Nobody saw your Sh*t : Why and what you can do about that

In this episode of the Art Business Morning Show, Patrick delves into the essential reasons why many art businesses are set up for failure. He highlights the importance of mastering the basics, such as in-person sales, maintaining a functional website, and conducting live art shows. Patrick stresses the futility of relying solely on Facebook and Instagram ads, sharing his experiences and data to debunk the myth of quick success through paid traffic. He emphasizes consistent marketing and patience, illustrating that true success comes from long-term dedication and not shortcut solutions.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Thanks, guys. Okay, coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Morning show, I've titled this one "Nobody Saw Your Sh*t: Why and What You Can Do About That." So specifically important advice, okay, for Q4, the fish in the surface analogy, and discounting. (soft melodic music) My morning intro, welcome to another edition of Art Business Mornings, the show.

Okay, it will put you on a path to a six-figure a year plus art business. Now, Q4 is here, the election ends today, and what will come next? Various uncertainties aside, i.e., who won, riots, or COVID lockdowns or not, it is going to be the holiday buying season. And in terms of e-commerce sales, in terms of art and photography sales online, it portends to be the biggest holiday period in terms of how these various products will be sold in the history of the world.

And that's not really hyperbole. More transactions will go down this Q4 via e-commerce in terms of the percentage of total sales. Our e-commerce, it's going to be the highest in terms of sales volume in the history of the United States. And I think it likely would have been the case regardless of COVID, but COVID has ensured it will far exceed any projections for growth that any of the wizards of smart made. It's gonna be tremendous based on everyone's buying behaviors changed, their habits changed as a result of COVID.

So this Q4 is just gonna be massive. So if my job is to get you prepared for Q4, which it is, then I wanna hammer two big picture points and sort of buck you up for the season, right? So why these two points? One, oh, come on. Instagram just paused on me. There it is, okay. Number one, I talk to hundreds of artists a week, artists and photographers, hundreds a week, have been a long time.

And I'm hearing this from both customers and non-customers quite a bit over the last few days. And so I was like, all right, that's it. I'm gonna rant. So let me start, all right, with my fish at the surface analogy. Okay, and where does this come from? What do I hear all the time, by which I mean week in, week out? Heard it yesterday, heard it last week as well.

And it's something along the lines of, "I've already emailed my list. I don't wanna email them again. I feel like I'm emailing them too much. I just ran a sale. I can't run another sale. I just ran one. I did a live broadcast. This was yesterday. Shout out to the guy who did it. I forget his name, but I just did my first one.

I didn't sell anything, but it was fun. How often should I be running them? Can I just run one again?" And variations of this abound, and they come in all different forms, but underpinning all of them are an extremely, extremely flawed premise. The premise is that every time you do something, you engage in marketing your business.

Everyone, okay, actually sees it. Everyone actually sees it. Number one, okay, number one, that's naive. Number two, it's arrogant, okay. Now, I'm not accusing you of being naive or arrogant, okay. The reason I know it's both naive and arrogant, okay, is because I am the biggest naive and arrogant guy you've ever seen in your entire life.

I've been doing this time and time again throughout my marketing career. And I had to learn this the hard way. I don't want you to have to learn it the hard way, okay? I want you to learn from my naivete and arrogance. So hence this episode. Now, your attention, okay, both rented and owned, by which I mean your email list, your social followers, your Facebook fans, your Instagram followers.

Maybe you've got something going on Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn or wherever you are, okay. Those folks, okay, only a small portion of them saw your message. You marketed, you sent an email, you posted on the socials, you posted on LinkedIn, you did a live show. Only a small portion of those folks saw your message, okay.

Period, full stop. That's a hard thing to wrap your head around. And where did the title come? One of my favorite authors is this guy named Steven Pressfield, wrote a number of things, books. We can get into that later, but one of his classic ones is a title that "Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t." And I think I'm gonna borrow his title here and modify it to say, "Nobody Saw Your Sh*t."

It's really hard to get that beep timing, by the way, I had to practice that. No one saw it, okay. No one saw it. And to explain this, I need to give you an analogy, okay. Join me, okay, on a boat as we head out to sea, okay. We are going fishing again. And what we're after are called pelagic fish, okay. Pelagic fish. I think the technical definition is pelagic fish just don't have a home, right? They roam, they're out in the open ocean.

Think marlin, tuna, swordfish, mahi-mahi, Wahoo, et cetera, right? So these are open ocean fish, okay. And these open ocean fish are your attention, both rented and owned, okay. It's the people on your email list, it's your social followers. These are open ocean fish, okay. In our boat, okay, we bait our hooks and we toss out our fishing lines.

The fishing lines are your art and photography, sales and marketing campaigns, this holiday buying season, right? So back to our arrogance and naivete, what do we think happens when we put our line in the water? When we actually do some marketing, we think the ocean is not the ocean. And we think it is a tiny pond, which all of the fish, okay.

Are not just at the surface, but they're actually right below the bottom of our boat waiting for us, okay. They're just waiting for us. Turns out, okay, this is the news flash. This is the naivete. You're not fishing in a pond, okay. We are fishing in the ocean, okay. The ocean is actually quite big. It's really, really big.

Covers two-thirds of our planet, and the fish are potential customers, okay. Roam, the giant ocean. Sometimes they're down deep at the bottom. Sometimes they're hundreds of miles away from our boat, okay. So most of the time, our fish do not even know we have a line in the water, okay. They did not see it.

They did not hear it. They are not aware we even exist at that moment. They don't even know. Stated in another way, right. Nobody saw your sh*t, okay. So it turns out your fish are living their lives. They're watching the kids. They're making dinner. They're watching sports. They're watching cat videos on the inter-webs or voting, or preparing their incendiary devices in the event that their candidate doesn't win, right.

But seriously, what kind of a world are we living in? Where we're having an election and people are boarding up stores. What has happened to our country? I have no idea. Anyway, the bottom line is the fish, okay, your fish, your potential customers are busy. They're busy, they have lots going on in their lives like you do.

So they did not see your sh*t. They didn't see it. They didn't see it, okay. So what can you do about that, right? That's the whole point of this message. Step one is the aha moment. You're hopefully having right now you get the analogy and you realize that not only does your list not know you had a sale, okay.

They didn't care how many times you've emailed them. They didn't see your Facebook posts or your Instagram live or your flash sale. They didn't see any of it, okay. They were down deep in the ocean. So number one, don't worry about it. Don't worry about how many times you emailed or had a sale or posted about this or that.

Instead, okay, instead realize how successful you're going to be this holiday season with marketing is twofold, okay. How often, number one, how often and consistently are you fishing? How often and consistently do you have your lines in the water, okay. Are you regularly marketing? Number two, when the fish are at the surface is when you can catch them, okay.

You do not for certain know when this will be, so the best to be fishing often, right? Best to have your line in the water as much as you can. And again, like I'm getting this so often, I can't remember the guy's name, but he took my advice on the validate and he was on an art business workshop yesterday.

He took my advice on the validation and he talked about this whole process, how he psyched himself up and he went and bought his samples and he did his first Facebook live. And he did his first Instagram live. And there's that sense like, ah, I just went through all of that and immediately what was my advice? Because he didn't make any sales on the first one.

I was like, great. Now go do 30 of them. And I'm met with this like blank stare. "He's like, 30 of them? I've got to go do 30 of them?" And this is what made me think about this whole thing this morning. But it's like, yes, you gotta go do 30 of them because what do I know? Nobody saw it.

Nobody saw it, right. Nobody saw his sh*t. So go do 30 of them. And maybe somebody will see it. And it's such an important point. Nobody saw your email. They were too busy, okay. Do you see everybody's email? You don't see everybody's email. You see everybody's Facebook posts? You don't see everybody's Facebook posts.

You see everyone's, no, you don't see everyone's Instagram posts. Nobody sees it, okay. So it comes down to how often do you have the line in the water. And when the fish are at the surface is when you can catch them. To take my analogy even further, you don't really ever know when the fish are gonna be at the surface.

You just don't, sadly. So marketing and having sales consistently, very important but also, shoot, shoot, shoot. But also, okay, you can rely a little bit on intel and studying conditions to get a better understanding of the time to go fishing versus not, right? So as you're thinking through like, okay, I know I need to be marketing consistently.

I can't do it because I've got my own stuff in my life. So what is the best times to do it, right? So what would a fisherman do? A fisherman would look at the tides and at the moon and the water temperature and the currents and the weather and make educated guesses on when the best time to go out fishing would be so too can you, art marketer, photography marketer, right? And you can make some educated guesses on what is the best time to be out fishing.

Guess what? It's right now, by which I mean Q4, by which I mean from now till Christmas, best time to be doing it, period. So what can you do about the fact that nobody saw your sh*t? It's market consistently all Q4, run sales on the channel market, hit it harder than anything you've ever done before and certainly harder than any other time, all year long.

Don't worry about any of the, any of these people. And don't worry about the fact that no one saw it, okay. You're gonna make sure you have a line in the water when the fish do come to the surface, okay. So it takes a long time to get that conceptually, once you do, you realize you have this weight off your shoulders and off your chest because if nobody saw it, you can send an email again.

If nobody saw it, you can have the sale again. Only when the fish are at the surface, okay, can you actually catch them, right. So that brings me to the discounting portion of the rant, all right. Everybody discounts, okay. Everybody. The only two brands that I'm aware of that don't are Louis Vuitton and Tiffany's. Now sidebar in a true twist of irony, okay.

The group that owns Louis Vuitton I think is right now actually in acquisition talks with the group that owns Tiffany's. That will probably be that negotiation. The only time either of those two brands discounted perhaps Louis Vuitton on their asking price. And so to Tiffany's or whether one to date.

So everybody else, however, okay, in the world discounts. Everybody, everybody. Another dirty little secret. This is not often told the purchase price for a particular piece of art or photography. The more negotiation goes down. The more discounting happens, okay. Wealthy folks as it turns out, did not get wealthy by paying retail.

They just didn't. Once the purchase price for art or photography gets more than three zeros in the number, okay. Is when the real discounting begins, okay. That's when it goes from the amateur leagues to the pros. I see that time and time again, but let's talk about what we know, okay. Nobody has even seen the fact that you discounted in the first place and everybody discounts, okay.

Now that we know that, once you come to terms with these two facts, it becomes very easy to market consistently and discount when appropriate because most people are not going to see it. It's just about having the right line in the water when the fish come to the surface, that's it, right? One additional point, important one, there are layers to discounting, okay.

There are layers to discounting. And I talk to hundreds of you guys a week, remember, hundreds, many of you price your art or your photography way, way too low. In some cases, this is straight up, I'm not kidding, a phobia, okay. It is an affliction, okay. It's no different than fear of heights or insects or being scared of the dark or something, right.

I have talked to many that are afflicted and straight up terrified to raise their prices. That is like a normal thing that I encounter on a regular basis. Usually my answer is like, look, just send me your website login. I'll go and I'll raise the prices for you. You leave town for the weekend, when you come back, just deal with it, right.

So it's an affliction, okay. I get it. But many others, they're not so much terrified to raise them. They're just too low. They're just priced too low, okay. So let me tell you another brief story. And then I'm gonna round back through my analogy and I'll finish things up. So I've mentioned this story I think quite a few times on the art business workshops, three times weekly Zoom sessions. You can join, link in the description of the show notes.

You should, there are good times. But longtime friend, okay, customer Matthew Lockout, he was a customer very early on. So we ran a bunch of case studies with him and become really good friends. And a while back he had pre-COVID, he had an art show in a gallery, like the big dog and pony art show. I think he sold, for context, a little bit over $100,000 Canadian art at this show.

So it was a big deal. I worked with him very closely on this show because I was creating, attempting to create a playbook on how to run a gallery show from the marketing standpoint. Ask me how valuable that playbook is now, appreciate it COVID. I haven't released it. So anyway, I was intimately involved with setting up the show and even the pricing.

And he had this masthead piece, okay, for the gallery show. And when I say masthead it was like, it was the image that was used in all the marketing material. It was the star of the show for lack of a better term and in terms of the pricing, it was priced exactly the same as all of the other pieces that were the same sizes.

And I looked at that and I was like, that's just wrong. I can't have that. So I called Matthew up and I was like, "Matthew, we can't charge what you have the same for this as everything else." And I can't remember what the exact numbers are but I'll get close. I think it was, I think it was priced at 18 grand, the same with the others.

And I was like, "This is the star of the show, okay. This is the star of the show." And I need to raise the price on this because it's the star of the show. So let's raise it from 18 to 23. And Matthew and I go back and forth. Eventually he relents. He's like fine, but we've gotta call the gallery owner.

So we call the gallery owner and she was like, okay, well, get on the phone. I had to convince her. Okay, fine, we'll do it. So the price went on the main showpiece from 18 to 23,000, all right. The show came and went, was there interest in the piece on the floor? There was, but it didn't sell. The piece didn't sell.

But the gallery owner interestingly enough had a collector that was interested. And so what did the collector do? Waited, came back a week later, walked into the gallery and said, "Hmm, I saw this piece, didn't sell, was actually interested in it. Tell you what, I'm not gonna pay $23,000 for that piece.

"I'll pay $18,000 and I'll take it today. Is it a deal?" It was a deal, right. So I ended up selling the piece for exactly what he was gonna ask for it originally. And that's a pretty big discount, right? $5,000 off, I'm taking the piece from 23,000 down to 18. So amazing, right?

The collector was patient, waited until the show ended, came back in a week later, opened up negotiations and boom. It's done, right. So it's a cool story. Here's the nuance though. Here's the nuance. Not only did it sell, not only did it sell for the original asking price that Matthew wanted for it, okay.

But the buyer left happier and more satisfied with the transaction than he would have ordinarily. Why? Because he negotiated $5,000 off. Because he got a better price. Nothing makes buyers happier than negotiating a better price and getting it. Ask yourself, how do you feel when you pull it off in your own life, when you're buying a car and you negotiate it down or you're buying something off Craigslist or

Facebook Marketplace.

And they're asking 1,000, you get it for 500. You feel pretty doggone good, right. Feels pretty good. When that happens, like I get fired up. So not only, okay, not only do you make the sale, but the buyer leaves happier. So when your prices are higher and you have the ability to come down lower, look at the situation that it puts you in, okay.

All right, so back to the analogy, back to the analogy. So everybody discounts, yes. It's an incentive to get humans to take action, which is why every single solitary company, aside from the aforementioned Louis Vuitton and Tiffany's, Louis Vuitton and Tiffany's, everyone does it, right, okay. So if we know that everybody discounts, we know that nobody sees your stuff, okay.

And then we further know that in these situations, the buyer actually leaves happier. What's to stop you from raising your prices? This thing went wonky, sorry. What's to stop you from raising your prices? If nobody, by which I mean, nobody sees your sh*t, it also means they didn't see your prices.

It means you can raise your prices, literally right now, today. You can just go into your store, raise every single price and be prepared to discount. Nobody saw your prices. They didn't see them, they didn't know. So you can do that right now. You can do that right now. And Instagram is going a little wacky on me.

So on that note, thanks for watching and as always, have a great day. That one's super wonky there, sorry. Thanks, guys.