like I'm like, oh, I have so many hours in the day, I have to allocate this much time to like doing lead gen or sales or whatever. I'm going to go to events and you're like, oh, I'm going to sit down and like I have a piano over here, like sit down and noodle on the piano for 4 hours. It's like, oh, I don't know if I can fit that into my schedule, you know? So I think the balancing act of all this stuff is very difficult and you only have so much brainpower for certain things. Like if you were doing you know, any, any kind of like creative work all day, uh, it's very hard to get done doing that and then go work on your own stuff, especially if it's like for a client, you know, because then you're forced to do it. You know, if I was, I was working on a brand guide for a client, um, the last month or so, and that, you know, hey, I have to get 6 hours to this, and I might get nothing done in 6 hours because creativity is so linear, right? I might just sit here and like, look, like stare at the screen in Figma and like not make any progress. And then you make a huge ton of progress because you're in like the end of hour 5 and you figured out the thing, you know. And it's hard, it's hard to like burn yourself out on that and then switch back over into being creative on your own time.

Yeah. And, and I, again, there's, there's a lot to unpack. I, I think that, I think great entrepreneurs harness that balance of the analytical and the creative. The, the, you know, that with the analytical comes things like processes and predictability and delegation and, uh, systems, you know. And I, I've known creative entrepreneurs that were so uber creative, they literally couldn't make any money. It's like you're, you're just out, out there. Like, I, I, I, I can't, I can't wrangle it in, right? But so many entrepreneurs go the other direction, and they're so structured they don't allow any room for, uh, novel thought. I think one of the things that I see that is a, is a huge stressor for creatives is the money. And because the money is a stressor, it sucks up all the bandwidth for creativity. Like, if, if you don't, if you don't have some type of foundation where you know that you can pay the bills, you're in a constant, uh, fight-or-flight mode. Did you experience any of that in starting your business?

The whole time. Yeah. Okay, man, I don't know. I think that's one of the things where I'm like evolved to be really good at, uh, feast or famine, that it's just normal for me. But yeah, I mean, it's You know, I used to do, when I first started freelancing, I would do Twitter headers for people for $100 and I would make it $50 on the weekends because I would go get money for like buy food and beer or whatever, which is pretty cool. I mean, you know, you could like that first time you realize like, oh my God, I have a skill where I can just go get money if I just like say, hey, this, right? Do some work for an hour, get paid. That was awesome. But it was hard. And it was also, you know, especially earlier when I was more of a creative than an entrepreneur, even I mean, it kind of been in entrepreneurship for a while at that point, but it wasn't like not now where I'm like, you know, more of an entrepreneur than I am a creative. The transition to that is difficult. And then understanding you have to make weird compromises or do nonsense, right? Like I had this one, this is the strangest thing that I was ever asked to design. So there's some random guy I met on Twitter who's like a kind of like a men's health slash also Esoterica guy, who's an interesting dude. He's like a fitness guy, but he's also really into like, um, teaching people about testosterone replacement therapy. So he asked me to do a book cover, and he said, quote, I need you to give me like a Frankenstein lab with a big tube of green stuff in it with just like a super jacked silhouette guy in it. I was like, okay, I can do that. I did this. I have it somewhere. It's literally what I just described. It is exactly that. I give it to him and he's like, oh, this is awesome, man, I love it. He comes back the next day, he's like, my wife thinks it's terrible, we got to do something else. So I only ended up getting paid like half for that even though I was done. And it was also like the dumbest thing I've ever produced. Like, it was a ridiculous thing to spend your life making this, right? It was crazy. So that's weird. You have to get used to like, no, actually, your, your taste is not always in charge of what you get to produce. You have to make some things because you're getting paid to make it. And getting over that is good, like getting used— like, because some people won't and they'll fight the client. And it's like, that's not— it's not your job. To some extent, you want to suggest better things, but if they don't want to listen to you, like, it's not your job to, right? You know, I'm not— I don't want to pay my, uh, subcontractors like to argue with me, you know. Um, so that— I think, I think that's part of it you got to get used to. And just like when you accept, like, the point of being an entrepreneur is to do things that solve problems for people for money, right? It's not to do art. And they're different. And you could do this creatively. You can produce art that solves people's problem if that's their problem. If you're building somebody's brand, you— they want it to be awesome most of the time, right? That's a great way to do it, I think. Um, and there's other versions of this too, like, hey, somebody needs a jingle, somebody needs creative video edit, One of my buddies is a much harder, like, internally creative than me, and he's— he actually just got picked up to do video for Andrew Huberman. But he's like, you know, super, super regimented creative guy. He'll do like, you know, a couple hours of like songwriting in the morning, and then he'll like jump into video editing and all that stuff. And it's, you know, being able to balance those things is really important because you have to have that state of mind where you can do all the creative stuff, but you also have to make not even necessarily compromises. I think as soon as you realize that they're two different things, it's not a compromising. When you think that they're the same, when you think I have to make the art make money, or I have to make the business art, then you ruin both of them and you torture yourself. And when you can split them and you say, I'm going to let the art be the art, I'm going to let the business be the business, and in terms of the business, my job is to solve people's problems for money, ideally in a repeatable way. Right? Ideally for a specific kind of person so you can target them and stuff like that. But really, really, really, it's problem solving. It's not anything else. And then that brings in the art of creative problem solving, which is really fun.

So yeah, I— all of what you said is 100% true. So thinking about, uh, Lucid Consulting and, and what you do, talk about how that evolved from your— so it sounds like you solved your own problem first, right, which a lot of entrepreneurs do, uh, and then they said, well, surely somebody else needs this as well. How did that transform?

Yeah, so let's, let's look at the— I, I'll give you an example with 3 points, right? So when I was freelancing, there was no logic to it. It's just, hey, somebody needs something designed, I design it. I did not No process. There's no— other than like basic questions. They're like, I want a Twitter header. Okay, what do you want? Cool, done, do it. When I had ION, my agency, we had quite a bit of process, right? But it was much more focused on like creating creative stuff and, you know, trying to capture their philosophy in terms of how their brand was going to look at their website or some other stuff. Moving into Lucid, it's switching into, hey, we're looking at this as a business problem. You know, if you're getting your brand done, what does this need to do, right? What is, what is the utility of your brand? It's not necessarily just to make something pretty, which I, when I had my design agency, it was about making pretty stuff, right? Whereas, you know, a lot of what we do now is more so pitch decks are probably our bread and butter because it turns out that something about doing philosophy and design combined is really translates to explaining complicated tech products. Effectively. Go figure. I don't know.

I can see that.

Yeah. It's, I, you know, I also, I mean, I've done sales related stuff for a long time. So I think years of sales experience and also working next to very technical people, you kind of learn how to like speak both languages. But that, that really is where I was like, there's a hole here, which is that at later stages of companies, the value of a thing is known and agreed on. Mark, your pricing is fixed, right? If you go to like, uh, Netflix, there's no salesperson, there's no ambiguity in the price, right? Netflix, you know what it costs. It costs that because they've tested every number and this is what they can get away with it for the right amount of people at scale without losing too many customers, right? And every time they bump it up, something changed. They did the math again, they see how many people they're going to lose, they run all the math, right? You're— if you're like anywhere before Series A, most of the time, uh, your value is unclear. And if you're trying to explain— and probably for all of you creators out there, you've had the experience of trying to explain why people should pay you money to do your job, right?

Right.

That's especially with service providers, that's really true. But like everybody in the early stages, your value is unclear and you may be negotiating like just based off of like, hey, I'm gonna throw out a number and we're gonna see how they react to it. Oh, they cringed. We're not gonna get— we're not getting $5K. We're gonna do it for, for $2K, right? But that, that— what the essence of that interaction is, that subjective exchange between two people, is the negotiation of value. And that's what I realized. That's the most interesting place to sit, is how do people communicate value? Right? What makes something worth more than something else? Because not only is that all marketing, it's all sales. It's like, that itself is like such a nebulous thing. But if you think about, you know, Nikes, right? If I have a pair of Jordans and a pair of random, you know, sweatshop Chinese shoes from the same factory that don't have the brand on them, these might be $10. On Amazon, you can get $10 shoes, right? And these are $200 or something. I don't know. I don't buy Jordans, but, but what's actually different? They're probably exactly the same structurally, right? It's probably the same, like, uh, EVA foam and midsole, whatever nonsense, right? So that's a really profound thing to start to think about. And that's when you get into sitting there, you realize, oh my God, there are objective values to things. Like, everyone needs food and water and shelter and stuff like that. But price, the value that we put on things, is actually totally subjective, and it's decided when people buy stuff. And if you can change the way that people perceive price, you add value to things, right? If I help somebody— if somebody's trying to fundraise, like a lot of our clients are, you know, if the VC doesn't understand why their company is worth anything, the VC thinks it's worth $0, they don't invest. If you change the pitch, you just change the words around and maybe some colors and and pictures in the deck and make it look better. Suddenly now it's worth millions of dollars. Like, if a VC gives you a million dollars, they think your company's worth 10 or more. Could be, you know, more than that, right? So suddenly we've created value where there was no value, even though the innate company generally has a good idea and it's like maybe they have revenue and stuff. It is technically value. And you realize value is completely made up, which is a disturbing thought. Right? And so I like, that bugged me for a long time as somebody who's like naturally like a really— I'm a pretty objective person, but you realize that in like what the value that creativity provides is fully subjective. Like why is, why is an iPhone better than an Android? You know, as somebody— and again, I'm talking about like peak iPhone. I, I have my issues with modern iPhones, but like it looks better, it has a better like UX, it's easier to use, it's got all this other stuff, right? Can you measure the difference in quality between these subjective perceptions? Like, no, not at all. And yet it plays out in the market that way, right? So there's this creative force, there's this subjective thing that actually has a huge impact. And I think for creatives, like, when you lean into the realization that there is this ambiguous, non-measurable thing that you as a creative can influence, and that directly correlates into what it correlates. It's hard to know exactly how it correlates, but it correlates with the perception of value, right? That's what creativity does. Creativity increases the value of things when applied correctly. And that's the best application of it to businesses. That's why Apple beats Microsoft in terms of being like thought of as a higher ticket thing. It's just the application of creativity to create this subjective sense of value.

Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy, and if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now. Yeah, I, I wrote an entire chapter on pricing in, in my book Profit First for Creatives just based upon those principles that you were talking about, which a lot of creative business owners— well, a lot of business owners in general don't do the work necessary to maximize their, their value and their pricing. And what you're talking about is subjective. There, there might be some limiting guardrails around it, like you can't create infinite value if you don't really have a true understanding of the problem you're solving for the customer, you can't extract the maximum value. And sometimes that, that value to the customer is very ambiguous by nature, like VCs. I mean, like, you might as well be trying to price interior design work because, I mean, like, how, how do I know how this kitchen renovation is going to make you feel, right? But at the end of the day, when you're selling an intangible, like all service businesses, including yours and mine, the, the value is determined by the buyer. One, that's, that's key, is you don't set the price, they do. And it's, it's not about the things that you do, it's about the emotions that they feel. And that's, that's a hard thing for analytical people like myself to get, uh, uh, our brains around that it's not the tax, it's not the bookkeeping or the payroll or, or the wealth management. None of those things. I mean, those are the things that we do, but it's the feelings that we generate from doing those things that is the value. And, and what we set our prices on, which is a completely different ball game.

Yeah, it's, it's wild. I, I do agree you can't create infinite value. So objective value exists, but the only way we touch it is subjective, right? You— hey, I tried to sell somebody, uh, brand design for $10 billion and they said no. Okay, well, we, we know there's at least a, a barrier somewhere between zero and $10 billion, right? Maybe it would— maybe if you had said $9 billion, you would have gotten away with it, right? But it is, uh, you know, the way I always say it, like what you said, I think is dead on. The buyer decides on the price at the moment of purchase. The seller decides the floor and the ceiling, which is what's the first number I'm going to say that's the highest it's ever going to go, and what's the lowest I'll take. So for people listening— go ahead.

Well, I, I was just going to interject, have you heard of, uh, Victoria Medvec? Mm-hmm. She is an author and speaker. She was a professor at Northwestern. I don't know if she still teaches, but she teaches negotiation. And I've been to her workshop twice, and both times it just floors me. She takes a group, a room of people, and she separates them into pairs. One's a buyer, one's a seller. They each get an information sheet based upon whether they're the buyer or the seller. But everybody in the room, all the buyers get all the same information, all the sellers get the same information. And the process is take 15, 20 minutes, negotiate your best price. And then she goes around and said, okay, what's your— what was your best price? What was your best price? And what's shocking, shocking, just absolutely shocking to me, is the range of negotiated values that come up with. I mean, like 100x. Like, someone will come up with, well, I got it sold for $1 million, and somebody else got it sold for $100 million. And you're like, how?

How?

How is that possible? We had the same information. But that's human. That's what you're dealing with, is people. And you can't predict it.

Think about, you know, a great example of this is the company Supreme. Like basically everything Supreme sells is almost certainly the quality of any other equivalent thing. But Supreme stuff retails for probably 10,000 times on average what the normal price of something— if you get a Supreme t-shirt, maybe not at the first purchase, but they like intentionally limit supply and then there's a huge resale market. But you're buying like a resold Supreme t-shirt, it might be 10 grand, right? It might be more. And now like even look at their brand. Their brand is comically like bad. It's— I think it's like Futura Italic Bold, right? Right. So it's not even like a— there's nothing creative going on there, but that's— they created the idea that it is this status symbol, which is interesting, right? And it's also interesting too, which I'm, you know, I have to imagine somebody's talked about this on the show before, but like the, the spectrum of how we perceive value changes at different levels of social class. Like, uh, so Supreme would be high status for low-status people, right? Or yes, people who are high status in the low set, like the lower class, uh, style where if you were going to Davos, right, and you were trying to be a high-status person at the WEF, you're gonna have some like tailored shirt that has no noticeable logo, but it maybe has some tiny detail that indicates who the designer was, and it's like a $10,000 white button-up, right? And like, right, you might have a $30,000 suit with some specific little like stitching on the cuff that's just for people who know it's there. So there's different ways of perceiving this. But on the other hand, if you're Jay-Z, Jay-Z might buy Supreme, right? Because that's like the, you know, he— somebody that comes from the lower classes is doing things that are associated with that. There's like that sort of opulence and display of wealth connotates different, uh, at different levels of society, right? Versus the old money people are going to do something that's completely unrelated to that. Yeah, it's like very inconspicuous.

It's interesting to me that people like my brother— my brother is one of these people that claims that he is strictly analytical, he makes no emotional decision— and I said, you're full of shit. Like, everything you, everything you do is driven by emotion. Now, that may just be subconscious. It's not like you're angry or, or afraid, but everything is driven by those feelings. Then you rationalize the decision after the fact in your brain. Like, you make that decision at the gut level— I want this, I want that— and then your brain fills in the details.

Yeah, that's the entire reason that I have a job, is because of what you're describing. Um, if everything was personal— like, one of the things I've said this before, this is a little bit like not great messaging because it's a little bit more technical, but because the market is inefficient, I have a job. If the market were perfectly efficient, everything would be priced at exactly the equilibrium point. But because of subjectivity, pricing is always going to be skewed and variable. And that's— there's always a role for salespeople, right? VC, especially an early-stage startup, is simultaneously worth zero and a billion dollars, right? It's, it's like quantum, quantum, um, like Schrödinger's cat, right? It's both of these things. And the difference is, what do you think it's worth? And thus pitching is, I'm going to make you think this is worth a billion dollars, not zero. But it can't be both, and it's either one or the other, right? But before you've started pitching, it's both, right? And your job is just don't let them think it's zero.

Right. Yeah. And Schrödinger's cat, This is not where I thought this conversation would go, but absolutely, that's a great example. Give me one more time the tagline you started with to kind of bring it full circle as to what your consulting company does.

Yes, it's hard to grow your business when you don't know how to talk about it. Lucid helps you talk about your business with clarity so you can close more deals. We do other stuff too. But the most important part of what we do is we help you communicate the intrinsic value explicitly of what you do. And that's the difference between getting invested in or not, getting purchases or not, commanding a higher price point or not, right? That's done visually, verbally. There's other ways, you know, but that's like the easy ones is understanding it's your pitch, it's your brand, it's your website, it's your copy, whatever. And every word in that sentence— like, we deliberated over that sentence for like 4 hours— that every word in that sentence is very intentional, uh, and it communicates specific points, right? So what do people actually want? What's their actual problem? Grow your business, right? Every person who is a client of ours has had the experience of, I don't know how to talk about this, which means more usually what people are trying to do is, I'm going to explain this And explaining and selling are two different things, right? It's like teaching. Explaining is like teaching. Explaining is how engineers talk to each other, but salespeople are not explaining most of the time, right? Generally, they're problem solving, right? So in the same way, my sentence is not explaining what we do. We help you talk about your business with clarity. Is that descriptive? Now you have no idea what that does, right? But if your problem is you're trying to grow your business, you don't know how to talk about it, Oh, if it was clear, it would be easy, right? What do you want at the end of that? You want to close more deals. Everyone does, right? Anyone who says they don't want to close more deals is a liar, or they hit their sales quota and they're like capped and they're at some organization, right? Which is— you should get a different job. So that fundamentally, that is really the problem I'm interested in solving is how do I help you with the right set of words or images or colors or otherwise increase the perceived value of the thing that you're doing, which is freaky black magic voodoo witchcraft, right? But that is, that is really the, the subjective art of communicating value, right? Is it is freaky black magic voodoo witchcraft, but it works and it makes a huge difference. And if you don't do it, your value very well may be zero, even though your implicit value is you're a billion-dollar company.

How do people find out more about working with Lucid Consulting?

The easiest way, my favorite way, is if you go to our website lucidconsult.ing and schedule a call with us for free. I, as someone who does persuasive stuff all day, I am not a pushy salesperson. I will be happy to just talk to you, but you can book a free call. We have a link on the website. Um, outside of that, follow us on LinkedIn. We post a lot of stuff, me and my co-founder Brian Schuster. But yeah, that's the easiest way. Perfect.

Well, Garrett, I really appreciate your insight and your experience shared today. It's been very informational. Thank you very much. Listeners, if you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast, rate the podcast, share the podcast. If you don't like what you heard, let me know and we'll replace Garrett. Until then, ta-ta for now.

And that's a wrap for today's episode of The Profitable Creative. Until next time, you money lovers. And don't forget, Profit First for Creatives is live via Amazon.

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