How Entrepreneurship Can Save The Starving Artist

A life in the arts has never been a quick path to profit. Sometimes quite the opposite. Which is why one group of Minnesota art supporters has launched an initiative to teach creative types how to do what they love and maximize their earning power doing it.

Springboard for the Arts, a non-profit based in Minneapolis, has spent the past 20 years pushing economic development for artists in the midwest, providing them access to healthcare and other resources. The organization’s latest endeavor, Work Of Art, is a free career learning course and video series aimed at helping artists nationwide become more entrepreneurial by teaching them to become time-efficient, savvier at self-promotion and better at turning their passions into a moneymaking business. “Artists are entrepreneurs and small business owners,” says executive director Laura Zabel, “and we want to help artists build that part of their capacity.”

Karsten Strauss: Why are artists so bad at being entrepreneurial?

Laura Zabel: I don’t think artists are bad at being entrepreneurial. I think there are a lot of skills that artists have that lend themselves naturally to being entrepreneurial: artists already have a DIY ethic about their work, they’re used to wearing a lot of hats and they understand a lot intuitively about engaging clients and audiences, about collaboration and iteration.

But I also think the landscape for artists has changed a lot in the last decade. A lot of communities have seen decreased funding for arts and culture and the kind of structures that used to support artists—patronage structure or theatre companies where they used to have a resident company and now hire everybody freelance, or the same thing for visual artists with galleries. So artists, more and more, are needing to be their own boss and manage all the details and run their careers like a business. A lot of training for artists hasn’t caught up to that yet.

Strauss: What kinds of things are you teaching them with Work Of Art?

Zabel: There are 12 units in the workbook and that covers everything from time management to legal issues to record-keeping, supporting your work, social media, business planning—all of the nuts and bolts pieces. Each of those units has a corresponding video that shows artists speaking in their own words about what those topics look like in the context of their careers and their work.

Then there’s a user guide that goes along with it so that an organization in a community could pick up the toolkit and start offering it to local artists, or a self-organizing group of artists could use it in a book club model in peer-to-peer learning. Or academic programs at colleges and universities.

Strauss: Who are these people that will go for this learning program?

Zabel: Artists who are serious about making their artistic practice a real part of their career and life. Sometimes that means your goal is to make your whole living from it, but it’s also valid that it’s a side business—I would say the typical artist who takes our classes here or who picks up this workbook is an artist who has had some success or who is doing the work already, knows what they want to make but is feeling a little lost or is struggling with making money from their work, or where to find an audience or understanding even basic stuff like record keeping.

Strauss: What technological tools are most beneficial to artists?

Zabel: There’s a whole unit on social media and that, I think more than anything else, has really changed. How artists relate to their audience, how they can communicate with a core audience and who their audience can be. We do a lot of training on how to use those social media tools—both the stuff that people associate with social media, and also some of the other platforms like Etsy or Pinterest that, for artists, can be actual mechanisms for making money as well.

Strauss: Who compiled this course? Where does all this wisdom come from?

Zabel: We developed these classes over Springboard’s 20-year history of working with artists. We’ve worked with over 100,000 artists in that time, so it comes from a lot of accumulated knowledge and research-sharing. And a lot of partnerships we’ve had with more traditional economic development agencies and small business support organizations.

Strauss: Artists, actors, musicians, and writers—which are the most in need of entrepreneurial skills?

Zabel: Every discipline has its own strengths and challenges. Sometimes performing artists have more access to collaborative skills or the audience or the marketing piece comes more naturally to them because they’ve been selling tickets to their work their whole life. Sometimes, for visual artists, the time management skill – carving out studio time – is much more part of the culture of visual arts than it is for performing artists.

Artists who are most challenged are ones who haven’t had access to a lot of those kinds of resources; they didn’t get it in college or they didn’t go to college or they don’t have access to small business support services and they don’t know where to find those resources.

Strauss: Give me a success story.

Zabel: One of the examples we use in the toolkit is a ceramic artist who was quite successful in terms of her recognition. People liked and supported her work – people bought her work – but she couldn’t figure out why she was losing money instead of making money. Going through the pricing workshop really helped her figure out where the hole in her pricing structure was that was letting that happen.

The pricing unit of the Work of Art helps artists calculate their prices based on materials cost, overhead – especially labor, which is a big challenge for artists – and profit margin. Looking at that cost and the market research, the ceramic artist realized that the labor costs for her larger pieces was nearly the same as the labor cost for her mugs, but she can build a much bigger profit margin on a larger piece, whereas a mug has a pretty defined market value – usually less than $50 – even though it is complicated to produce.

Strauss: How do communities benefit from artists?

Zabel: Arts businesses and organization generate a tremendous economic impact for cities and towns in terms of their direct and ripple effect spending. The other thing is that culture and art are what make our places places. The identifying features and brand of a place are usually rooted in the culture of that place, which is the food and the art. If you look at a place like Nashville or Memphis or Detroit or New York or here in Minneapolis, those are cities that are built on the idea of a culture and vibrant cultural activity.

I actually feel very optimistic right now. I feel like we’re in a moment where cities and communities really recognize that value and want to find ways to support it. But sometimes those bridges and connections aren’t there yet.