The Sharing Business Model

Making a living making art and how to make it work.

The Rock And The Hard Place

If you're a collaborative working artist, you've probably worked on spec. For the lay reader, that means working on a project without a specific customer or buyer, in the hopes that the project will A) complete successfully, and B) eventually succeed financially. In other words, working on spec is working for free.

Typically, one does this because you're helping out a buddy, or you believe in the project, or it just seems like fun. It's usually the projects that are actually artistic where you wind up working on spec; the "art" that most people are willing to pay fair wages for is art that helps a business make a profit. But making art is skilled labor, no matter whether someone will pay you to make it or not.

Artistic labor comes with a certain amount of exploitation baked in. We live in a society with such a high demand for art (or "aRt") that both Netflix and the people who are invested in generative AI are making cheap, quick turnaround slop that's meant to play in the background while you doomscroll TikTok. Anyone who knows a craft will inevitably contend with audiences that demand art but don't want to pay for it, and companies that want to cater to that demand, but don't want to pay you to make it. That is the rock and the hard place.

All this makes it exceptionally difficult to get an artistic business off the ground. Without an investor, buyer, or customer to pay your collaborators, anyone who contributes to a project and its potential future success is doing so in their spare time. This creates logistical hurdles and slows down the speed of production, as folks' paid work and real lives take precedence over unpaid work. It also creates skill gaps, as it's not always possible to find someone with the needed skill set to volunteer it for you. Plugging those holes means the tasks either fall to you or don't happen.

It is possible to work around a lack of initial investment. There's grants and awards, crowdfunding, subscription models, sponsorship, ads - all potential revenue sources that can be used to cover labor and overhead. But almost all of those sources depend on already having an audience for your work, whether you're asking that audience to invest their own money or you're asking a company or organization to use your work as an avenue for them to reach your audience. It is much more difficult to build an audience from scratch if you are A) working mostly alone because you can't pay anyone and/or B) working slowly because you are Tetris-ing volunteer labor from your talented friends.

So what to do? We want more and better art - to make and to enjoy.

The good news is that for years I've been noodling on a business model that could potentially upend the exploitative nature of spec work, while still being realistic about the environment we're all working in. That is: I may have come up with a way to compensate spec work that helps build the business while respecting and paying back the investment of contributors. It requires diligence, sharing, and patience.

Making Spec Work Work, For Now

The eventual goal is to turn Dancing Stickman into an employee-owned company. That's not the new model here; they're just better business structures than shareholder-owned corporations. Employee-owned companies have lower quit rates, higher retirement contributions, and better workplace safety. They were a more resilient form of small business through the pandemic. Employees are more amenable to making sacrifices and more willing to reinvest what they earn back into an employee-owned company, since they are the people benefiting from the company's success and profitability.

But in order for employees to own a company, one has to be able to hire and retain employees, so let me back it up to where Dancing Stickman currently stands.

At the time of writing there's one employee: me. The company is not profitable and has no realistic prospects for profitability at present, so I don't pay myself. For the projects that are currently through the production phase, I've paid every contributor I've worked with. Not enough by any means, but I've paid what I can by transferring money I earn from my day job into Dancing Stickman business accounts. That's how the company is currently funded; it is operating at a loss.

But what I've had each contributor do, including the two writers who are unpaid and in pre-production on The Labyrinth with me, is track their hours and deliverables, which I keep logged. This serves two purposes: getting data about how long it realistically takes to complete specific deliverables and having an account of time invested by each contributor. We'll come back to the delivery data momentarily.

As it stands, for every four hours a contributor has invested into a Dancing Stickman project, they've earned one Unpaid Share in the company's potential future profits. Like I said, I don't have a realistic path to profitability at the moment, so in real terms they're doing spec work. But I have that data, so when the outlook for profitability changes, every contribution has been logged and tracked from the beginning.

Their contributions matter whether a specific project ends up being wildly successful or not. That's why I'm starting a production company and making short-term projects, like a 14-episode D&D actual play, or an 8-episode anthology series. I'm not banking on any one project carrying the company, but rather trying to create an environment where the artists I'm working with can keep trying things with me to see what lands. If the specific project they joined me on isn't a banger, it doesn't matter. The iterative nature of their contribution does, because they're investing in the success of Dancing Stickman as a whole.

In fact, my expectation and hope is that the company grows at a reasonable, moderate pace, rather than viral or explosive growth. None of us are situated to be able to harness rapid expansion, and the time and space that reasonable growth affords would allow us to approach the management of the company thoughtfully, rather than reactively.

Fair Play, Fair Pay

So what happens if Dancing Stickman starts to make more money than it currently spends? Whether that's through Patreon, ad sales, grant funding, etc. - if the company can pay overhead without it coming out of my personal bank account and then has money left over, how will it be distributed?

First and foremost, I want to pay people for their work as they are doing it. In other words, the first thing revenue will go towards is labor.

The issue with paying labor, as far as I see it, is that every contributor has varying professional rates that they charge (or, can get) depending on the markets they work in, as well as their experience, skill set, and roles. But at the same time, we all have pretty similar personal expenses: bills, rent/mortgage, feeding ourselves. When you've worked in a field where work fluctuates as much as it does in artistic fields, sometimes it is a struggle to put food on your plate. It doesn't matter if you're a production assistant or a producer - very few of us who labor in our respective industries become truly wealthy.

So the intent with Dancing Stickman is this: there are Paid Shares and Unpaid Shares, but everyone will make the same amount of money per Paid Share.

Paid Shares will operate slightly differently: rather than the four hours of work an Unpaid Share covers, it will cover five hours at $50/hour. The expectation for labor compensation will be that a contributor will deliver a specific type or amount of work in one five-hour Paid Share (remember when I said I'm tracking how long deliverables take?), but they are only expected to be productive for four of those five hours. The remaining hour is compensation for a break.

Rest deserves compensation. While we do live in mindless capitalistic grind culture, it turns out that breaks and resting are necessary for productivity. If your brain is "work-work-work" at all times, you're actually less productive and less efficient than if you give it a chance to pause. Rest reduces stress, it allows one an opportunity to reflect and make unconscious connections, it boosts creativity, it rebuilds depleted mental faculties. Rest is necessary for productive labor.

To recap: when Shares are paid, a person working on a Dancing Stickman production for a normal eight-hour work day will earn $50/hours for ten hours (or $500/day), they will receive two profit Shares, and two of the paid hours are discretionary. If a contributor wants to work the full ten hours, they can. If they want to work eight with a few half hour breaks, or eight and a two-hour paid lunch, no problem. It's up to them. This model can cover sprints as well as normal operations, with Unpaid Shares to help create some flexibility when revenue slows.

This compensation model applies to anyone doing any kind of work for a Dancing Stickman production: me, writers, performers, designers, sound engineers, producers, IT, marketers, managers. Anyone. To be clear, $50/hour is a lot for a production assistant, it is less than my hourly rate as a freelance editor, and it is significantly less than executive compensation. But here's where we get into my personal business ideology: I don't believe that any operational role is inherently more valuable to a company and deserving of higher compensation than any other. I'll explore that more in a different post.

But suffice to say I'm trying to attract people to work with this company who embody the value of sharing - including shared sacrifice. Think of it this way: I'm not going to hire a PA at $500/day before I hire an EP for a series at the same rate. By the time we get to the point that a $500/day PA is feasible, the EP will have earned significantly more Shares in future profitability. And any EP who is willing to work at the lower day rate will be one who understands that building towards a collaborative vision means that they know they occupy a single role within a whole.

As a side note, I obviously need to pay myself first, or this work is unsustainable. When the company gets to a position where revenue is positive, I will cap my own weekly Paid Shares at six per week, or three work days, regardless of whether I work more hours than that in a given week. It is vitally important for me to compensate the people I work with for their labor, even at my own expense. Especially in the beginning, if I can't pay others fairly, it's incumbent on me to also make sacrifices for the company's success. Only when we make it to "successful beyond my present hopes" will I bump up my own pay to cover all five days of my own labor. But the point is this: it is a dearly-held and embodied value that all work deserves fair pay.

Imagining Radical Futures

The other point of working and paying contributors in five-hour Paid Shares is this: when revenue is variable or uncertain, Unpaid Shares create a compensation option for people to engage in the work freely as it suits their desires, needs, and situations.

If Dancing Stickman becomes successful beyond my wildest imaginings, we'd pay out profit Shares on a quarterly basis. If in a given quarter we don't have enough revenue to cover all the Paid Shares of work required to meet the necessary deliverables, contributors can opt into or out of Unpaid Shares as it suits them. Since a Share covers a half-day of work, maybe they're willing to do just two Unpaid Shares in a month while they pursue contract work or fit the Dancing Stickman work around their full-time job. The point of the Sharing Model is fairness and flexibility.

When the company can move to an employee-owned business, my hope is that we will have built a working environment where we are all looking out for each other and our audience. To me, employee governance is the only business model that makes any sense. A business is an organization that puts people to work towards a specific goal. As prevalent as it is in American capitalism, "profit at any cost" is the goal of scammers, predators, and assholes who don't care who they hurt so long as they get ahead.

But we don't have to choose that goal. Rather, we can choose "sustainable profit that allows us to create a high-quality product" or "enough profit to pay our employees fairly and then reinvest in the company's growth." Even a goal of "high-quality product first, and hopefully profit follows." That's the point of employee governance: that the people who make the thing decide what the goal is that they are working towards. My goal with the Sharing Business Model is to create a blueprint for a sustainable business that reflects that the best art is collaborative.