Taking Time

I've had to face the facts. No one has been more surprised at the success of my book, Artist Survival Skills, than I. I was stunned to see the book go into its second (modest) printing - the result, mostly, of the interest of Opus customers. And for that, I thank you sincerely. But beside the sales success, I have been extremely pleased with artists' response to it.

About half way through writing it, I had a crisis of confidence. I thought to myself, "There is going to be an avalanche of criticism. I am going to be embarrassed by mistakes. Artists are going to hate me." And then I had an inspiration: I would establish a website where I could acknowledge my errors or omissions and put a notice about the website in all the critical places in the book. That decision gave me the courage to finish.

But I have not had a single letter of complaint - not one in the nine months since the book was released. In fact, I have received some glowing testimonials from readers for which I am grateful since, as you can deduce from the previous paragraph, confidence is not overly abundant in my psyche.

Another unexpected outcome resulting from the publication of my book has been conducting workshops and making speeches. Talk about irony! All my young life, I was embarrassed by a lisp and (minor) stutter until I matured enough to shed the shame I carried inside. The positive outcome of my anxiety about speaking was the emphasis I put on becoming a writer.

The workshops and speeches put me face to face with a lot of artists and many of them had read my book and came armed with questions. I have probably done over thirty presentations. Each one increases my confidence and expands my understanding of what artists want to know the most—and I have had some surprises because, I realize, I am a born entrepreneur and I am still learning about what life is like when you are not entrepreneurial.

What has struck me the most in the sessions with artists has been a question that is, in so many words: "How do I get started?" I didn't really know what was being asked or how to answer the question at first but as is so often the case, the answer became clear when I decided to use an example to illustrate a point I was making. I had recently undertaken to coach my artist/friend, Brenda, and when I needed an example to illustrate a point I was making, I shared her story and when I did so, I saw heads dive to paper, pens scribbling, and the room 'light up' with energy as I was asked a barrage of follow-up questions.

I said one day, in the course of working with Brenda: "Say, for example, you wanted to make $50,000 a year. Let's round that off to $48,000 a year because that becomes $4000 a month or $1000 a week or $200 a day (if you are working five-days-a-week)."

Brenda can only work 5 hours a day, five days a week at her practice because she has a part time job and spousal and social responsibilities taking up the rest of her time. She currently works 20 hours a week, earning $15,360 per year, so I showed her that if she wants to make forty-eight grand a year, she has to earn ($48,000 - $15,300) $32,700 a year from her artistic practice.

From there we set to seeing how we could break the $32,000 down. How much could she expect to earn from the sales of the paintings she was doing each year and how? How much could she earn by introducing new products at different price points and where and how could she sell them? How much might she be able to earn from teaching or studio rental? What other products or services might she be able to create and sell?

Brenda's task was clear. To earn $32,700 a year in the time she had available for her creative practice (5 hours per day/5 days a week or 1200 hours per year), Brenda had to earn $27.25 an hour - more than she was making from her job, but by her own admission, fair to expect since she felt she was a far, far better artist than she was a paralegal.

Now if you take this approach to defining the financial objective of your creative practice, you must keep track of something very important - how long it takes you to create your work. The startling thing that I have learned from my workshops is that few artists record the time it takes to make their creations, yet knowing how long it takes to make your work can be an invaluable tool in making your artistic business successful.

If you need to earn $27.25 an hour to reach your financial objectives and you take twenty-five hours to create a painting that you can only sell for $400, you are losing money - you are running a failing business - especially if you are selling that painting yourself (retail), because if you sell a $400 painting through a gallery you will only get about $200 from the sale.

If you think about your practice this way and you record the time it takes to create each item you sell, you will have all the figures that you need in order to make your business prosper - you will know how much you want to earn per year, how many hours you have to earn it, how much inventory it will take to achieve it and how much time it will take to create the inventory. You can tinker with these figures until you get a formula that balances. This is a simplistic overview, but I hope you get the idea of why your "manufacturing time" is an important thing to know.

So, within my workshops, this has become a popular answer to the question, "How do I get started professionalizing my artistic practice?"