Sally is a video maker who Bernadette Jiwa writes about here:
What most clients pay Sally for—the deliverable, is that five minutes of video footage. But what Sally dreams of doing and being paid for is finding stories worth telling. It’s easier for Sally to sell the outcome—the video, than it is to market her process and the impact of her work. So, she defaults to doing what’s easy and ends up selling videos in one-minute increments to clients who don’t understand or pay for her genius.
People happily pay for the tangible. But if the tangible—the logo, the report or the cup of coffee, is a fraction of the value we create, then we need to get better at selling the intangible.
It’s not unusual to wake up one day and find that the work people pay us for isn’t the work we intended to do. It’s our job to fix that, by telling the right story to the right people.
Is the work people pay you for the work you want to do?
As I read Bern’s piece I couldn’t help hold a mirror to what us celebrants do. Many would see it as the few moments we are on the microphone in the ceremony, but it’s so much more.
“It’s our job to fix that, by telling the right story to the right people.”
