Are You Forgetting Something?

My biggest mistake as a business person is to write a list of questions or tasks, hand it to somebody, get a response, then try to figure out what I forgot to put on the list.  Or, worse yet, not write the list at all but try to get the information I need by asking all of the questions from memory.  You pick it: obsessive-compulsive, Type-A control issues, and micro-managing -- guilty as charged.  Luckily, I have had to suffer the consequences long and hard enough to know the irony of such behavior -- chaos, seriously limited multi-tasking and only the smallest potential for growth.

Creating art is singular, the business of creating art is not.  Like any business, creative businesses require systems and structure.  Your business' ability to grow will depend on the flow and certainty of information.  It will also depend how you can deconstruct the information into distinct tasks to reach the desired goal.  

Think of Star Trek's Teleporters.  To get from one place to another, a person is broken down into her smallest components (molecules) which are sent to a specified location to be reconstructed in the same manner that they were broken down.  If each of your projects are body parts (no comment on which ones), then the process of deconstruction and reconstruction and how it happens virtually instantaneously at the right time (in Star Trek's case, at the same time) is the information flow I am talking about.  By inserting uncertainty into the information flow with my controlling ways, I stop (or at least seriously slow down) the ability to get from one place to the other.

The bigger point though is that if information flow is not defined, it will be really hard to figure out where the real flaw in your system is.  Take pricing for example.  In most cases, you are marking up your materials and labor to reach your price.  If your mark up is correct, but your are still missing your expected margin, then costing is the issue.  And if you don't know what goes into costing on a consistent basis, finding the culprit will be one tough exercise.  About the only way you will be able to do so will be to set the information flow and then observe it in action.