I’m just hours back from my very first speaking engagement at the Arts Business Institute in Bristol, TN. The Arts Business Institute, formerly the Crafts Business Institute, is a non-profit traveling classroom, providing workshops and seminars on the business of craft led by professionals in the industry. You can read more about ABI by clicking the title.
It was an unusual event—local arts groups had partnered with the Blue Ridge Travel Association to host the event. In addition to the regular crowd of artists and craftspeople attending, I found myself advising members of the tourism industry, including a couple who wanted to promote their newly-renovated ghost town and answering questions for the owner of a bed-and-breakfast. I quickly discovered that business principals, especially the nuts and bolts of self-promotion, are the same for most small businesses, and forged confidently ahead with my presentations.
A popular section of ABI conferences is that attendees are offered a free, one-on-one mentoring session with the speaker of their choice. They get to ask whatever questions they want to about their business, and we use our expertise to answer them.
I’d worried endlessly at the thought of these mentoring sessions. We were to meet individual artists, who brought samples of their work, for fifteen minutes, one on one. What if I gave the wrong advice and the person’s business crashed? What if I was too harsh and their egos crashed? What if another mentor would have given different advice, and MY ego crashed??
But it turned out I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the conference. Bruce Baker told me to relax, listen and then allow myself to “channel”. I did just that. I’d ask the person what was standing in their way right now, then address that. Relying on my experience and my gut feeling, I simply shared what I thought was working well and what could be done better.
I mentored a nine-year old girl who makes beaded jewelry, advising her that she faced stiff competition as there are a bajillion “bead stringers” in the biz. But there were not many nine-year old girls successfully selling their work. Her design sense was pretty good, and so was her use of color. “Improve the quality of your stringing material, use nicer findings and use your cute factor”, I explained. “It won’t last forever, so take advantage of it now. Put your face and a little blurb on your hangtag, so people know you are a cute nine-year old kid. Take off your phone number for safety. If your work is good enough, a lot of people will buy your work to encourage you. That’s your story right now. It will change, eventually, but it will work in your favor right now. Use it!”
I spoke with Marilyn Ulen, director of ABI, the day after the conference. I told her I'd been worried that my advice might not jive with what another member of the ABI team might offer. And sometimes, that was definitely the case—someone else saw an issue I didn’t have with the work, or vice versa. We talked about the nature of mentoring and the unique perspective each member of the faculty brings to the process.
In the end, we agreed, IT DOESN”T MATTER. Advice is advice. Simply one person’s take on the world, freely given to someone else who can take it or leave it.
I’ve heard plenty of advice on how to run my business over the last few years, all of it from worthy people, some no doubt who knew much better than I how things worked.
A lot of it was awesome! But sometimes I just wasn’t ready to hear it. Sometimes the advisor was clearly holding different values than mine. Sometimes life just didn’t allow me to follow the advice right then. And sometimes, the advice was great but still didn’t save me from making some real clunker decisions.
IT DOESN’T MATTER.
If there were one right way to do this stuff, there would be one book we could all read, one opinion we could all turn to, one person who would have all the answers.
But art and business and art don’t work that way. There are some basics, to be sure, mostly based on common sense and courtesy and law.
But ultimately, we are left depending on ourselves to select the information that feels best for our current situation, for our intrinsic way of doing things, and for what our ultimate professional, artistic and personal goals are. We all have to find our own way.
We do the best we know how. When we know better, we do better.
In the end, I feel like a midwife. I’m there to help out, but I know who’s really doing the hard work of bringing their infant business dream into the world. It’s the artists and business people who came to the event. They did it by showing up, by asking for help, by getting the information they need. And then they go home and do the work. And I go home to take care of my own little business.
I hope Sheri Baker’s little girl sells a bunch of necklaces, and that Sheri’s beautiful bird pins take off like a house on fire. I hope the Davises make a go of their newly opened “Virginia City”, the ghost town they bought. I hope Chuck and Dona Lewis found some ideas to promote their bed and breakfast business in my self-promotion seminar. I hope Rebecca and Dakota develop a thriving arts business worthy of their obvious enthusiasm and determination. I hope dreams come true for all the people we spoke to this week.
I feel honored to be a tiny, tiny part of their success, hoping I said a good thing at the right time. The rest is up to them.
And I’m heartily looking forward to my next ABI session. Especially the break-out dance evenings with Bruce Baker, the craft industry's answer to Fred Astaire; Alisha Vincent, a vision in red running shoes and a perfect conference buddy, and Marilyn Ulen, who held it all together for us and who can also dance a mean Electric Glide. Slide. Whatever. Thank you, Judy Raiford for the hugs, support and cheers. Thank you to all the folks in Virginia and Tennessee, who worked so hard to make our conference a success and made our experience memorable. And if you get to Bristol, check out the new dance bar attached to the Days Inn off Rt. 81, exit 3 I think. I never figured out if the name was Confetti or Crowley's or whatever--it just opened and it had three names on the building. But it's AWESOME. Any DJ who can mix house dance, country/pop, rock & roll and hip hop to keep such a diverse crowd happy is worth his weight in gold!
