Sometimes you can have too much money.
That got your attention, didn't it?
Yes, it's possible to have too much money. And I don't mean the too-much-money like the Rockefellers or Gettys of the world.
I mean when you have the money to quickly and easily make a decision about your craft or art business. Because QUICK and EASY doesn't necessary mean GOOD. And having too much money to buy the PERFECT and BEAUTIFUL solution may mean you don't take the time to think things through to see if it is the RIGHT solution for you.
A friend came very close to throwing a lot of money on the perfect, beautiful packaging and support materials for a brand new product. She wanted to get her business to the next step, she wanted it to look really snazzy and she was in a hurry to get it done. And she had enough money to get it that way. What a luxury, to just throw money at that next step and get it done!
Fortunately, within a few days, she got a few new pieces of information that changed everything. She found out she was targeting the wrong venue. She found out the path she was starting on was taking her further away from her ultimate vision for her business.
She'll still be able to have the beautiful packaging she envisions, and it's still going to look snazzy. But she has a much clearer idea of how to go about it, and how it will all fit into her master plan.
I've known many small businesses and non-profits who have admirable goals and mission statements. They also had a burning desire to hit the ground running. They want to look like they were true professionals and knew what they were doing. They wanted to get very big very fast.
Huge amounts of money were spent on ventures that didn't actually benefit their constituents. And their business mode was soon constantly in crisis management.
I know a savvy young woman who ditched her well-paying corporate job to open a retail store in downtown Keene. She crunched all the numbers, she researched the perfect location, she enlisted experienced mentors. She spent weeks making the store look absolutely beautiful, she filled it with the perfect inventory and she bought the latest inventory software to manage sales.
Unfortunately, business was slow (she'd only allowed one year for it to get off the ground), and she began to resent the few customers she had. One day she complained to me she hadn't gotten anything done because customers had interrupted her all day (though they hadn't bought much.)
One year later, she realized she hated running a retail business. She thought an internet business would have been much better suited to her needs and still satisfied her dream of running her own business. But she had no money left to launch one. She closed shop and left town.
If she had simply spent some time actually working in a store BEFORE, to see if she really liked being tied to a 9 to 5, six days a week retail business, she might have made better decisions about her dream business.
We ALL do this. I've done it. You have, too. I still have boxes and boxes of labels, brochures, hang tags I spent hard-earned money on, for products I no longer even want to make. I have tons of support materials telling stories that no longer mean anything to me. I've thrown money into organizations that were supposed to help me grow my business, that actually did very little to build my bottom line. I've spent time and money developing new products that in hindsight had very little to do with my ultimate vision for my art.
If I'm honest with myself, I can see it was for the same reasons--I wanted to LOOK like I knew what I was doing. I wanted to be taken seriously by my peers and audience. I wanted to look professional and competent.
I wanted to skip the learning curve.
Well, what I've learned is, SOMETIMES you can skip the learning curve--but not all the time. SOMETIMES you can learn from someone else's mistakes. But you're also going to have to make your very own, very special, very humiliating mistakes.
Almost every new craftperson I know spends hours coming up with a business name. It has to have lots of personal meaning, it has to say just the right thing about us. I had the "perfect" business name for many years. It's still embedded in my blog and website. I no longer even use it. But when its domain named lapsed recently, some readers couldn't find my blog. I ended up renewing it. I am forced to maintain a name that means very little to my core business.
We have to have special logos developed. I've sat in on presentations by grapic arts companies as they pitch "the most important business decision you'll ever make" and offer their logo development and packaging design services for "only" $2,000.
And I've watched new craftspeople eagerly line up for this because they are sure the most important place to put their time and money is into developing a "look", a "name", an "image." Many of them don't even have a viable product yet, let alone a cohesive marketing strategy.
The first irony is, I can barely remember logos or business names (unless it's a store I go into regularly.) The only logo I can pull up right now is that Mieneke Muffler bear. I can remember that lovely preview film of the boy sitting on a quarter moon fishing in a pond below, but for the life of me I can't remember the company's name (Dreamscape??) nor whether they are a production company or a distribution company. And I cannot name a single film they've made.
I can barely remember the studio names of fellow craftspeople--it's just "Carrie" or "Bonnie" or "Mark". (Less often it's something like "that jerk who had the booth near us at BMAC"....)
The second irony is, we ARE our brand.
Branding is important. But I believe as artists, it's the vision we have and the work we make that people will remember--not our logos and packaging and expensive catalogs. Sometimes the simplest things--the unique design of our best product, the colors we instinctively use over and over, the "look" of our support materials--says more about us than any fancy design treatment by a professional marketing team.
And here's the kicker: It was when I felt the most insecure and insignificant about my work and my business, that I felt I had to spend the most to make it look "real."
I will still make fast and foolish decisions when money is burning a hole in my pocket. That's human nature. And it's also very human for us to want to be seen as competent and professional.
But don't let big bucks dazzle you with the possibilities to look like a "real player". You ARE real already, okay?
And don't let LACK of big bucks keep you from taking smaller steps to move your art further out into the world.
The money will come and go. But you, and the beautiful work you make, will hopefully be around a very, very long time.
