This past week I had the pleasure of working with a friend I met in University. He has since graduated from the film program at the U of R and now owns his own business called Living Sky Media. Riley doesn’t charge an hourly rate for filming and editing video. He can’t. If he did, his clients would either;
a) Pay an absurd amount of money because he works on a project until it is perfect (or very near perfect) not worrying about time.
or
b) Pay a seemingly miniscule per hour rate to account for the extra time spent making the video great.
When you are passionate about your work time doesn’t matter. For Riley, he’d rather put in the extra effort to make the video amazing whether he’s getting paid for it or not.
Most financial and business consultants would say this is a terrible business model because it does not amount to being profitable. If Riley’s main goal was to be profitable he wouldn’t create such amazing video’s. Now I’m not saying that being profitable is a bad goal to have but putting your passion before profit is something that many people do not do in business. This isn’t his long term strategy, I bet he’ll do it long enough to show the world how good he is, then by means of demand, he will be forced to raise his price.
What’s your main goal, being profitable or being passionate?
