This past year, I had a fantastic experience that helped me shape how I interact with all of my clients now, in a great way.

A client flew me out to their company all-hands, which is not anything new. Here’s the transformative (for me) part…alongside the drawing, they asked me to run a session for the whole room on how to work with a graphic recorder. Whoa.

Thirty minutes on the practical side of the work: when to pass along the agenda and materials ahead of time, and what actually happens to the finished boards once everyone goes home. Plus how the drawing will look in between.

That session might be the most valuable thing I’ve ever done for that client, and my markers barely came out.

Live drawing work is a little unusual. People don’t always know what to do with it, and that isn’t necessarily their fault. However, I am making it my issue to fix.

It’s not just me. A lot of work is unusual. If what you do is specialized, most people have no map for how to work with you. They want the outcome, for sure. But they can’t see the road to it.

Handing them that road is a big part of the job. It’s the plain version of what happens and what they walk away with, and it matters more than any amount of fuss over the visiting artist.

When that part is clear, so many other things click into place. The logistics stop being a hassle. The timelines make sense. People relax, because they know where this is going. And most importantly, how to get there.

The four years nobody sees

I’ve worked with one client for about four years now. They can call me with sometimes only a day’s notice and it still runs perfectly.

From the outside, that might look like luck, or like I’m good at scrambling. It’s neither. Even though I am capable of scrambling, I prefer to avoid it.

It runs because they know the process cold. They know how much time I need before an event. They know the drawing in the session is a small slice of the hours. They know exactly what they’ll have when it’s over.

That took years, mostly one event at a time. Megan is good at reminding me about this. The ease we have with them now is something we earned slowly, back when none of it was smooth.

When people think it’s easy

When the path isn’t clear, people fill the gap with the easiest version of the story. They decide the work is only the hour I’m standing at the board with a marker in my hand.

I hear some version of it more than you’d think. Because the drawing comes easily to me, people assume the work must be quick. Just sketch this for us; it’ll take you no time.

The hours aren’t only the drawing. They’re the prep, and the time it takes to make something worth keeping. The hours spent on my run imagining what to create. Drawing

multiple quotes a week on post-its so ‘it’ is more second nature in the future.

This, the laying it out, is what I call “the work before the work”.

When the process and the outcome are clear, everything else falls into place.

I used to think the smooth jobs were luck. Or it was because the people were “easy to work with.” Both, to some degree, are the case. But now I know they get built through communication and time.

Which is what that room at the all-hands was really about. The people in it walked away with more than boards on the wall. They had a clear way to work with someone whose job is hard to picture from the outside, and that map is the part worth drawing first.

Grateful you are here,

Wade

PS - I'm building a course on how I turn live conversations into drawings at events like this one. If that's a skill you want, get on the list here and I'll let you know when it's ready.