Left foot. Right foot.

The first time I hired a model I was blown away. Up until that point, I had simply hired friends to be in the lifestyle campaigns I was producing. They did great. They were good-looking enough. They could pose and walk just fine to show off whatever product we were shooting. And they weren’t major divas, like I feared with real models.

The first time I hired a model, though, I realized my friends were not doing fine. The model was exponentially better. The model stared down the camera with steely, longing eyes. The model struck poses that looked way cooler than my friends’. The model took direction and ran with it like a true professional, making our campaign look better than it ever had. 

Many creatives fall into a trap: we love making stuff so much that we don’t know when to stop making stuff. We’ve figured out how to figure things out. We don’t know when it would be better to bring on a more specialized creative professional to do something instead of figuring it out ourselves. 

Here’s the quick answer to that conundrum: if you have a little extra budget, you should bring on another specialized creative. 

Here’s the long answer: we all want to work on bigger projects with bigger budgets. But we hit a ceiling when we pitch. We try to pitch clients on bigger ideas for more resources, but they don’t bite. Hiring specialized creatives is how you get bigger budgets. If you have a little extra money in your budget (or even if you don’t), it often pays to bring in someone who really knows how to make an impact.

You know the difference you can make for someone’s project in a day, or even just a few hours. Yet we have a hard time believing other creatives could do the same for us. 

This is walking. 

This is the left foot and the right foot of commanding larger budgets for your projects: invest in quality, then get more money. Then do it again. This is how walking works. Left foot, right foot. You can’t just pitch on more quality without first showing it. And you can’t show it unless you pitch for a little extra budget to spend. 

You won’t get a million dollars tomorrow. And that’s probably a good thing. But you might get an extra $500. And you can pass that $500 over to a writer, or a stylist, or a real model. And when your clients see the impact that has, you’ll be able to command a few more dollars next time. 

Left foot.

Right foot.