Still More Ingredients

In my last post I described some of the ingredients that are essential to developing fully as an artist. But this blog is called Artrepreneur, isn't it? That means we have a whole other facet of ourselves to work on and develop....the entrepreneurial side. What are some of the essential ingredients for the artist entrepreneur?


1. Separation. Yes, your work is in part about you, and your story. But, the business is about your products. Can you separate yourself from you work to be able to evaluate the viability of the work in the marketplace? We need to be able to make decisions about our work without the emotional attachment.


2. Decisive. Details, details, details. There is no escaping all the details that need to be attended to if you are in business. If you develop a product you think will sell, now the work has just begun. You need to figure out a price? How to package it? What colors or variations do you want to offer? How can you streamline your production? Decisions have to be made about endless details of how you will run your business. And decisions build upon decisions. If you freeze up at the idea of all the decisions and details that you need to attend to, your business will screech to a halt.

3. Problem solver. Inevitably you will be presented with challenges. You don't have a staff with varied expertise to call upon. You have you. You need to be able to be a problem solver. Ready to dig in and learn. Sometimes solving the problem will meaning finding help. But that will be your call.

4. Salesmanship. Can you sell your work and yourself? Can you talk about your work without going into the "Gosh, shucks" mode, looking down and kicking the dirt with your foot. "Oh, it's nothing. I really am not that good." Face it, if you cannot talk with enthusiasm about your work, you cannot sell your work. Being humble is good, but being passionate about your work, and being able to share that passion is helpful if you want to sell your work. Bruce Baker has some excellent classes and CD's about sales if this is a struggle for you.

5. Long-range thinking. If you can't visualize where you want to go, you will not begin to be able to move your business beyond where it is today. My husband has a phrase he is fond of, "If you keep doing what you're doing, you are going to keep getting what you're getting." If you cannot see where you want to go, you cannot start planning how you will get there. What are your goals, and how can you start moving towards those goals?

6. Capital. You will not be able to grow your business, or make it run efficiently, without capital. Capital is your financial investment in the business. Without making the investment into your business you will not be able to grow effectively and efficiently. Capital can help you buy the equipment you need to produce your work, or the booth display to help sell your work. Put your money where your heart is.


7. Stay current. You need to stay current about what is going on in your "industry". What are the trends? How strong is the market for work like yours? What price ranges are selling well? Are there things going on in the world that will impact your business? For instance, the internet, off-shore manufacturing of "craft" items, the flucuations in the price of gas, or the price of silver and gold, environmental issues, etc......all these things may have an impact on your business. Magazines, newspapers, radio, blogs, podcasts, forums, ....can all be used to one extent or another to stay current with your field and the wider world.


8. Organization. There are many deadlines with the business of being an artrepreneur. Deadlines to apply to shows. Deadlines to file sales tax, or income tax. Production schedules to stay on top of. Receipts, invoices, order forms, bank statements.....you can't run a business without some paperwork. For some, organization comes easily. For others it is a struggle. But there is no leeway when it comes to filing taxes, or deadlines for entry to shows or competitions. Figure out a system that works for you, and use it. There are lots of solutions, but the best one is one you will use. It may even be hiring someone to do it for you.

9. Passion and Persistence. Any successful entrepreneur is passionate about their business, and persistent. They are willing to accept the inevitable challenges, and do their best to work through challenges. They are willing to accept that it takes time to build a business. If you are not passionate about what you are doing, the inevitable demands on your time, energy and financial resources will not be worth it.

10. Support team. It is not a sign of failure to need help from time to time. We may need an informal board of advisors. People who can give us the advice we need at times, or help us think through an issue. Or, we may need to hire help. There are limits to how much time and energy we have. If we hire someone to do the bookkeeping, it may give us more time in the studio. Or if we hire a rep to sell our work, our sales may grow more than enough to compensate for the expense. You can try to do it all yourself, but chances are, you will need some advice or help from time to time.


Overwhelming, isn't it? But, if you love what you are doing, and can't imagine doing anything else, you find a way to make it work. I work too many hours. I am months behind on my paperwork, and I can find very little clear space in my studio. But when something has to get done, it gets done. Just like becoming a better artist, becoming a better business person means continually working to improve. We will never be perfect, but we can keep working at getting better.

Ingredients

I wrote last time about how I was inspired watching the evolution of one artist's work. But success as an artist and business person is multi-faceted. There are many ingredients that are needed to succeed at the top levels. Here is an attempt at coming up with some essentials.

1. Mastery of your media. This is the beginning. It is the time in the studio practicing your media. Learning the ins and outs of how it behaves. The nuances, the limitations, the possibilities. Amy Crawley recently told me about a book her husband was reading. It was about music. In it, the author proposed that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. Ten thousand hours of hands on work. Practice. Struggle, and triumph. This is not to say you cannot begin to sell your work until you reach that magic number, but it is essential for really being in control of the process. More time is spent in flow than in battle with mastery. You will not acheive mastery by limiting your studio time to one afternoon or evening a week.

2. Good design. It is more than being a technical master of the media however. It is also about design. Being able to have a sense of the elements of design, and how to best utilize them in your work. Line. Form. Movement. Pattern. For a writer it might be about the flow and structure of good writing. A musician has melody, lyrics, harmony, etc. How do you bring these elements together to create a cohesive piece?

3. Color mastery. A visual artist needs to understand the ins and outs of color. Whether through study, an intuitive sense, experience, or all of the above, color is an essential ingredient in most visual art. Color gone wrong can do more to ruin an otherwise successful piece.

4. Voice. The magical, elusive voice. What are you saying? What are you trying to express with your art? It doesn't have to be esoteric or deep. It can be simple, straightforward, or whimsical. But it has to come from what makes you tick. What tickles your creative muse?

5. Drive or Passion. The phrase has become trite, but "It's hard work." Success in any field, even one seemingly as enjoyable as the arts, is hard work. Without the passion or drive, many drop by the wayside. You have to want to do it. I used to drag myself out of bed to go to work. Now I am literally propelled out of bed with all the ideas going through my head in the morning that I can't wait to act upon. You do not want to know how many hours a day, or how many days a week work. But I love what I do. I feel fortunate to be able to pursue my passion. And when I share my passion for my work with others, it can be contagious.

6. Willingness to go public. You can not succeed by waiting to be discovered. You need to bring your work out into the light of day if anyone is going to discover it. If you want to hope you become famous after you die when someone discovers the treasure trove of work you left behind, go for it. But there never will be a way to know if that strategy succeeded, will there? It may feel safer, because you do not need to face rejection, or criticism. But it is also absent the thrill of having someone react with enthusiasm to your work. Besides, that approach is for the hope that you will end up in a museum someday, not about creating a successful business as an artist. Leaving a legacy is a nice idea. But building that legacy is more likely when you work on building a public body of work in your lifetime. Waiting for after you die is like the eternal hope of winning the lottery. A longshot at best.

7. Problem solving skills. So you have an idea. An idea that won't go away. It keeps you up at night, or you wake up thinking about it. How do you go from the idea to the reality? By being a problem solver. You are guaranteed to run into obstacles and problems you could not foresee when the idea was just that, an idea. The concrete reality is full of roadblocks to fruition. But, the successful artists is engaged in this process of problem solving. I have had the conversation over and over again with other artists. Sharing how an obstacle was overcome. How they started down one path that didn't seem to work, so they went in another direction. Or maybe it took many tries. But eventually they figured it out. And they will be beaming when they share this moment of triumph. It is partly the mastery, and partly persistence. But also that ability to dissect the problem. Figuring out where things might be going wrong, and figuring a new path around the obstacle.

8. Understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. Let's face it. We all have things that come easily to us, and other things we have to work really hard at to succeed. Having the awareness of our strengths and weaknesses means we can play to our strengths, and try to get help with, or work around our weaknesses. The weaknesses will probably not disappear, but with awareness and work, they can be managed. And our assets can grow stronger still.

9. Continual growth. As much as we grow in mastery and as much as our work grows in public acceptance, we can and must continue to grow our work. Stagnation is death in a creative field.

10. Persistence. It is hard. It is frustrating. It can be demoralizing at times. But, you need to persist through the struggles to have success. Any successful artist will tell you about the bad shows they had. Or the failed products. Or the rejections....one after another. If you cannot persist through these adversities, and accept them as just part of the package, you will not make it. How you react to them....changing, growing, asking for help,..or....outrage, rebellion or seeing it as evidence that you don't have what it takes.....all these reactions will take you down a different path. We choose.

Where do you struggle, and what comes easily for you in your journey as an artist? Just recognize, it is a journey. A journey without a final resting spot so much, as many points of inspiration and growth. And each journey begins by taking a step. Moving forward. Bit by bit. It isn't about being the first to reach a goal. It is about reaching our personal goals when we are ready. And doing the ground work to make it possible.

Perpetual Motion

Yesterday, Amy Crawley and I went up to the New Hampshire Craftsman's Guild Show in Sunapee, NH. There were many of the same artists we see each year, but there was plenty of new work from some of those artists. The one that stuck in my head as we drove away, and was still in my head this morning was the new work by Kathleen Dustin. It is not on her website yet, so unless you can get up to the show, you will have to wait till sometime later this month to see this work. But be prepared to be wowed.


Kathleen Dustin has been one of the leading artist in the medium of polymer clay. And she just amazes me with how she continues to explore and innovate. She is still making purses and jewelry, but none looked the same as what she was making four years ago when I first saw her work in person. There are still purses with woman's faces, but they have a fresh interpretation. And there is so much more.


I am so inspired by this continual spiral of creativity. Her work is not static. There was a definite excitement and energy in her booth. She was excited to share the work and talk about it. Another bonus, as she observed...people will come to realize that they can not wait forever to get the piece they fall in love with. It will not be there forever. As artists and business people, we all need that extra push sometimes, to move someone from loving a piece to buying a piece. Kathleen is not just a very talented artist, she is a savvy business woman.


It made me think about artists who have seemingly built a box for themselves. It is possible to make this kind of innovation difficult or impossible if you start to define your work and your vision too tightly. I have heard people say that if an artist is wandering at all from their vision it reflects an amateurish approach to their art. That desire to play around is the sign of a hobbyist. If you subscribe to this, where is there room to stretch your creative muscle? Where is there room to react to whatever gets your brain churning in one direction or another? Consistency is important to establishing a recognizable look or style. But feeling like you have to stay married to that look or style forever forward, is not going to feed your muse, or fill your bank account. Most people change and grow in their lifetimes. Artists must keep this vitality in their work to keep themselves, and their audience engaged. Otherwise the scenario can play out like this....


"Oooohhh! I love your work. I haven't seen anything like it!" This may or may not be followed by a purchase.


The next year they may bring along a friend and point out your work to them. Talking about how much they like it, noticing details. But it may be more like visiting a museum than a store. Going back to see the exhibit.


After three or four years of this, all but the most die hard fans will likely pass your booth by with just a glance.

Unless, there is new work for them to see.


Our audience wants to connect with our work, but they also want that excitement of what is new. What have you done lately. Creativity is about energy. Designs from five years ago do not inspire or excite. And they do not get purchased.


Now before you panic, this does not mean reinvent yourself every year. Change can be incremental. Pinging from one media to another, or complete shifts in designs too frequently may raise questions about whether or not you have figured out what you want to do or say yet. But don't avoid change either. Craft has an element of fashion to it. Most of us do not change our entire wardrobe every year. But we do like to have a few new pieces. A few things that will invigorate our wardrobe. The few pieces a craft buyer will purchase in a year are likely ones that create that rush of excitement. The piece that stirs up the discussion in their head about how they can rationalize this purchase. Purchases of craft are made as much with emotion as with money.

Another permission slip. You have room to play, to explore, to check out those ideas that have entered your consciousness. Staying with a "look" is not always about maturing as an artist. Sometimes it is the death of the artist. Excite yourself, and see if it doesn't excite your customers as well.

Why Should You Build a Mailing List?

My first venture into entrepreneurship was making custom window treatments. I started this business after my oldest daughter was born. I had never been self-employed before this. I had worked for thirteen years for various corporations, and a small tech start-up. I had done lots of sewing for myself, from about the age of ten, and had done a few projects for friends. I wanted to work, but have the flexibility to work according to my schedule. This seemed to fill the bill.


I put on my marketing hat, and thought about how do I get started? How do I find customers? Looking back at my own experiences, I decided that one of the best times to contact someone, was after they bought a house, when they are thinking about how to transform that house into their home. Each week, our local newspaper posted property transactions. They would list the addresses of houses sold by town, who bought the property, and the sales price. With this information, I could build a list of potential customers.


I put together a letter, a brochure, and a coupon. I built a mailing list using the information from the newspaper, by town, and sales price. Two days after I did my first mailing, I got a call, and she ended up being my first customer. Over time, I was able to get referrals, and do presentations to a newcomer's club. But what consistently brought me business was those mailings.


Now, as a craftsperson, I can describe my typical customer....but she is also the needle in a haystack. There is nothing comparable to that listing in the newspaper of property transactions to identify her. The approach is very different.


This is why I harp on the value of a mailing list. It is as simple as setting out a notebook and pen in your booth for people to add their name. Some artists will only do mailings to people who have bought their work. But what about the other people who loved your work, but did not buy? Don't you want them on your mailing list so that when the opportunity is ripe, they will know where you are? Do you have business cards or postcards out where they can be easily seen and picked up? Some people have a false sense of economy about business cards or postcards. Don't hoard them. Will they be worshiped and framed? Nope. Even if only one in ten or twenty or fifty of those cards is saved, that is okay. What about the ones that get picked up and passed on to the friend who owns a retail outlet, or the friend who would love your work.....Don't you want to make it easy for other people to spread the word about your work? I do. I need all the help I can get!

Of course, it goes without saying, once you build that mailing list, you do need to use it! No excuses here. This is basic care and feeding of your business. Even if your business is strictly online...collect e-mail address, and have a newsletter. You only sell wholesale. That's fine. Keep track of any and all businesses that have sent you inquiries about your work. If you identify a store or gallery that would be a good fit for your work, add them to your list. When you have new work, or you are going to do a wholesale show, do a mailing. At a show, if you give someone a catalog....get a card in exchange.

Off my soapbox...for now anyway. I am sure I will give my mailing list speech again. This is just so essential, and so basic to your success. The only way to avoid it is to pay someone else to update and maintain your list, and do your mailings. But you still need to put that notebook out.