Don’t rely on sticking your finger in the wind this year to figure what you want to have achieved come December 31st, 2010.
Back in the day, one of the favored ways for us to plan was to lick their index finger, and stick it in the wind… it was the way most of us did it , in fact we did it because we didn’t know any better.
Sure, some of us kept data bases of every conceivable shred of information from sales, inventory to who bought what. Well…that did nothing more than let us continue to live out the fantasy of “doing something”.
As I’ve harped all of 2009 things are different now and we no longer have to move ahead with a bag over our heads, hoping we don’t run into a wall or fall down the stairs. We don’t have to use the SWAG method (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) of planning our business year.
Tear off the blindfold
So pull your hand out of the sky and dry your finger off and look at the coming year in the same way you would look at your buyers. We’ve talked a lot about ideal buyers and the importance of having profiles of those fine folks who can’t live without our stuff.
But you know as well as I do that ideal buyers can’t buy your stuff if your stuff isn’t around for them to buy…as in if you don’t show up at the place they are looking for you. Here’s a suggestion.…profile your ideal show or sales venue in the same way you do for buyers. Why? Again for the same reason you would profile your ideal buyer…so you can easily recognize her when she shows up.
And, yes I know for art fair artists you can’t just say “I’m going to do the Greatest Artist in The World Show in New South Wherever”, because a bunch of folks you have no control over will decide for you. Here’s the deal tho… knowing what your ideal art fair looks like will help you avoid the one step removed from a flea market type shows. It won’t guarantee it but it will help.
The same is true for any other sales venue as in galleries or on-line. Having a profile will help you sort out the best galleries. Also, if you have good profiles you can take the SWAG out of your production and so you’ll have the best inventory available for the buyers at any given venue. Basically, schlepp factor will be reduced by not having to sweat over dragging stuff that will likely collect dust.
Don’t chew off more than you can do or why just goals don’t work.…
Remember the baby step approach? Instead of setting lofty goals like “I’m going to sell $50,000 at each venue”, you might instead bite off some more digestible morsels by brainstorming a list of what you’d like to have accomplished December 31, 1010. Then don’t just start at the top of list of 200 things, instead start whittling the list down until you get to no more than six.
Now take those six and describe how accomplishing them by December 31,2010 would look, where would you be both as a business person and an artist. Once, you are happy with your descriptions then start describing the steps it would take to get where each objective will take you.
The next part is hard at least it is for me, see I have a tendency to say cool let’s get going!! I learned the hard way, that this leads to extreme bouts of dizziness brought about by tackling everything at once…don’t do that. Instead, see if you can spread them out over the year. That’s why three to six months works so well.
So…sit down and sketch out your year and schedule each two or four month block according to the objectives you’ve come up with. The schedule doesn’t have to be linear as in January to February you’ll only do “X”, there can be and likely will be an overlap just try to make the overlaps gradual.
Finally, within each objective identify the steps or tasks needed to check that objective off and what it needs to look like when it is checked off.
That’s it…there are tools available to help you especially visual tools like Mindmaps which I’ll cover in another post.
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