SUCCESS: How it informs everything we do!

In today's edition of the Art Business Morning Show, Patrick delves into the seven layers of success needed to grow an art business, emphasizing how it should become almost a religion. The episode covers the importance of setting an aspirational goal of $100K a year in art sales and outlines the crucial metrics and strategies to achieve it. Patrick discusses reverse engineering customer success, the significance of focusing on crucial metrics, the perils of shiny object syndrome, and the need for effective software development. Additionally, he highlights the value of community and surrounding oneself with successful peers to drive motivation and accountability. This comprehensive guide is designed to help artists and photographers grow their businesses and achieve substantial revenue growth.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Coming up on today's edition of the art business morning show. We're talking about the seven layers of success, how it needs to be almost a religion, how it informs how we think about everything that we do. And that's it. There's a lot to unpack here though. So let's get into it. And it should be noted, um, that today's episode sort of builds upon the introduction to the show. 

So if you haven't seen the introduction to the show, you might want to see that. Uh, there'll be links wherever you're watching this to go back and be able to get it, you can Google it, go on YouTube, whatever, but Uh, but in that episode, we sort of brushed upon, I would say, uh, this concept of success, right? 

So today's episode is going to be a deep dive on the topic. So again, you might want to go back and listen to the first one. Now, let me get going on my slides. Layer number one, uh, the true North of everything that we do. Right. And you've seen the tagline for the show. It's empowering our customers to a hundred K year of business. 

That's it, right? Our customers are Luke Skywalker and we're Yoda. That's the whole galaxy for us, pun intended. Now, a hundred K a year of business is no easy feat. Okay. And for many of our customers, that's a higher number than they're even after, but we wanted the number to be aspirational, right? Like no one's, no one's going to say like, yeah, I want a 10, 000 a year in art sales. 

And even if you are saying that you have to aim for a hundred grand to get to the 10 grand. So it's like a good aspirational number. And I think it's, it's the same path. If you want to sell 50, 000 a year or 000 a year, as it is to getting to 100k a year. So it's getting on the path. The job is just to get on the path where you get off is up to you, but get on the path. 

Right? So let's just for context too, let's delve into some stats. I did some Googling and fired up the Google on the internet machine. Small businesses, okay, with no employees have an average in the United States annual revenue of 46, 978, right? So we're talking more than double that number. So obviously, yes, I get it, it's aspirational. 

86. 3 percent of small business owners make less than 100, 000 a year in income. And the other stat that jumped out, small business owners who are self employed, i. e. most artists and photographers, by, uh, their own incorporated businesses made a median income. Of 50, 347. And the stats were from 2016 because these things are always trailing. 

So, you know, the a hundred K a year number becomes even more aspirational when you sort of frame it in the context of the stats. Uh, but I know that your next question, right? So you have a ton of customers that are there already. No, not a ton. Um, of course we have a good clip of customers that are your guests, but we have some that are on a journey to a 500 K year business, some that are getting close to a million, but most are just getting started on the journey. 

They're getting on the path. We have them on the path. Towards that hundred K number towards that goal, aspirational or otherwise. And they're, they're taking daily steps, successful steps, uh, forward every day, day by day, consistently towards that spot, right? Towards that spot, towards the aspiration as big as they want to grow the business. 

So. That's the true North metric. We thought it was a good number to base the show on. Um, some people say, well, I don't, I don't want to have a business that size. That's okay. That's okay. You can get off wherever you want to get off, but that's aspirationally where we are. Okay. Layer two, the only metric that matters for us, uh, O M T M the only metric that matters, right. 

And let's start with some history and ultimately, you know, with an is an intro at first glance, that might sound a little bit selfish. Uh, but as it turns out, both us, uh, art store, for instance, of business and our customers and potential customers, and you guys listening to the show, um, have a massive amount in common. 

Most importantly, we have businesses that we need to grow. Okay. We have businesses that we need to grow. Let me give you a brief intro of the history of SAS. SAS is software as a service, uh, jargon aside, any subscription software business that you pay to help you out in your life, right. To be more efficient, accomplish your job, whatever it might be. 

Wind the clock 5, 10, 15 years ago. You didn't have a lot of competition, probably had a sales staff. If you had a software business, uh, you could kind of set, set the terms, dictate the way things went, uh, run demos, uh, uh, uh, drag your customers around a little bit. You didn't have any competition, right? Um, fast forward to today, there are so many different options for just about everything out there. 

The competition is absolutely insane. Even if there's not an option, there's a way to cobble together and hack certain pieces of software. So. It's nowhere near as easy as it used to be. Right. And I always cite this stat, um, that 99%, you can Google it. 99 percent of Shopify owners fail. It's that high who knows, but it's close to that because it's all over the internet and the internet never lies. 

Larger point is, is that you can't, if you want to have a successful business, just sell software anymore. Those days are gone in order to have a successful business. You need to have successful customers. That's it. That's what it is in the software business. And we believe a tremendous amount of what we're doing as a business. 

Now, what the show intends to do is something that's going to become the norm for all SAS companies being that you can't just sell software and have a big business, you need to have successful customers. Okay. Need to have successful customers. What does that look like? Right. That's, that's sort of where, where it starts and what it looks like. 

Um, Short story. There was this amazing coach, amazing leader, Bill Walsh. Okay. He coached the 49ers way back in the day. He wrote this book called the score takes care of itself. Great title. The premise was that if you have a really good process, okay. A process that you gave your all to in a system where you always work your hardest and you only accepted excellence in it, the score would take care of itself by focusing on that, by nailing that the score would take care of itself. 

Right. Stayed in another way that while other coaches were out there, uh, stressing frantically throughout the game, uh, growing gray hair, right, like starting to lose it. He was cool as a cucumber. Why? Because he knew he did everything that he needed, everything that he could to take care of the score. So the score would take care of itself because he did all those things. 

So he's not going to be stressed about the ups and the downs and the breaks in the game and what happens with the ref and everything else. Other guys over there losing hair, pulling his hair out of his head. Those things are going to happen no matter what the ups and the downs, those things that come at you, the breaks of the game, you know, the ref has been whatever, as long as you've done the best that you can do, taking care of the most important stuff, the score will take care of itself. 

It's a, it's a fantastic premise worked out quite well for him. System is amazing. Guy won everything there was to win. We don't play football. We create software. We teach our customers how to run their businesses. So how does the score take care of itself? Apply to us. We're a digital business. We have a marketing department. 

We have an onboarding staff and outreach team. We talked to hundreds of thousands of artists or not a week, hundreds of artists and thought talks a week. I should say on the phone, we capture emails, we email them in total. Uh, and I didn't even mention a million other things. We are drowning in data. It would be very, very easy to effectively drown in that data and metrics and worry about the way that they move this or that the ups and downs of the game, right? 

Yet, if we worry about just one of them, just one metric, the only metric that matters above all else, the score will take care of itself. You know what that metric is? Surprise, right? It's the success of our customers. That's literally it. The health of our storefronts as a business, how big we grow, how well we do, how much money we ultimately make can all be tracked back to how well our customers do, how quickly they grow, how well they do, and ultimately how much money they make. 

Uh, and it's not about email copy or button colors or AB testing or what's going on with their ads or some fancy script on the phone or any of the other massively less consequential metrics. It's absolutely amazing thing to say. It's absolutely amazing in that it's ultimately so, so simple, right? Simple as it is, though, it did take us a few years to figure this all out. 

And I would say our storefronts and our customers from the minute they sign up are placed in a roadboat. Okay. We are both given an, or, and our job is to get both oars, row it in the same direction and get that boat moving at a speed, right? And then keep that there for as long as we can. We do that. Make our customers successful, the score will take care of itself. 

So I love that one. It's an incredible pillar, incredible layer to this thing. Layer three, reverse engineer success. Okay. Once you have the only metric that matters, the success of your customers, it changes how you think about everything that you do. Why am I telling you this? Because these are the major tenets of success that are going to underpin this show, right? 

You start asking the right questions. How can we make our customers more successful? So what do we mean by reverse engineer? You find the success. Wherever you see it, whatever customer you have that's doing well, that's selling a ton of art and you attempt to break that system down that they used to do this. 

What, how are they achieving this? You break it down into pieces such that you can systematize it and teach it to others. Okay, so you go to the data helps out when you have a ton of customers and many of which are selling a ton online and you can see what they're doing, right? So you look at that data, you see what's working, you study it, improve on it, and you create playbooks, step by step instructions on how to execute marketing techniques and tactics that are working right now for lead generation, content marketing on the socials, live art shows, print giveaways, on and on and on. 

If something's not working, okay, and you have the data at your fingertips, you know, conclusively, you can call BS on things quickly, right? Like we know you can't snow me on what's working out there in marketing world. I know. And then I can ensure that my customers waste not one second of their precious marketing time of which we all have precious little time to market. 

Right. So that nobody wastes any of their time on anything except marketing. What's working, right? That process never stops, never stops. The goalposts are constantly being moved on us in today's digital marketing landscape. They're over here, they're over here, they're over here, they're over here. When your focus is on success and you have the data each time the goalposts move, whether it's algorithm change on the socials or a new app or service or technique, we're able to move with them, okay? 

And we're able to prepare our customers before anybody else. And we're good at marketing to begin with. Now we have the data. So now we know conclusively, it's incredible. So how can we make our customers more successful, always be reverse engineering the data and gets us onto the fourth pillar, how we approach software development. 

Okay. I love this one. This one's so amazing on so many levels. Let's stick to addressing two of them in particular. Historically, by the way, uh, uh, there is a graveyard of software companies, uh, that's lined with individuals that went out of business, just working on features, feature release after feature release, after feature release, they made a suggestion, go make that feature, you put a ton of engineering dollars, you go to make it. 

And then you go out of business. Why? Because oftentimes the customers were listening to the crowd and oftentimes, uh, even, you know, oftentimes I should say the software company was listening to the crowd, even if it was their own customers, right? And there's this quote from, uh, the football coach, what's his name? 

Buddy Ryan. I know what the sports analogy is today, just bear with me. But he said, if you listen to the fans, You'll be sitting up there with him. I think that's so profound. His idea, you know, if you're the coach and you start making all your coaching decisions based on what the fans are yelling at you and you don't have your own game plan, you're going to end up sitting there with him. 

You're going to lose your job. And it's powerful. It's essentially, as the coach, you better have a rock solid game plan and strategy thought out. If you listen to the crowd, you're going to be out of a job and sitting with him. So. Easier said than done that one. Um, you know, when, when, when your customers come to you and they're really requesting a feature, you have to take it seriously, right? 

You do, but, but, but notice how easy it becomes when you frame it through the lens of the only metric that matters. Hey guys, I really need this feature quickly pivots. If we create this feature, uh, will it make our customers more successful? If so, make it. If not, ignore it. That's it. We have a game plan, and we stick to it. 

So we can get all of these requests. Oh, it would be so great if you did this, or so great if you did that, or if your software only did this, I would sign up, right? Those inputs come at you so hard and fast in this business. And if you don't have a game plan, If you don't have a metric that matters, will this make me more success, make our customers more successful? 

Yes or no, then you're, you're cooked because you're going to make it a bunch of stuff that's not going to make anyone successful and then everyone loses. Right? So we've got a game plan. We stick to it because even deeper than that, though, uh, uh, uh, what is the best way to sell art? What if I asked you that question? 

What is the best way to sell art? How would you respond? I'll wait. How would you respond? Right. Admittedly. Uh, this has been one of the, uh, Most recurring troll type of comments I've received over the last five years. Uh, something along the lines, I don't need to be selling my art online as I do way better in person face to face. 

Uh, my art is really visual, uh, and sells best only in person, right? Um, to answer the question, of course, the best way to sell art is in person, face to face. That is an indisputable fact. No one is arguing to the contrary. That is absolutely the truth, right? Problem is, you only have 24 hours in a day. And you're geographically fixed on this earth, it turns out. 

So a website that never sleeps and could resent your work to thousands of people, at a time, simultaneously, is sort of necessary for those looking to be on a path. Okay. 200k a year. So step one, you got to have a website. Step two, though, your website's job is to take the digital experience and make it as close as possible to the in person buying experience. 

Specifically, you want your website experience to mimic what it feels like to walk into an art gallery. If you, if you, um, look at your website themes and templates, or I should say our website themes and templates, what do you notice? They're mostly, uh, uh, uh, completely minimal white, Uh, uh, it's all about the art and it's the color. 

Why that is the exact experience you get walking into an art gallery. Okay. Your website should look like the experience of an art gallery. You should attempt to have a website that gets you as close as possible in a digital capacity to the offline buying experience, right? This is extremely, extremely important. 

And let's, let's state it another way. If you walked into, let's just say the Apple store today. And for the sake of our scenario, it was not crowded. You walk in, you start looking at phones. What would happen? What would happen in that case? Sales person would walk up. They'd start answering your questions. 

They'd get you to the correct model. And then they find out any accessories you might need likely upsell you a case, right? Have you seen our cases? We've got great cases. Let's go over and look at those. If that's how it works in person, how can we mimic that experience digitally? That's the question, right? 

So we go about developing a suite of features that do just that. Also, our marketing and how we instruct our customers always, always, always to do this. So, our software incorporates a proprietary cookie that lets you know when pieces your customer or potential customer looked at. We then alert you to this, so that you can immediately follow up with that person. 

Email them, start a conversation, right? So that is a perfect example of how you approach software development. And you say, that is what would happen in the real world face to face. Let's make it in the digital capacity. Don't ever stop that process. So how do you approach software development? You always ask yourself, will this make your customers more successful? 

If the answer is yes, you make it. If not, you ignore it. Layer number five, we're rolling the things we ignore, okay, that we don't do are as important as the things that we do super counterintuitive. This. Also, it's not a course of antibiotics either. It's over in 14 days, right? It's a vitamin. It needs to be taken daily. 

It needs constant reminders. If we want our customers to be successful, to get on the path, to educate your business, then identifying the shiny objects and then explaining why are there shiny objects and then getting them to ignore them might just be one of the. The uppercase, most uppercase important things that we can do. 

You ever see the Pixar movie up when the dog is seemingly doing what he's supposed to view, being a good dog, focused dog, and then all of a sudden, squirrel. Um, he runs off in that direction. Dogs are extremely loving animals, but have a major personality flaw. They are very, very easily distracted. Humans, not so different. 

Call it shiny object syndrome if you like. It's so So easy to lose your focus and run off in some direction because some shiny new object and new people are saying it's working again Now if we slow down for a second go back to the only metric that matters Will this make our customers more successful then it's easy to pair you these Constantly building up business, killing distractions that are out there. 

As an example, it comes to mind. Um, just recently, this came up on one of our zoom calls and it had to do with the new ability, okay, to create web stores on Instagram and Facebook. Maybe you've seen this where, you know, you look at the Instagram item and it's got like the little, um, you know, I forget what they call those things, but like little boxes, like buy this, buy this, buy this, you know, it's like what they put in the ladies magazines. 

Similar concept on Facebook. Now, at first glance, this sounds like a great idea, right? Uh, Patrick, you always talk about having a market where the attention is Facebook and Instagram have it. So it must be a great idea to build our stores there, right? Let's do that. Right. So I heard a member build this, bring this up in the workshop and before I could even answer it, uh, uh, which I was chomping at the bit to do. 

The chat lit up and, you know, it was a zoom call. So there's like the chat on the side and zoom. And another member was saying she spent over 40 hours trying to get it to work. And it's still buggy and not functioning properly. Her advice, don't do it. I took the words right out of my mouth, right? Because that's exactly what I would have said. 

It's a shiny object. It needs to be vetted through the lens of success. First. And you think of any others, uh, SEO, uh, uh, uh, this marketing service boosting post on Facebook. Don't even get me started on that one. So given my experience, if I would have been inserted into that conversation earlier, I never would have suggested attempting to do a store on Facebook or Instagram. 

I know better. First of all, Facebook is war with Amazon Shopify and you. Okay. They want to control everything. Okay. It's going to be a worse buying experience than on your own website. And there's never something that I would, it's never something I would succeed or seed the control of to Facebook, to Instagram. 

Absolutely not. Moreover, it needs to be vetted and, and even see if it works, even contemplate it, right? Like even contemplate it. And I'm in my forties now. And despite thinking I'm still a freshman in college, it turns out, uh, age with age comes wisdom. You get older, you gain wisdom. Uh, if marketing is your trade, shiny objects syndrome is supercharged. 

So I give you my theory of shiny objects. Okay. I hear about a new thing, the thing registers, and I promptly ignore it and forget about it. You have no idea how freeing this is. Once you train yourself to do this brand new shiny object came in, everyone's talking about it, most amazing thing ever. You ignore it, you ignore it. 

You don't even let it take any, any, any brain space, zero brain space, because I need to see it talked about. 10 plus times from people that I follow and know and trust that have achieved success before people that are running companies, huge marketing departments. I need them talking about it and publishing a case study or two. 

Once that happens, that is satisfied. Uh, uh, my little barrier, uh, for actually taking the time to investigate it, download it, start seeing if it's a real thing, right? And if you apply this for any amount of time in your personal life, Wait till the thing pops up, promptly ignore it, wait till it comes back up 10 plus times again from people that you trust and then go in and investigate it. 

Oh my gosh, game changer. In terms of the shiny objects, you want to know how many of the shiny objects that I ignore that I never went and downloaded or spent any time or investigated or started testing. I can't remember the name of, I can't even tell you how many it is. So many of them never come up again. 

They don't come up again because they were not worthwhile. They were not worth investigating. And you know, that system has served me so incredibly well with the huge, with the shiny objects that just come to, to, to, to, to, to, to, and it's really, really easy to fall victim to it. So that's my shiny object. 

If I'm not seeing it 10 plus times, I'm not going to investigate it. I'm not going to teach myself that and figure out whether or not it's worthwhile for the customer. So it's with that same level of scrutiny. That we even look at adding something into the business stack, okay? Our customers will bring up things and we will promptly squash them and take it out of their minds and get back to what we know works. 

It's a very small list of the stuff that we know that works. Sorry, it's just a bug guy outside my window. That we know works and it is by focusing on it and staying religiously laser focused on the stuff that works and doing it consistently that you succeed. So the things that we ignore are as important as the things that we do. 

This is going to be a major feature of this show. We're going to talk about it again and again and again. Next slide. Number six, success does not matter where it comes from, nor does it matter the blend of it, right? What do we mean by that? What do I mean by that? It can be a blend of all media types, all originals, fine. 

Mostly originals and some commissions. Great. All commissions. Wonderful. Uh, all prints a okay to a combination of all of them. Amazing. Perhaps it's a 60, 40, anyone ever have a 60, 40 front seat in the car and a station wagon did perhaps the 60 percent of selling your work and perhaps the 40 percent is a service portion of your business. 

Perhaps it's flipped the other way around 40, 60. Okay. Perhaps, uh, it could go any which way really the point is, okay. It can be 90 percent selling digital courses, 10 percent selling art the other way around. You get the point. If you've been an entrepreneur for any length of time or a business owner, you realize how difficult it is to get any one product to take off and really start selling. 

If you're fortunate enough to be in this position, the last thing you want to do is take that success for granted by attempting to shift your business model for a myriad of different reasons, right? Why bring this up? Why am I bringing this up? A few different reasons. Number one, we find that oftentimes we get pigeonholed as a brand business that only cares about people selling prints. 

I mentioned that earlier. Nope. We don't care what you sell. What's the only metric that matters? Our customer success is all that matters. Not how they get there. The same applies to you or it should, right? Number two, we've seen customers who've had a robust revenue source working, okay? And then they decide they want to pivot to a different one based on a myriad of reasons. 

I don't want to do the work. It's too time consuming. I'm sick of this. I don't feel, you know, fulfilled, all of those types of things. While not understanding the market has spoken, okay? They love particular product success is really hard do not change it. I use this specific example here because it's a great one We had an artist who was killing it on commissions. 

Okay. She decided she really didn't want to do them anymore. She decided she wanted to leave ASF, switched to a different platform so she could sell the Chachki, you know, the pillows, the mugs, the merge type of stuff. We got her on the phone, Nick and I convinced her she was making a big mistake. Her commissions went for a few hundred dollars each. 

She was selling a ton of them. I think a few hundred dollars, maybe a high, high hundred dollars. Um, do you know what the margins by the way, are, uh, uh, in the purchase price on Chachki? You know the mugs, uh, uh, the coasters Okay, the the t shirts the scarves and everything else extremely low price point extremely low margin Do you know how many thousands of those that you need to sell? 

Uh to truly generate a ton of revenue and i'm talking a lot a lot. So But in this case, we convinced her to abandon her plan and work on getting some understudies in to help with the commission's workload. Okay, she did this and she's back kicking butt again, not just kicking butt, but also doubling down on what works, continuing to squeeze as hard as possible this demand for the commissions that she creates, which is such a hard thing to do. 

So when you have success. Nine times out of ten, people tend to take their focus, move it somewhere else rather than squeeze this opportunity that's working as hard as you can, as hard as you can. Number three, if you're fortunate enough to have a revenue source working, it's almost a certainty, okay, that you've not gotten all of it, that you can't, right? 

And I alluded that to the last point, but we see so, so many. They want to pivot. They want to try to do something new when they have something that's really working and they haven't figured out how to truly maximize the marketing of it, uh, to take it as far as it will go to literally take it until it stops producing, right? 

Like it stops reducing, like diminishing returns and such. So that's the number three. And, you know, these are all going to be hot button issues. We're going to end up covering on this show again and again and again, because now that we've talked to hundreds of customers week in week out, Hundreds of non customers week in week out. 

We just it's pattern recognition. It just keeps happening and happening, happening. So number six, number seven, being surrounded by the people that are achieving it. Okay? And this is the final pillar. And it's sort of like the inception situation because there are layers to this layer. Um, this is sort of a variation of the, you're the average of the five people you surround yourself with. 

Right? Great line. I can't remember Jim Rohn. I think stated another way. Okay. You need to monitor the source of your inputs. Okay. Um, let's make it relevant to the time we live in now. Try cutting out 100 percent of the news out of your daily consumption for two weeks. Do it now. You can start today and tell me how you feel about yourself, your neighbors, the state of the country. 

Once you try this experiment, don't read the newspaper. Don't watch cable news television. Don't read anyone on the Internet and just put some different inputs in there for the time being. You'll end up feeling so much happier, uh, about yourself, about your neighbors, about your community, about your country. 

It's mind boggling. It's a mind boggling thought experiment. You will feel so much better. And this is like just a huge, huge problem that we found coming out of the news and just going into the photography business is oftentimes photographers and artists, the inputs are filled with information that is just wrong. 

Nonproductive. Okay. Filled with shiny objects. The inputs are given by folks that are not selling any photography or art online or off. Um, and probably never had any success doing so. The bad news is, is it ends up being a cancer on your mindset. The good news is just like the case of the news. It's really easy to fix, right? 

You can get it right out. So the inputs. Who you're surrounding yourself with sort of combined very important. The other layers have become all clear as a result of the recent pivot. Uh, we've made in the business and, you know, before we taught our customers to market run their businesses via blog posts, a podcast, videos, playbooks, marketing calendar, private Facebook group, uh, the Facebook group aside, it was mostly online learning for lack of a better term, right? 

The pandemic hits and we pivot, uh, to putting in a bi weekly basis, week in and week out. Zoom calls, a bunch of our customers getting on there. We teach the thing, we talk about the thing, we're taking Q and A on the thing, our customers are surrounded by their peers that are all on the exact same path working on the thing that they are. 

The result of this pivot has been profound, forever altering the course of this business. And one of the things that we do in these sessions is that our customer base is out there marketing. When they get a big win in any aspect of their business, the tendencies to post about it in the group, we cherry pick the best ones, get them to come on to the zoom call and discuss what they did, how they did it. 

And so we can all learn from it. And this has been absolutely amazing. You know, when a photographer gets on and said they sold 35 K last month in the middle of the pandemic, is it inspiring? Yes. Is it motivating? Yes. Is it shows what possible? Yes, we all learn from it. And yes, of course we all learn from it. 

So, you know, you can, you can, you, you end up with an input live and direct on video that is actually selling art or photography. You are surrounding yourself with people that are actually really seeing success. You can ask them questions. How did they do it? You go and follow their social followings. You start taking trigger. 

You start taking cues from them, how they're doing it. And, you know, you realize that like, Hey, I'm doing it. They're just like me, if they did it, I can do it. It truly is a situation where a rising tide lifts all boats. Okay. Our customers are leaving sessions and we're motivated to do their marketing, to achieve, to grow their businesses. 

They have pure examples that they can follow, um, that they all can reverse engineer on their own and keep them on the path towards that a hundred K a year plus business. And so this, this holds true for, for, for, for big months, uh, as much as it does for properly executed, uh, marketing techniques. Uh, uh, and you know, it, it. 

Even the ones that might just seem a bit outside your technical ability or acumen to graphs, like, wait a minute, that gal ran an art show with that crappy camera and lighting, and she sold four originals, if she can do it, I can do it too. So an amazingly powerful discovery for us on how incredible this, this being surrounded by your peers, seeing what they do, realizing that you can do it and going at it. 

And lastly, I would say accountability. What do we know? 99 percent of the art business out there, solo entrepreneurs. You don't have a staff or a team or a business partner behind you. Even with that support though, okay. The entrepreneurial road filled with ups and downs. It's great when you're up, but it can be debilitating when you're down. 

And you know, it's in the downs when artists and photographers tend to. Stopped everything, stop marketing, stop promoting at times, stop creating. Uh, you kill that momentum and you kill the business. So the group sessions actually provide accountability and it's no different than an addict that's been sober for 10 years and still attends meetings religiously, right? 

They're going to those AA meetings religiously. The support and the accountability is critically, critically important we're finding. And the group sessions provide that accountability and we're constantly auditing the results. Getting the train back on the tracks, moving down the track, the path to 100 K year business. 

So the zoom sessions have been critically important in this regard as well. Um, we'll, we'll continue to be so pretty much in perpetuity. It's never going to change. So those are the seven layers of success. And as I heard myself say all that, it sort of sounds like a sales pitch to sound up, sign up with us. 

And if it does, sorry, that's where it came from. But I think understanding How important success is, yes, to us is a business. Yes. To our customers. Yes. All the ways that I defined it, it, it's going to underpin everything. Philosophically, philosophically, philosophically, that's what I meant to say. 

Philosophically that we intend to present on this show. Like when we mentioned success, this is the mindset or mindsets that we have. It's going to be from one of these seven pillars, why we're mentioning it. Why we're bringing it up on this show, why we're banging a drum about it, why we want you to follow it. 

And whether you're a customer or not, it's such an important thing to understand, like, where am I getting this information from? Why is it relevant? Why is it relevant to me now? Why should it apply to me? Why should I take it seriously? And, you know, you're gonna have to make your mind up on that, of course. 

But this is how we're thinking about success. This is how it's going to continue to inform everything that we do and how it's the most important thing that we do. Finding out what it is, all of the seven pillars and going through it that way. And, and, and again, like, you know, no different than the person going to AA, you can't just go to one meeting a month. 

Like you got to stick to it and do it consistently. So that's success as we define it. Those are the layers. Uh, and that's how they fit into the path. That's going to take your art business from where it is now to a hundred K a year. So that's what we'll be talking about a whole lot of it or die, try and achieving it or something like that. 

Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching that. And I hope to see you in an upcoming edition of Art Business Mornings.  

Thanks.