The Flywheel

In this episode of Art Business Mornings, Patrick and Nick discuss the concept of the marketing flywheel and how it's essential for business growth, especially in the art world. Joined by two new team members, Taylor S. (TS) and Taylor E. (TE), they explore the definition of a flywheel, both in mechanical terms and its application in marketing. The team emphasizes the importance of customer success in driving the flywheel's momentum. They share insights on developing effective marketing playbooks through an iterative, feedback-driven process and highlight the benefits of close customer interactions. The episode also touches on the importance of validation in art marketing, with examples of small-scale testing and pivoting. Announcements include upcoming workshops and a special summer sale for Art Storefronts.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Alright, coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Mornings, which sometimes happens in the afternoon. It is again in the afternoon. We're talking about The Flywheel Defined. Okay, we're gonna define the flywheel, how we are designing for it and why it matters. It makes me wanna have a (indistinct).

Boys, it's the afternoon, we gotta have a water. This time we're gonna have a water. Look, sometimes the Art Business Mornings happens in the afternoon. Okay, we're busy. You gotta call audibles occasionally and for the first time ever on the Art Business Mornings, we have four of us, okay. We have the original two plus an additional two, four.

So, Nick and I have the honor, the prestige, the privilege of welcoming Taylor and Taylor. (laughing) Now, this has created some nomenclature issues in the organization. We had them sort it out, so bottom left-hand corner down there is TS, bottom right-hand corner down there is TE, okay. And we're talking today about the marketing flywheel, the flywheel defined.

There is nothing I hate more than buzzwords. Okay, I get it. This is a new buzzword. I think to give this some context, we have to talk about what a flywheel is in real life. And then we have to talk about how marketing has jacked this concept and created their own version of it. So I wanna define both of them, both of which I think are really good.

Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about some new learnings that we have as an organization that we think are incredibly powerful. Now, these things might sound a little self-serving at first concept, but I think it's really important. The takeaway is that you'll get customer (indistinct) from this session based on learning and iteration and how quickly you can improve, and I think it's something that can apply across the board to just about anyone.

So, let's talk about what a flywheel is, okay. And I'm just gonna do two quick instantaneous Google definitions, okay. A flywheel is a machine that reserves rotational energy by resisting changes in the rotation speed, okay. The stored energy is proportionate to whatever. None of that matters. That's what you get when you actually Google it like normal, it's a machinery term. It's a big spinning wheel at the end of the day, right.

Now, let's talk about the flywheel as it pertains to marketing and I think this is amazing and the subtitle is The New Growth and Revenue Model for Business. Okay. But this is the definition that I think is amazing. Unlike the funnel that puts customers as an afterthought in marketing and sales strategy, the flywheel model puts them at the heart, keeping customers happy, allowing them to drive referrals and helping the company make sales.

And I think one of the most amazing things that we've figured out about this journey is that if you create successful customers, you build a big business. So how does it apply? What is so incredible about this? Everything that we do to try and grow our business, Art Storefronts, 100% applies directly to the artists.

We need to get more leads. The artists need to get more leads. We need to grow the business. The artists need to grow the business. If we create successful, happy customers, our business grows. If the artist or photographer creates successful, happy customers, they get more referrals, they build more collectors, they grow the business.

So, let's talk about what we've done and here's how I wanna kind of prepare the ambush. I want everyone's perspective on this because I think it's a profound learning. I'll go to you first, Nick, and then we'll go to TS, TE so we keep it coming connect the dots grid style. We create playbooks, okay. And they're very good and the reason we know they're very good is because we're good at marketing, number one. And number two, we run the playbooks after we create them with an actual customer, we get the results and we're like, "Oh man, this is a home run." Okay. We teach it to our customers.

How to run a live art show, how to do Facebook ads, how to have a flash sale. It doesn't matter, these examples are bound. And what happens is that we teach them on a Zoom session. Okay. A whole bunch of people go out and run them, they come back and then we get responses on one end. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I cannot even believe what I learned. I can't even believe what I just achieved and I accomplished, I sold eight pieces, 10 pieces, 15 pieces. And then we get some people that are like complete crickets, I learned nothing. I didn't get anything done. It's not working. And our normal response pre-flywheel, let's call it Pre-Flywheel Days, was to say keep working the playbook, keep working the playbook.

That's changed for us over the last couple of weeks and Nick, define how it's changed. We used to just say, keep working the playbook and we left it there, now, what are we doing?

Nick Friend: Well, I mean, we wouldn't just necessarily say like just keep working the playbook, keep working the playbook. We would try to find in that session, and this is in a consulting session, right. We would try to find where they went wrong and on the spot, we'd usually be able to figure out what that was through discussion and say, go back at it, don't do that, don't do that. But then what would happen? Right, next session what happens it's like, I'm still not getting it, I'm still not getting traction with that tactic. And then we do it again and then it would happen again and so you can't just leave like you can't just leave these people stalled and stuck. And I mean, Taylor Sinople or TS and TE, right.

And we should say that for everybody that you haven't seen these guys before, these are two other high-level members of the marketing team, okay. At Art Storefronts, alright. So we've got four Art Storefronts team members here. And so for you guys, in our private messaging system, Slack, right. Where we're talking, you guys must be just like what is Nick doing? We're talking about this one customer and I won't let up on it. I won't let up on it. Like all last night and then this morning and I come onto the session today and I taught a part of the session because it was that important to me over one guy, right.

But there's a reason there, this one photographer, right. He's been working at it hard. He's coming to the consulting sessions every single time. He's not like a lot of people, in the art industry, which they just think that fish are gonna jump in their boat and they're not willing to work at it. He's willing to work at it. He has demonstrated that but he got stuck and he needed help. And I know for everyone that's like that, I know there's a hundred more people that are like that as well, and we cannot let them get stuck on things that are very important, like lead generation, for example. But coming back to the flywheel, what this all means is that the customer success, right.

All across the board from all of our members, their success is where everything originates for us. Okay, it is the foundation, it's the epicenter, it's ground zero, whatever you wanna call it, right. Everything starts there with us at Art Storefronts and then it works backwards. And like you said, I don't wanna toot our horn or make this all about us because I think the lesson here for all of you artists and photographers and I cannot stress this enough.

It is such an important lesson that I've learned over a 20-plus year entrepreneurial career and it's very easy to get sidetracked on this but at the end of the day, your customer's success matters more than anything and success to you guys is your art buyers getting great value, great satisfaction from hanging your art on their wall.

Right, they look at it every day and it inspires them, it makes them feel great. They have a cocktail party. They wanna talk about it. They wanna talk about you. They've got this connection to you. You're making their life better at the end of the day, you're being useful. You're adding value to them, right? And so that's your definition of customer success.

That's your foundation and your epicenter, but what happens so often is that we get sidetracked and our mind tends to think top down when we're running our businesses. And that means like you're like what tactics should I do? What should I do here? I just wanna do it like, what's my email open rate? How many people are unsubscribed? You get caught up in all these different things and you forget at the end of the day that there's really only one metric that matters.

It's your customer happiness, your customer success. That's your flywheel. That is the catalyst of your flywheel. The catalyst for our flywheel is actual artists making sales, building their own business. Like artist's success, right. And from that everything happens in our company. Without it, it's over.

The whole thing is toast, right?

Patrick Shanahan: And there's as much to do with the ones that get it right away as the ones that take a little bit longer to get it. Get the marketing technique and get the tactic and Taylor one, TS, I'm gonna start with you. TE, you are new, we'll go to you second. Taylor, you've taught multiple playbooks like I have, right. And when we say teach, we should give it some teeth and define it, right. Like walking through step by step, sometimes in real time, actually doing the thing that we're teaching, saying here is how it goes

Here's how easy it is. Knowing what you know now and seeing that certain people are struggling. What would you say your biggest takeaway is from the new system that we're on?

Taylor Sinople: Yeah, so it's like the 2.0 concept. It's fairly new to us. So in the past we put a playbook together and we tell everyone do it, do it, do it, do it. Time would go by, months would go by, maybe it's been a year. Maybe it's time to look at that old playbook. Maybe there's something to update there. Now, over the past few months we hit Publish and then it was just like when can 2.0 come out of that exact playbook? Is it ready yet? Is it ready yet? 2.0 is the actual real world results? So it's, we're putting it up. Anyone that wants to run with it, this is kind of our latest study on some tactics you should be doing, but tell us immediately how it worked and what didn't work and what did because 2.0 is gonna be even better than 3.0.

So this iterative process where everything we're doing is shaped by real-world success can be passed directly into how artists market by again not assuming you're gonna get it in one and reevaluate in a year, but create that flywheel where you're chasing what is actually working, not what you think should work. And I think that's a big difference between the funnel model and the flywheel model is that the flywheel is all about listening and not so much putting your flag in what's going to happen based on your assumption.

It is just listening to your customer success. What is delighting people, thrilling your collectors and then making that the starting point. From then on you're a 2.0, so to speak.

Patrick Shanahan: Okay and you're up next TE and I'm gonna tee you up, but it's so funny to hear what Taylor said there for me because we've worked together for like five years now, right. And I would say almost very close to the point where we pivoted this thing to having these sessions both for non-customers and customers and talking to hundreds of artists a week. It's like, we used to design our marketing message on what we thought was best with no damn input from the customer. Now, where are we? All we're getting is input from the customer. It's completely changing everything. We taught the thing today. We did a course correction today. Now there's four of us sitting here talking about it live which is just sort of crazy. So TE, you're relatively new to this entire thing, your impressions on the flywheel, your impressions on the system as it pertains to creating a playbook, teaching a playbook.

You've been with us for a couple of weeks now. You've seen already 500 artists and photographer questions and answers. Look at the (indistinct) sessions you've gotten already in two weeks. What are your initial impressions on that system, on that core and how we can make it better?

Taylor Engstrom: Yeah, no, I mean just to add on what everyone's said here, I think we figured out marketing. I think we're done. I think the secret of how to do great marketing and how to do it for a long time, we figured it out 'cause just identifying and approaching it from this angle from like, let's get everyone's opinion, let's get everyone who's using the product in and tell us what they're struggling with, where they found success with and then really kind of poke holes in that will then inform us on possibly what we wanna do which is make them successful.

So just coming in and being able to be like receiving information that will create content instead of like you said, pushing it it's just gonna make us do two things, grow our business by helping them grow their business. So in terms of that, I think it's just a phenomenal way to approach it. That customer-centric mindset.

In terms of way to improve it, I would say just variety in the content. So Art Business Mornings has just been you and Nick most of the time but now we're like we have four people, maybe next time we'll have three people. Maybe next time we'll have two people and a guest. So I think it's, once you figured out this model of like, what is everyone talking about? What is the problem everyone wants to solve? And then how do people best learn this stuff? Is it workshops? Is it Instagram Live? Is it a webinar? Is it a blog post series that they subscribe to? I don't know. I think that the next step after you understand sort of how to approach it. The engine is a distribution point, so I'm excited to really get into that and continue to help our customers.

Patrick Shanahan: It could be the Art Business Taylors.

Nick Friend: Yeah. (mumbles) (all laughing) - It got a nice ring to it.

Patrick Shanahan: Get a room. - You guys can hash some things out from a different side.

Nick Friend: Yeah, we'll take Tuesday and Thursday and a complete (indistinct) so.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, perfect. That's right. Then we'll move to Monday, Wednesday Friday. Now the big picture I think it's really, really exciting. And we talk about all the various different mantras and on the previous iteration of the show, which was on Tuesday, which was technically also the Art Business Afternoons, it's been a tough week. No judging has been the validation point, right. And so you get the playbook, it's really good marketing. Certain ones it just works for right away and there's various different circumstances. For the ones that are struggling, it could be that they don't have the grasp of the playbook or it could be, they're not well and truly validated their art.

Whereas before it might have taken us nine months to get there and now we're getting there in two weeks. Now we're getting there in two weeks and we're instantaneously getting in and we're saying okay, if you are doing the marketing consistently how long have you been doing it for, okay what do the sales look like? Okay, well, if the sales are not there then we've got another problem to solve which is the validation is not well and truly there.

And let me just tell you, this is not a haven't sold anything exclusive problem. This could be like, yeah, I've been at it for six months but I've only sold $1,500 worth of stuff. Well, if you've been at something for six months and you've only made $1,500, we've got a problem there too, don't we. We've got to fix that too, right?. So I don't know. I just feel like we have reached as a result of doing this video. Okay and talking to our customers and being this close which by the way, is as available to us as a business as it is to you guys, it's why we're pounding the live art shows, it's why we're pounding the flash sales, it's why the minimum viable audience for you to do art merchandising, selling, talking about your stuff that's one-to-one. The learnings that are coming out of this are 3000% faster than we've ever been. Period. I mean, it's just changing everything. So--

Nick Friend: And that is the main point right there, right? That's the thing that like all of you artists and photographers out there you can have those same learnings for your own business right. Your own content. You're wondering what price point you should have or what niche you should go into or you're painting this and you're painting that and you're not sure which one to focus on. You just get to market and you get closer to your customer, right. The famous saying, which is like this is a mantra internally at Art Storefronts, right? He or she who is closest to their customer wins. He or she who is closest to their customer wins, right. And that is just, that it's such a great thing to have in your head, right? Like for yourself, so if I were you, I would be talking to as many people on my email list as possible. I would be engaging as much as possible with whoever wants to talk to me, right. Whoever's willing welcoming--

Patrick Shanahan: Video chats.

Nick Friend: Or yeah doing video chats, commenting, bringing people on. Anybody that's interested and like getting them on a Zoom call if they're really interested in potentially buying something, like the market you guys, your audience, that is the truth. That is the only truth you're ever going to get. Okay, you're gonna read blog posts, you're gonna listen to podcasts, you're gonna hear all sorts of nonsense out there. You've got articles coming at you every day from the news. All these inputs, we call them inputs, right? It's all just a bunch of whatever. Like, you don't know where the truth is in all of that. The only truth you have is your customer or your potential customer. In other words a lead who is giving you real information right back at you. And when you're live like we are and when you're talking to customers, like when we do art workshops, all we're doing is accelerating like the volume of conversations that we can have with our leads and our customers, right. And like that's why we're just, it's like we're addicted to it. I mean, we really are because you just want the truth at the end of the day, right. You don't wanna sit around and waste your time and you will waste your time on niches and things that don't matter with wrong information when the information is like, you'd be shocked. If you really could just talk to like 10 of your people on your email list by phone you might save a year or two years of time.

Patrick Shanahan: Just tell me honestly, Nick or Taylor, what do you think of this niche? Would you ever buy anything like this? No, you don't like it, okay. Can I show you three other ones? And tell me--

Nick Friend: Right, exactly.

Patrick Shanahan: Like getting that feedback and contrast getting the feedback that way with six months of trying to build your Facebook page and six months of emailing and six months of Instagram post and I'm not getting that much traffic, I'm not getting that much interaction. You could have done it in 48 hours.

Nick Friend: And I think this is a great place to bring in the Taylors on this.

Patrick Shanahan: The Taylors, this is getting good. This is a good place to bring the Taylors as like both of you with a lot of experience in marketing I think any experienced marketer will resonate with this, right. Like how often are marketers? How often are people just sitting behind a computer? Right, like communicating digitally, not like that's not enough. It's not enough just communicating digitally. And like what's the first thing that most people say? I'll send out a survey, right? Let's send out a survey, let's figure out what our customers think about this or what our prospects think about this. And it's like yeah, you'll get some information, but it's not the same. It's not even close. And I think when you've been working in a business long enough or in a trade long enough, when you start talking to your customers you find out exactly what it is that resonates with them. You really truncate that time period dramatically.

Taylor Sinople: Yeah and what I always say too is to notice when you're looking into a crystal ball and go ahead and smash it, just go ahead and smash it. You do not need to be looking into a crystal ball. That is not how smart marketing is gonna be done. It's not predictive. It's gonna be reflective. Stop predicting, stop looking forward, wondering, creating things off predictions. Instead, do some stuff, go out there, do some stuff and then reflect on what you just did. That is what all of our marketing at Art Storefronts is about. Internally we are looking back last week, last month. What does that say about what we should do next week and next month? So I think artists in particular have a tendency to get behind the crystal ball for far too long when they can be out there digitally or in real life out there getting that information that they need to reflect on to make smart decisions.

Taylor Engstrom: Yeah and I think another point on this is just the enemy of done is perfection, right. I think artists start to apply this mindset too to their marketing and to asking their customers what they think about work. It's not something you send quarterly. You don't send one survey. If you look at really elite brands out there, if you look at Apple, if you look at ESPN, if you look at any of these elite brands they're asking their customers stuff all the time. They're asking Facebook like, what was the quality of that video call? What was the quality of your experience with the Ads Manager? Right, so if you're an artist, it's like it takes less than 60 seconds to set up a poll on your IG Story, right. So putting two prints on your IG Story and saying which style do you prefer A or B, you can be doing this weekly, you can be doing this daily. So yes, you should be asking your customers their thoughts. You should also be asking a lot. Cause that's what we do. And we preach and we eat our own dog food and yeah, it's just about reps and sets. Just doing it more and more.

Nick Friend: If you know that this is the fuel for your flywheel to start the whole flywheel, right. Then you should prioritize it. Like you guys, it's the fuel, the flywheel is essentially the engine of your business. Like, just look at it that way, right. If that's what it is, don't you want more fuel in there? Right, like and as much of it as you can, because then it's gonna go, boom, boom, boom, boom, but otherwise, what is your flywheel doing? Right, like it's kind of just sitting there and that's when your business feels like you're pushing a cart up a hill. You're just guessing, you're guessing all the time. Right, you're guessing all the time. I mean, how often look like the only reason that I can talk about this or that we can talk about this is because we've done it before a lot. Like how many hours and years I've wasted entrepreneurial remaking (indistinct) eventually it's like I gotta stop.

I gotta go talk to 100 customers. I just have to now and then you do it and you get like, I remember there was one time that I did this like many years back. It was probably 13 or 14 years ago and I just said, forget it, right. Like after all these failed experiments of like trying to figure out like what was gonna resonate with my audience I was like, I'm gonna go talk to like 50 or 100 customers or 100 prospects, right and I did it.

I did it like in three days. I was floored. I mean, like life-changing because in a matter of three days, like I had looked at my last like three years of guessing and just went what a waste of time, Pat can you like, do you not agree I know you've done this too.

Patrick Shanahan: And you know it's so funny is that one of our earliest lessons. TE, TS you probably didn't know this, but we'll tell you. So Nick and I's first business, we started a clothing company at the tail end of high school, early college and one of our earliest mentors, we met this guy outside of like a fabric place. You met him, I wasn't even there when we met him. You tried to go get the jacket made outside of like a--

Nick Friend: I don't remember it.

Patrick Shanahan: In LA. And he came up and he's like, let me help you get a jacket made. This guy ended up being a mentor to us, both credibly what he taught us. He would drive us to Melrose, okay. And Melrose in LA is like a huge shopping district or it was back then. Things have sort of changed and moved where it's cool in LA. And he would walk in to all the hot clothing stores and he'd go watch this and he would walk up to every single solitary sales associate. And he would go, what's the best selling stuff in here right now? What's really moving? What can't you keep in stock? Can you show me? Show me the pieces.

And he'd be like, okay. And he goes, pull us out. And he goes, did you see that? Did you see that? And he goes, let's go to the next one. And we'd go into the next one, walk right up to the sales associate. Hey, what's the best selling stuff you have in here right now? T-shirts. Okay, what about denim? Oh, really? Who's buying that? How well is that selling? And in one day, I'm not kidding we hit 16 stores and then we'd go back and he has all of this in his head.

And you know what we did? We promptly forgot it for the next 15 years of our lives and we should have gone back to it, right. So, what's so interesting is that we had the conversation (mumbles) on Tuesday about validating your art and the concept of when to pivot or like instantaneously we have to get a playbook going.

So, number one, I'm teasing that. Number two, our goal, our job is to give you as many resources to be able to validate what the next best direction is for your business. And guess what? This is insanely important. If you've not sold enough. It's even more important for everyone that is selling well and contemplating a new direction or a new show.

And TE just gave you a perfect example, like you could be pulling Instagram with every single solitary story A or B, A or B which one do you like better? And then recycling the polls. So, we're gonna be building one of these things up very soon and it's gonna be fire and it's going to teach you tactically speaking, well obviously we're not gonna give the whole store away. It's gonna be for our customers because we're tyrannical like that, but we are gonna talk about it. We're gonna talk about it again. So, I'm starting to get really excited about this. And it's like, we come on here with no agenda, no show and we just start talking things through and like good stuff bubbles up every time. TS, you had another point to make, you got cut off. What was it?

Taylor Sinople: Yeah, along those lines what happens when someone joins your mailing list? It's an important question. First, do you have a mailing list? That's a whole different discussion. If you do, what happens when someone joins it? Nothing or a thank you message. Is that an opportunity? Of course it is and we have a lot of advice for that for our members, but that's another little hint for you. Are you taking advantage of that opportunity to meet that person, to get some information from them that can change everything for your business?

Patrick Shanahan: The analogy I give and it's an important one because we're talking about it and Gretchen is just like the pivoting thing has been on my mind. The pivoting thing whether to do it or not, we'll get more into the definitions is as important for the person that sold nothing that sold a hundred different things. And no one is saying like the analogy I have in my head and it's a little bit tawdry, it's origins, but you have to think like a monkey.

You know what a monkey does unless it's like those ones that really truly fly they don't ever let go of the branch that they have with their left hand, until they get ahold of the branch they have in the right hand, right. So no one's saying quit your business. Stop. All I'm saying is you can have your left hand on this branch and then reach over there and grab the one on the right. If it's not sturdier and more stable than the one you have on the left, then you swing to the next one, right and you swing to the next one until you get one you're like, (exclaims) this is the new one and then you swing over there and that's just good business. I mean, we're doing it right now.

I don't know if the four people on a Zoom call on the Art Business Mornings here, which are really in the afternoon this time is gonna be a hit or not but I'm swinging it over there. I'm giving it a shot. I'm trying it out. We'll see what the comments look like. Otherwise, you two Taylors are running your own show.

Okay, go with your own graphics. Okay, (mumbles), so we'll see.

Nick Friend: Like its-- We're kind of switching topics a little bit here but I think this is like, this is a good one because how many people out there right now, like are you wondering whether you have the right content? You know what I mean? You have the right subject matter or you've been making sales for a while and you're thinking about launching something new. Gretchen. And for all of you, Gretchen's on YouTube right now. She's an Art Storefronts member and we see she's dropped a comment on here and that's what we're addressing, but Gretchen I wrote the playbook this morning. Okay. I wrote the whole outline for the playbook this morning. That's how much this is on my mind. And it's not so much of a, like it's for pivoting and a pivot is when you decide like, in the art world we'll just talk about it in the art world is like, you've been trying to sell a certain type of subject matter and it's just not working, it's not getting traction and you pivot to another type of subject matter, right.

Now, this has been a very successful strategy, right. For artists and photographers over the years. And we have talked about this quite a bit some of our best selling artists and photographers and I mean that people who are doing over 100,000 plus a year right, pivoted. They ultimately pivoted, right. They were struggling. They were just hitting against that wall and then they pivoted and it was like, they went from being like a tugboat to a smooth sailor. That's what it feels like when that happens because you give yourself the opportunity to move to something that's just has wider appeal, and it resonates with more people.

More often than not artists and photographers start with something that is probably like narrowly defined and what you don't realize is how easy it is to switch to something else. Now, right when I say that, I know what everybody's thinking, I know everybody's thinking on here is like well, what is that next one? It's gotta be the perfect next thing. No, it doesn't because you can test it out and try it, next week zero.

Taylor Sinople: Zero risk.

Nick Friend: This week, zero risk, zero time. You're not changing your whole website. Okay, you're not changing anything. You can do this low friction and so Gretchen what you'll find the most interesting is that Bill Stidham, one of our most successful artists on the platform, right. He actually did it like two weeks ago and he didn't do it intentionally. He's not trying to pivot, right. What he did was he tried a brand new piece of content that is totally outside of the box of what he normally offers. Completely outside of the box, okay. And he ran a flash sale, followed our whole playbook and on that flash sale he sold the original on the spot for like three or $4,000, okay.

Like it was gone. Multiple people were asking for it, they wanted to buy it. He could only sell it to one of them. And he got more engagement and interest than ever before and he came back and I talked to him and he said, I have never ever... And this guy sells really well, okay. He said, I've never seen this type of response from an image I've ever released, a painting I've ever released in my entire life. He's like, we need to do something about this. I need your guys advice. How do I market this? How do I expand this and all this stuff? And it was just because he painted one new painting. That was it. He would take one new painting and he went out there and he marketed it and that was it, right. And so you can see how easy it is to just iterate slowly, right with almost no investment, keep it very simple and find your way towards the best product that you can offer to the world.

Taylor Engstrom: Yeah. 

Patrick Shanahan: Go ahead.

Taylor Sinople: Reflective not predictive. He didn't say, okay, I've got the idea for the piece. Now how do I get the website for the piece? The new brand. I can't keep calling myself Bill Stidham. I need a new name for this new brand I'm creating. I can't just have one piece. A website with one piece, I need a series. So let's start doing this new collection, months go by, right. That is predictive operating. He made one piece and just showed people. It turns out they liked it. Reflective, now he's got a direction. They didn't like it, he made one piece on to the next one.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Yeah, so what if-- (mumbles) 100K plus in your business. What if this new niche takes him to a 500K to a million a year business? That's fascinating. And he doesn't have to go all in. He doesn't have to make this huge decision, right. Like I'm gonna abandon the old and just do the new, it's like, no, let's start offering a little bit more. It works, right. So if something works, pour a little bit more gas on it, don't go all in and then just build.

Patrick Shanahan: Amazing. Okay, announcements. We're running the non-customer, the art business workshops that we call, link. Anywhere you're getting this, link in the podcast description, link in YouTube, link in Facebook. It's gonna be tomorrow, 11:00 a.m. PST.

Nick Friend: Yeah, exactly and this is for non-Art Storefronts members. If you're not a customer, right. You get free art business consulting from... I got a point. It's always the opposite direction, I've got to figure out how to get over here. Yeah, it's tomorrow you guys, 11:00 a.m. Pacific, One Central, two Eastern, okay. For all of you non-members. Bring your most pressing question. Taylor E, did we decide? Are we gonna focus on Facebook ads or are we not?

Taylor Engstrom: Yes. 100% Facebook optimization. Are you ready for social ads? How much should you be spending, initial budgets and just honestly, that's not something you should even do. You should focus on other things like validating your art, like building the story behind your brand, all that sort of stuff. So great stuff for tomorrow. Check it out, 1:00 p.m. Central (mumbles)

Nick Friend: So Pat, we kind of talked about this a little bit behind the scenes, but like all of you out there, artists and photographers, this is for non-Art Storefronts members, right. We're gonna just talk high level about Facebook ads, like boosting posts. When should you do it? Should you do it, okay? Number two, like Facebook ads. When should you do it? Like are you a candidate for it? Not everybody is. I know everybody's thinking about it, but not everybody's a candidate. The difference between warm and cold, we're gonna speak about it just from a high level, all right. So if you've thought about like, should I be buying ads on Facebook? Should I be buying ads on Instagram? All that type of stuff. We're gonna talk about that tomorrow, so go to that session. Don't miss it because you can get on the Zoom call and ask questions to the people you're looking at right here, right? One or two or three will be on there to answer all of these questions.

I'm planning on being there, okay. I'm the CEO of Art Storefronts, if you didn't know who I am. I'm planning on being there because you know what? Buying ads, it's a very important topic. I've got a lot of experience in it and I've got some strong opinions on it because I don't like people wasting money. When you start getting into the burning money let me just tell you, if you wanna burn money, start buying advertising you will burn a lot of money and so if you're not ready for it and most of you are not. So that's the most important point. I don't care what your sales are. Most of you are not ready yet, okay. So it's really good to know when you are ready for ads and when you are ready, how do you approach it? Like, there's a very specific thing that you should do first, right before you do other things, right. So you wanna make sure that you're doing that so that you can have the most success upfront.

So we're gonna talk about this from a high level. We're obviously not gonna get into like detailed tactical that's for our members only, but on the whole we could stop you from wasting money right. And if there's one thing that I see all the time, people are asking us about Facebook ads that are not Art Storefronts members, they're already burning money on it. I've already tried this, I tried this and I'm spending money on Instagram ads and I tried the boosting posts and stuff like that. Just stop and come to the session.

Patrick Shanahan: Boom. Links everywhere. To find it in the description all over the place. Other than that do we have a sale going?

Nick Friend: Yeah we do guys, like anybody else that's been following Art Storefronts for a bit. Our summer sale, which we extended out of August is ending, okay. If you got a week and a half, it's September 17th, it's ending at the end of the month, all right. You can save big on joining Art Storefronts. Don't miss out on it. If you've been kind of waiting around and looking to take your art business to the next level or you've been affected by the pandemic, whatever it is, right. So if you're interested in taking advantage of that or you're interested in just learning more, what the details are about, what we do, the pricing, all the different features, your next step is to request a demo, okay. When you request a demo, one of our team members on our outreach team is gonna reach out to you and take a look at your art, learn about you and your goals and what you're looking to do and then they can show you everything.

Like we have a gazillion features, with our website software, as well as like the art business consulting and how we help you get more leads and more traffic and things like that. So they'll go over all of that with you in detail. And then of course, if you wanna take advantage of the Summer Special you can do that. So again, if you're at that point and you wanna learn more, just go ahead and request a demo. There's a link in the post, regardless of what you're on. If you're on Instagram. Oh, we're not on Instagram right now, so there's a link in the post YouTube, Facebook. There is always a button on the upper right-hand corner of our website too, that just says Request A Demo. A big orange button, so just click on that and we'll get in touch.

Patrick Shanahan: Huge thank you to TE, TS. First start Business Mornings. We look forward to Art Taylors coming soon to a live stream near you. On that note, thanks for listening and as always.

Nick Friend: Well done. Well done boys. Thank you.