Guest Blair Enns gives us a look behind the scenes of creating his new book Pricing Creativity.
Blair's Bio
Blair Enns is a 25-year veteran of the business side of the creative professions. In 2002, he launched Win Without Pitching, which has worked with thousands of creative professionals in numerous countries through direct engagements, seminars, workshops & webcasts. Blair is the author of "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto" and the forthcoming "Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour"
Links

Pricing Creativity
Win Without Pitching
2Bobs Podcast
Blair on Twitter
Blair on LinkedIn
Implementing Value Pricing: A Radical Business Model for Professional Firms
The Curtis Creek Manifesto

Transcript
Jonathan:
Hello and welcome to The Business of Authority. I'm Jonathan Stark.
Rochelle:
And I'm Rochelle Moulton.
Jonathan:
And today, we're very excited to be joined by guest Blair Enns. Blair is the founder and CEO of Win Without Pitching and the author of the Win Without Pitching Manifesto, and the forthcoming Pricing Creativity: Guide To Profit Beyond the Billable Hour. Did I get that right Blair?
Blair:
You got it right Jonathan thank you.
Jonathan:
Stressful :-) I am very excited and I [00:00:30] know Rochelle's very excited to have you on the show. We have just a lot in common, I've been following your work for years, we've read a lot of the same authors and we're super excited to talk about how you've taken this big idea, which to me started with the Manifesto, perhaps it had its roots before that, and turned it into a consulting business and then later a training business, and now hopefully, fingers crossed, a bestselling author.
So, could we start off by just [00:01:00] giving folks a little bit of background about who you are and what you do now and then we can sort of delve into the history?
Blair:
Yeah, sure. And thank you to both of you for having me on the podcast. I'm really looking forward to this and happy to be here. My name is Blair Ends, the company is Win Without Pitching and I founded it back in 2002, early 2002. At the time, it was a consulting practice, a new business development, sales or new business development consulting to creative [00:01:30] firms, typically independent creative firms, and I had come out of about a dozen years of working in advertising agencies and design firms and thought I'd launch this consulting practice.
So that was the first iteration of Win Without Pitching. And then over the years, beginning in late 2012, and I'm sure we'll get into this, I decided to shift the structure of the company from a solo consulting practice to a training company. So that's where we are now in late 2017, [00:02:00] early 2018. Win Without Pitching is about five years into its current incarnation as a training company. And for a few years; 2013, 14, it was both as I kind of played with training and had to make a decision about going one way or the other.
So we've been a pure training company for about three years. It really feels like this business is about three years old, but really it's more like 16.
Jonathan:
Wow. And [00:02:30] before that, you were from the agency world, you were inside the agency world, yes?
Blair:
Yeah, I worked for some of the world's largest advertising agencies and some of its smallest design firms. I was a suit, I don't own a suit anymore. Although my latest social media profile pic has me in a suit. I had a borrow a tie from my 18 year old son for that photo and I own one jacket. But I was a suit for many years and then I moved to this little mountain [00:03:00] village in the middle of nowhere where we live now when I started the consulting practice. So there's this kind of shift in the personal life that was the impetus for the business change.
And I had a Hugo Boss bonfire when I moved out here, got rid of all the suits. But I was a suit doing account services and new business at a very young age in the first ad agency I ever worked. When at I was 22