The next big art-selling holiday is upon us. 30 days away.
In this episode of the Art Business Morning Show, Patrick and Nick delve into the importance of art-selling holidays, with a focus on the upcoming Mother’s Day. They emphasize the need for early marketing efforts, starting as early as April 1st, to capitalize on the holiday’s sales period in April leading up to early May. They discuss the patterns of missed opportunities observed among artists and photographers who fail to prepare properly for such holidays. They also highlight the structured marketing calendar provided by Art Storefronts to ensure members are consistently prepared year-round. Emphasizing the analogy of the art business as a marathon, they stress the significance of preparation, sales strategy, and the reality of the extended timeline required for success in the art world. Furthermore, they address common misconceptions and pitfalls, encouraging a direct-to-consumer sales model and the idea of hiring assistance for marketing tasks if necessary.
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: We are talking about the next big art selling holiday that is yet again upon us. It’s Mother’s Day, another one firmly ensconced in the calendar. We’ve all had moms, and we know we’re all due gifts or cards or something nice, and art fits into that box in just a lovely, lovely fashion. So, I’m going to grab Nick, and we are going to talk about holidays, art selling holidays in general, and then specifically why they’re so important in the regular life cycle of an art or photography business. They have been important, they will be important, and they’re never going to stop being important. And I sort of... we’ll just have... we’ll just have... we put this thing on the podcast too, so, you know, a lot of people listen not live but on the podcast, so we have to always take care of those people. So, allow me to reintroduce the intro.
Coming up on today’s edition of the Art Business Morning Show, we’re talking about the next big art selling holiday on the calendar, and it’s Mother’s Day. Specifically, why these sprints towards holidays is fundamental to a successful art or photography business, how you can never get back the opportunities that pass you by. We’ve been thinking a tremendous amount about that and what you can start doing now to take tactical steps towards putting yourself in a position to succeed for the next big art selling holiday, which is Mother’s Day.
Nick Friend: Yup, and this is a big one, Pat. This is a big one, so, you know, and you can see here, like the... So, let’s get this straight. Let me ask you if I’m correct on this: the marketing that needs to begin to take full advantage of Mother’s Day is like April 1st, right? It’s like the end of March, beginning of April, right?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, so we’re talking about like, what, about three and a half weeks away, right? And so this three and a half weeks that you guys have, it’s your chance to, you know, do the best marketing you can in terms of generating more leads, romance marketing, and whatever to get built up for this period that’s about to come. Because like Valentine’s Day, you know, that’s a big one, already gone. If you didn’t take advantage of it, you already missed it, right? And as you and I were talking about last time, it’s such a big deal when these big art selling holidays pass, Pat. You can’t get them back. And I know it sounds obvious, but one of the most, like, obvious things that we see with artists and photographers is that they miss these things. Like, everybody that’s on this right now, how much did you sell on Valentine’s Day? Like, for the two-week period leading up to it? Because it’s not Valentine’s Day that you’re supposed to be making money, it’s the two to three weeks beforehand with the proper marketing that you do, that you should have done really well in that period, right? You should have brought in thousands of dollars of sales, okay? All that demand is getting sucked out of the market. So if you’re the guy, you know, holding the bag the day after all of this stuff is gone, you’re like, “I wonder why nobody’s buying.” That was a really good social media post I sent out, or it got a lot of likes, it got a lot of comments, but it didn’t really work. It’s like, dude, everybody just bought art for the last like two weeks straight. They’re not there anymore, you know? You gotta gear up for the next time. And so here we are, warning everybody, right? Giving you guys well advanced notice that in three weeks or two and a half weeks, the marketing is going to begin for Mother’s Day. And all of the selling that’s to happen for Mother’s Day is going to be happening throughout April. Mother’s Day is like May 5th or May 8th. It’s somewhere like right around there. But you have to realize that all the purchases are largely happening before then, guys, okay? Because people have to get their shipments and all that stuff. That’s how it works, okay? So you’ve got to be prepared. You got to have your website live and ready with everything according to best practices, so you’re ready for that traffic. It needs to be a robot waiting for that traffic to come in to convert as much of that traffic as possible into customers, right? And you got to have the proper marketing ready to go. So here we are, beginning of March. This is what you’ve got to be thinking about and focused on right now: Mother’s Day. So you’re going to hear us talking about this a lot. It’s time today to get your, you know, everything in order, to get kick-started, to start looking and working on this, okay, as soon as you can so that you have the best, you know, Mother’s Day execution possible, so that another one doesn’t pass you by.
And I should say, just to stick with format, welcome back to Art Business Mornings, the show that will put you on the path to a six-figure-a-year art business. And one of the things that I’m fundamentally proud about is our consistency, okay? You and I have been coming on these and sending our emails and banging the drum for our customers ahead of holidays, each big holiday every year, going back like five years, right? We start banging the drum on getting ready for fourth quarter marketing, okay, the last three months of the year, in August, okay, in August. Because fundamentally, this business, a great analogy for it is you guys are all just marathon runners, okay? You’re marathon runners. That’s what you do. Trying to sell art or photography makes you a marathon runner. And if you’re a marathon runner, there are going to be certain events on the calendar when you have the race, right? And they’re very important races, and they’re special ones, and they only happen once a year. And you have to get everything, all your ducks in a row ahead of time and make sure you get signed up and you get your bib and you’re in the line and you get your hotel accommodations. But guess what happens before the race? You start training, okay? You start going for those three to five-mile runs, and then it gets a little bit closer, and you’re doing those like 10 to 15-mile runs, right? And you’re getting ready to do this big incredible distance. And fundamentally, this business is just that. It’s just that year in, year out, all we do is we make it through every single solitary year. We tell our customers, “Here are the marathons that are on the calendar, and here’s when to start training for them.” And what is so inspiring, what’s so great about them is like once you sign up for that race, right, and you’ve paid the money for that race and you’ve got your bib, there’s no monkeying around. You don’t start doing those training runs, you are going to get killed. You are going to be killed over mile seven if you don’t start doing the preparation. And what each of these holidays really represents is a motivating factor. It’s a little fire under your bottom, okay, that says, “This is what I’ve got to start doing. I’ve got to start getting ready. I’ve got to start getting my ducks in a row. I’ve got to get my sales prep going on. I have to start doing some marketing, and then I have to get ready for the big sales event,” right? And then you get a little break, okay? Then you can have a couple of beers and some pasta or whatever you do after you finish a huge race, and then contemplate when the next one is. And this is the business. This is what successful artists and photographers do well. It’s a, you know, in many ways, it’s a blessing because many, you know, other businesses, like B2B businesses, business to business, right, like you don’t have these like holidays and things like that. Like, you’re just literally marketing like out into the ether, you know, as strategically as you can. But for artists and photographers who are normally like not as planned out, you know, detail-oriented... well, detail-oriented in their art, but in terms of like marketing and business, not as much, right, Pat?
Nick Friend: What’s amazing about it is that if you’re actually operating on the right marketing plan, it’s very structured. It’s shockingly structured. And so if you’re not operating structured, that’s on you. But the correct marketing plan for an art or photography business is actually incredibly structured to the day.
Patrick Shanahan: To the day. And I mean, of course, we have our art marketing calendar that every member gets at Art Storefronts. It’s a 365-day-a-year art marketing calendar literally telling you exactly what you should be doing on every single day, along with like pre-written templates for everything, pre-written subject lines, pre-written emails based on what we already know is working for other Art Storefronts members over the past eight years. We just keep refining it and improving it, you know? But it’s an incredible thing when you think about it that like you can actually follow a step-by-step plan every day, and you’ve got these holidays that are like, you know, milestones that you just need to make sure you’re executing on. And look, you’re talking about how long we’ve been talking about this. How long have I been saying the following, right
? People, artists are always looking for like, “What’s that one tactic that I’m missing? You know, do I need to modify my website, or like, have I done my SEO correctly?” And they hone in on these things. Dude, what about my niche and all this stuff, when the number one thing that you need to do is take full advantage—and when I say full advantage, I’m talking, I’m not talking about 100%, I’m talking about 150% advantage—of the big art selling holidays that happen all year round. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, right? A couple sprinkled in there in the summer. There’s Amazon Prime Day, you know, Memorial Day, Labor Day, some of those that you can take advantage of. And then you get into Q4, the biggest art selling time of the year. And what do we find, Pat? We did a survey on this. We did a survey on this, if you remember, like six months ago. How many of you actually take full advantage of these holidays? And eighty percent said that they don’t. Eighty percent said that they don’t, until they started, you know, as a member of Art Storefronts, they had not done that. And that’s the thing. So anybody that’s not a member, the biggest value that we could provide to you is to actually make sure that you do that. How long have I been saying this? It’s got to be like years, right?
Nick Friend: Yeah, yeah, and it’s such an important point. It’s why the marathon analogy is so important because, you know, what do I do? I run a webinar, Webinar Nick, three times a week, okay? And all I do is I talk to artists and photographers, and they’re telling me what they’re working on, or where they’re focused, or what’s wrong in their business, or why their business is not growing, why they’re not taking positive forward steps in their business. And the majority of the time, they’re either not working on anything at all, or they’re working on the wrong things, okay? They’re just working on the wrong things. And we know that because we have a ton of customers. We look at their data. We know who successfully know what they’re doing, right? But it’s common sense. It is just utter, total, and complete common sense. When you commit, like you commit to the marathon, you know you have to start training. When you commit to running a sale on the art holidays, you know you have to start doing your pre-sales, your pre-marketing activities. And when you cement yourself, when you put that deposit down to run the race, when you commit to running a sale on one of these days, it is a forcing function. It’s like a little bit of a hack that just pulls you right into what you need to be doing, right? That says, actually, whatever other nonsense I was focusing on, that’s not making any forward steps in your business. Don’t lie to yourself, and certainly don’t lie to me. I talk to you guys all week. What are you working on? “I’m working on this, this, and this.” Yeah, how’s that working out for you? It’s doing nothing. It’s doing nothing for your business. The trap is always, just because you’re busy, you think you are working on the things that are positively impacting your business. But I know from talking to so many of you and seeing so much that if you are not working on the right things, your business is not moving forward. Running a sale on a major holiday and doing the marketing ahead of time is doing the right things. It’s doing the right things. It’s, you know, it’s like a balanced diet, or it’s like exercising. You don’t need to be told that a balanced diet or that exercising is the right thing. You know it’s the right thing, right? Like, you know, I use this example, which I think is hilarious. You know, one of our buddies, Nick and I grew up with, he uses this story. His idea, he’s going to start a gym where every time you go to the gym, your monthly payment goes down fifty dollars. So he charges you six hundred dollars at the beginning of the month. Every time you go to the gym, your payment goes down fifty dollars. So he’s like, so at the end, you get to the point where your gym membership is free. And he goes, it properly aligns the incentives with the rewards, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that the reason that we bang on about these holidays, okay, you guys are probably so sick of hearing this, bang on, because I know it is going to make you put your focus in the right thing. You know, “I’ll just get started when I contemplate what my niche is going to be. I’ll just get started when I get my work photographed. I’ll just get started when I get my business license in place. I’ll just get started when I bring in some excess capital.” You’ll just get started right now because there is a major race coming up, Mother’s Day, and you’re going to start figuring out what it’s going to take to do the sale. And even if you sell nothing, you’re going to learn a tremendous amount, and the business is going to be on the proper trajectory. And they don’t teach this anywhere, Nick. It’s not taught in art school. It’s not taught in photography school. No one tells them this is what you have to do. And I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t matter if you ever sign up with us at all. If you take this level of thinking and you say, “Hey, this actually sounds like a really good idea. You know, I’m going to go listen to these guys about what the major holidays are, and then I’m going to put them into practice,” you’ll win. It’s a forcing function.
Kelly (on Facebook): Do you have a program for clients that do not have the time to do all of the marketing activities?
Patrick Shanahan: Have you ever heard that question before?
Nick Friend: Never. Never once. Not once.
Patrick Shanahan: You’ve never heard that question before, okay? Yeah, it took Kelly and Haven Cahill... I love that name, by the way, Kelly Haven Cahill... to let us know that that was the first time.
Nick Friend: Yeah, that is a very commonly referenced desire, let’s just say. Thank you. Very, very common. How many artists, like, raise your hand, you know, with an emoji, actually really want to do marketing activities all the time? You don’t have to answer. I already know the answer to the question, right? Nobody wants to eat. So, Kelly, the answer is yes. I think it’s actually kind of a cool story on this, Pat, like how we started the client services division, which is essentially doing marketing services for our clients. So, we have the art marketing calendar and everything that we give DIY, do-it-yourself, because any artist that joins Art Storefronts can do it themselves, and there’s nothing hidden. We want you guys to, you know, execute all of the marketing on your own. It’s the cheapest way to do it, and it’s the easiest way to keep your costs low. However, some people don’t want to do it. They want to move faster. They don’t have the time to do it, things like that. And so we have an option where, you know, we call it marketing assistant, where you can buy that service. There’s two versions of it. There’s marketing assistant light, and there’s marketing assistant growth, okay? The growth is obviously more expensive than the light, and we do the, you know, the full art marketing calendar on the growth, and we do a dressed-down version of it on the light. But you can buy that service, and we will actually do a lot of the marketing tasks for you that we have already given to you to do on your own. You just need an assistant to get it done. So yes, we have that service.
Patrick Shanahan: And also, fundamentally, like, you know, I get this a lot. Like, no, I’m just going to hire an assistant, or I need to hire out, and, you know, someone said it here, you know, and I’m going to do that. And while I love the idea on paper, everyone approaches it wrong. And this is just a fundamental thing that happens, so I’ll say it. I’m going to hire an assistant. I’m going to get an intern. I’m going to get a local college kid to help me do the marketing. Maybe you’ve got a son-in-law or someone that’s capable. And if I interviewed after ten people did this and went and hired an assistant, how many people have the same assistant after six months, a year, a year and a half, two years, three years, or five years? Zero out of the ten would have the same assistant five years later. Zero out of the ten would have one three years later. One out of the ten would have one a year and a half later. And maybe two, maybe four out of the ten would have one after six months. And there’s a huge and tremendous failure rate to that particular system. And the reason is that no one has taught you guys the perspective, number one, of how long it takes to grow this business and really get it cooking. It’s three to five years at a minimum, okay, number one.
Nick Friend: Number one business.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. Number two, the nuances of how to sell
art and photography in this particular industry, its ins and outs are so different than any other industry that even if you’ve got a kid that’s great at social media, or you’ve got a kid that’s good at writing copy, or that understands fundamentally Facebook and Instagram ads, or is killing it on TikTok, or any combination thereof, has a day job doing marketing, what we do in attempting to market and sell fine art and build this business is no different than learning a new language, okay? It’s learning a new language. And like any time learning a new language, you don’t pick it up in six months unless you’re just some sort of freak, talented, incredible person. It takes a while, and that’s even more so where the three to five years comes in. And so people always hire an assistant or someone to help them out, or an intern, or a family member, or whoever, and they go and do it with the same mentality that they’ll potentially run an ads campaign on Facebook or Instagram, or they’ll boost a post. And the mentality is, “This seems like a really good idea. What I should do is I’m going to go test, and I’m going to go put $50, $100, $150 into the Facebook slot machine. And what I’m expecting to get out of that is $3 for every $1 I put in. Now I’ve run my test, it clearly works, I’m going to keep going.” And so you approach your hiring of an assistant or an intern or an admin or however you want to say it the same way you approach your marketing and your Facebook stuff. You don’t realize that it takes an entire year minimum, and in many cases a year and a half, that assistant, that admin, that overseas employee, whoever it is, is only really going to be valuable to your business and start showing an ROI a year and a half in. And then when it really becomes valuable, year two, year three, year four, year five. When I bring on board new team members to my marketing team, I don’t even look at them if they’re not willing to make a three to five-year commitment because it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it for us as a business to start training you in all of the crazy ways that this stuff works, and how you need to articulate things, and how the industry works, and what the ins and outs are, and the fact that you have big holidays coming up and there’s a sprint and all of the language in between. So it’s year two, it’s year three. I had a team member hit one year today. One year today, he is ten times more valuable to this business and this team than he was a year ago. And you know what? Year two, he’ll be 20 times as valuable to this team as he was a year ago because he understands and can articulate and properly teach how you market and grow this business. So, you know, to those that are like, “I need time to hire out,” the only way you’re going to be successful hiring out is if you can make a three to five-year commitment to that person and then not quit.
Nick Friend: Right, why we have the agency even more so, because that’s all these people do all day.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, and I like to use client services because I know that that’s the way that it’s referred to, you know, internally as the name, but like that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. That’s why we have it. I mean, we have, you know, when you... I always say this, it is extremely powerful, you guys, to think about your business and start at the end. Start with the end of where you’re trying to get to. Like, write down exactly what that is. You know, like what revenue level is that? You know, what are you doing? How much time are you spending on it? What does your lifestyle look like? Are you traveling three months a year or a month? You know, like what does that all look like? Start with the end and then bring that back to today and make sure that you’ve got all of the things in there that are going to get you there. And what’s interesting about that, Pat, is like some of our biggest artists that sell over $100,000 a year, they’re utilizing these services, right, for different reasons, right? Like some of them are using it permanently because they don’t want to do any marketing. They want an expert to do it, you know, and they want to create more. And actually, it makes a lot more sense that way because they can experiment with new subject matter, which is increasing their market size and all of that, and they’re not bogged down with the admin at that level, right?
Nick Friend: Yep.
Patrick Shanahan: And so that’s a really big deal. But some of them also, you know, they travel for three months, they head out of the country, or they, you know, or they get too busy with something. Maybe they, you know, I’m thinking of one in particular, she had another baby, right? And so she’s going to be out of commission, you know, on a lot of stuff for three months or so, or six months, and she doesn’t want to do it. And that’s totally understandable. What are you going to do? You don’t want your business to stop, right? And so the ability that we’re providing to outsource the tasks even for like a three to six-month period where it’s just like, “Oh, I’m just going to pay for the assistant. They already know how to do it. I don’t even have to say a word. They know it better than I do, right? Because they created the whole marketing plan and system, so I’m just going to outsource it to them. And then I might pick it back up after the fact or not. It doesn’t matter.” But you have the option. That’s a really powerful thing. It’s a really powerful thing as you scale. Again, if you start with the end and you imagine yourself with a $50,000-a-year, $100,000-a-year, $200,000-a-year business, you start mapping that thing backwards and you start realizing you’re going to need a lot of different help in there, okay? You’re not running a $100,000-a-year business on your own. You’re not. You’re going to need some help, you know, and you’re going to need automated fulfillment and all of that type of stuff. We talked about that last time, so I’m not going to go deep on that, but there isn’t a single person that’s, you know, selling $100,000 or $200,000 a year on our platform that isn’t using automated fulfillment, you know what I mean? Is there the unicorn that’s out there? Yes, of course, there is, right? But it’s a good lesson for people to know that 99 point something percent of successful artists and photographers, the most successful, are not even monkeying around for a second with their own prints or doing it with a local print shop or anything like that. Because when you just actually look at all of it, you can’t scale that globally.
Nick Friend: Yeah, I had a really interesting guy. Trying to remember what his name was. I’m scratching my head. I’m terrible with names, so sorry that I didn’t remember yours. But he’s just getting started, and he’s got a crazy day job. He designs theme parks. I was like, “I got a design business.” I was like, “What are you designing?” He’s like, “Theme parks.” I was like, “99...”
Patrick Shanahan: Sounds like fun.
Nick Friend: “...99 out of 100 kids would raise their hand between that and being an astronaut. Like, what do you want to do?” I was like, “What are you talking about? You want to be an artist?” And he’s like, “Yeah, you know.” He was asking these really thoughtful questions. And the first one he asked me, he’s like, “What’s the number one mistake as I go into this business that I have to worry about?” It’s the inversion, not what do I need to do, but what do I not need to do.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.
Nick Friend: Which was just genius. And I immediately answered... I don’t know how you would answer, but I immediately answered with the perspective of how long it’s going to take to grow the business. I think so many artists and photographers fail with not understanding... And I started with the three to five years, giving yourself permission to give the business that long to cook and grow and market and do everything else. And then I obviously talked about sales too. I said, “Yeah, figuring out the sales when they’re on the holiday and running them when it’s appropriate, learning what you can, getting better and better and better.” And I would probably say my top three... My next third one is don’t ever be 100% married to one subject material. Give yourself the permission to try different subject materials. You take those three kernels of advice, you’re on the path, you’re on the phone.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, those are... This is... You know what? We need to dedicate a session to that, to this topic alone, right?
Nick Friend: Yeah.
Patrick Shanahan: What are the three to five key things that you absolutely... or mistakes that you cannot make as you’re getting started or as you’re running your business? You just hit three major ones, right, that are sort of shockers to a lot of people, you know, because this is... We are
finding especially... This is always the case. Whatever the common dogma is, the narrative is almost always wrong. It is almost always wrong, okay? We don’t really know why that is. There’s forces behind it, and there’s been forces in the art industry, you know, which is the publishers, the art, you know, the galleries, the... and not all of them are guilty, but I’m just saying the red seekers of the past, you know, the art dealers have been setting the narrative. And then everybody walks in, and they think the first thing they have to do... and this is... I’ll add another one to your list right now... is upload all of their images to these marketplaces like Fine Art America and Redbubble and just go down the list. There’s like 17 of these things, Pat, right? And that... like, if that’s you and you’ve done that, like, it’s one of the biggest mistakes that you can make, right? Not that it doesn’t mean that you might not get a sale here and there. I mean, the sales are few and far between. Nobody is making a living off of any of it, right? But because it’s easy, everyone does it all over the world in every single country. There’s literally thousands of new pieces of art every single day, probably tens of thousands, getting uploaded from every country across the world to every one of these platforms, right? And so by definition, it will not work. It is what every single person is doing. It is the most crowded thing ever. And that is... anything that’s super overcrowded, there’s no return in it, right? It’s just like every investment that every single person on the planet knows about becomes the worst investment that you can make instantly, right? And so you want to have an edge or an arbitrage, not the opposite, okay? So, you know, falling into the trap of thinking that uploading your work on these marketplaces or that someone is going to sell your art for you is a huge trap, and it sends you completely down the wrong path versus understanding that building a direct business where you sell direct to your customers and there’s no intermediary in between, you know, is the number one way that the most successful artists and photographers have built their businesses, hands down, no debate.
Nick Friend: Super important. I could see us calling the episode, like, “All the things that you wanted to learn in art or photography school, but they never taught you,” right?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.
Nick Friend: And like, that’s like the fundamental list. Like, it’s going to take you three to five years of grinding, okay, to start getting momentum where serious income is coming in. You’ve learned a bunch of lessons, and you’re continuing to grow. Always be iterating on your subject material, okay? This is fundamentally a business. You aren’t looking for one...
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, it’s fundamentally a business, like archery. It’s about how many arrows you fire, right? It’s not just one arrow. You didn’t hit the bull’s-eye, so you’re a failure. No one ever talks about that in art or photography school. No one ever teaches them that. And what does everyone do? They try and sell what they have. It doesn’t map to the expectations that they’re looking for for the business. And no one’s told them, “That’s totally okay. That’s actually a part of the journey.” Pablo Picasso, when he died, had 45,000 pieces of unsold work, okay?
Nick Friend: The next would be thinking that you are going to be a full-time artist, okay, that is feeding your family and prospering through the gallery model. And the gallery model uniquely is no different than you being a basketball player and thinking you’re going to make it to the NBA. That is how bad the odds are. Now, does it work? Did it work for Kobe Bryant? Did it work for Shaq? Okay, we’re old Lakers fans. You’re dog-on right it did. But you know what? There are 999,000 Shaq-size guys that it didn’t work for because those are the odds of making it as a professional athlete, okay? And yet everyone is told, “You need to get into galleries, and you need to be in the top galleries,” and that’s all well and good. And the gallery model has its place, but it has its place and is successful and will provide you a serious income for less than one tenth of one percent of artists and photographers that try to go that route. Contemplate those odds, and the next thing you know, you’re going to invert your thinking to some of the things that we’ve been saying for a long time that you need to be doing, right? And that’s a huge one, right? That’s just a huge one.
Patrick Shanahan: Pat, take a hundred artists who pursue the gallery model today, right, and take a hundred artists who pursue the direct model and compare the success rates in two to three years. I mean, can you do... can you imagine what that is like? It would be... it would be...
Nick Friend: Let’s just say...
Patrick Shanahan: Did you say ten years is the timeline?
Nick Friend: No, no, I just said three years, right? Like, the people pursuing the galleries will be so frustrated. There’ll be almost no money being made. There will be like two or three out of that, you know, or sorry, maybe one who’s actually done it pretty well, you know? And then sprinkle in a few who got something, but they’re never feeding their family. Never. Never, never, right? And then on the direct side, you have, like, reasonable success rates. Now, every entrepreneurial business, like, guys, not everyone works. Some are not going to work. It’s just a fact. Just a fact, right? But the direct model has such a higher percentage of success. It’s not even discussable. And this is not like an opinion or something that is just about the art industry. I say this all the time. Guys, I’ve started five companies, and if you talk to any entrepreneur in any industry, this principle remains: a direct business is the way that you go. When you build an indirect business reliant upon third parties to sell your product, it is not the way that you want to go. It is highly risky. The rug can get pulled out from underneath you. You have no control. You have no consistent income at the end of the day. And that’s why artists and photographers for so many years have never been building valuable businesses. They get 1099 checks from a gallery. That’s not a real business. That’s not something that you can pass to the next generation, right? That’s not something you can cash flow for 20 or 30 years and retire on. If that’s what you’re after, you have to do what most entrepreneurs have already learned that you can read about and talk to and all of that all over the place, which is building a direct business where you sell direct, you market direct to your clients. So you just have to do that, and you just have to learn what it takes to get that done.
Nick Friend: Yep. You have to have a tightly defined niche, or you’ll never be successful. Complete BS, okay?
Patrick Shanahan: Yes.
Nick Friend: In fact, not just BS, it’ll hurt you. It’ll hurt you. You can’t run sales because it will cheapen the quality of your art, cheapen the quality of the product. Biggest lie ever told. The more expensive the pieces are, the more they discount, right? Everyone thinks that, like, “Oh, I can’t have sales. It’ll cheapen my work.” When you get into the six-figure pieces, you think 30% off is staggering. Sometimes they go for 60% and 70% off. They just don’t ever tell anyone, okay? The people that can afford the art at the top end of the scale did not get to that place—inheritance business aside—by paying retail for anything, ever. The person who says, “I’m not going to have a sale on my work,” is playing checkers. You’re playing checkers, okay? The people who are strategically and intelligently running and having incentives are playing like 3D chess, okay?
Patrick Shanahan: Why 3D? Yeah, and you don’t... you know why? Because you don’t really want to put your work on sale. You know that, right? Yes. But your retail price, you guys, sets the perceived value of your work, okay? So you want to set that really high, and you price it knowing that you’re going to end up discounting it most of the time, right? And so your real price is 20% or 30% under that, but you price even higher, which makes your work even, you know, even more valuable, okay? And so that’s why I say when you’re playing the 3D chess, you’re playing the game that is part of society, right? You’re playing the game. The game is there whether you like it or not. You can hate it, and you can run against it and make less money and have a less successful business and a harder life. Fine with me, right? But... and play checkers. But if you want to play chess, which is what the most successful people do, they’re like, “Hey, I can’t get around the fact that people are looking for sales, Pat, during the fourth quarter, during Black Friday, during Cyber Monday, during December. Sales are everywhere. They’re looking for it. I’m going to play that
game, but I’m going to play it smartly. I’m going to play it intelligently. And then... and you know what happens? You win, and you get the same amount of money that you wanted in your pocket in the first place, and you played the game.”
Nick Friend: I could literally make this list like... there might be 50 things on it, and I think we should probably do it, but let’s save it for another session because this is too good. We’re weaving around. We could go forever. As a final, though, I’ll say, and then we’ll tie it back to Mother’s Day, and we’ll wrap her up because I know you got to go. But this one hurts a little bit, all right, but it needs to be said. The thought that you, artist, you, photographer, are just going to shoot whatever inspires you and makes you happy, and then you’re not going to do any sales or any marketing, and you’re going to be successful, is a fairy tale, okay? It’s a fairy tale. It is inflating a left balloon, all right? It doesn’t exist. It never has existed. And maybe you think... and you know, the perfect example is, you know, with NFT craze, which you and I are crazy into, you know, everybody latched on to Beeple making $96 million on his first, like, formal week of NFT drops. And never in any of the articles that I see, Nick, never in any of the tweets, a few aside, did they talk about the fact that the guy committed to doing one original piece of art for 5,000 days in a row.
Patrick Shanahan: I know.
Nick Friend: 13 years. I don’t even know if he missed it.
Patrick Shanahan: And he marketed it.
Nick Friend: And he marketed it, and he marketed it for years and years and years when nobody cared. He had no followers, no fans, nobody cared for years. And then he started slowly building and slowly... like every business, most people are not willing to do that.
Patrick Shanahan: No, they’re not. They’re drive-by marketers, Pat. They’re drive-bys, right? One social post, one email, you get discouraged, you’re done, right? It doesn’t work.
Nick Friend: It’s one of the extreme bummers, for lack of a better term, that I have because, again, I talk to hundreds of you guys a week, and you come in and out, and pattern recognition is real after you’ve been doing it for this long. And I see the same situation over and over and over again, and someone has planted the narrative in their head that success in this business is very easy to just create what you want because you’re so awesome and not have to do any marketing or sales, and you’re going to make it in this business. And I’ll listen to you...
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, and listen to your customers, right? I don’t know how it’s happened, but that is not a job, okay? Making it and being successful as an artist or photographer is no different than any other job. It is a ton of hard work. And the lie that has been told is that the most successful artists in history didn’t have to do that themselves. They did. They did, right? I mean, there are stories of some, sure, that didn’t get discovered until after they died, and that’s another one of the ridiculous tropes. But the reason they didn’t get discovered until after they died is because they weren’t doing any marketing and sales.
Nick Friend: That’s right. Yeah. These stories get sensationalized, and it happens in every single industry. You notice that, like, whether it’s like a Facebook story or something like that, people just think, you know, Mark Zuckerberg kind of lucked out. But it’s like the guy was building commercial video games as a teenager, right? He was taking shots at it, and Facebook wasn’t his first attempt at providing a product to a customer, right?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, but I think also... I think what happens, and I think this is part of human nature, particularly with artists or individual influencers, you know, stars or whatever it might be, is they get interviewed, and the media, like the interviewer, like, wants to make it into, you know, like that it was an easier story, right? Like it was their talent and just everything. And I think the artist or the star or whatever gets wrapped up in that a little bit, and it’s like, you know, the story sounds better when you’re like, “Yeah, I didn’t work that hard. I, you know, I didn’t have to do as much homework, and I still got A’s,” right? We all know those people, right? Like, people want to say that. They want to say that they didn’t work as hard, and, you know, they were more smart, they were more talented, you know, and that’s what got them there. But you don’t hear the story enough that it was like, “No, I grinded for years. I stayed up at night. I cried in the middle of the night wondering how I was going to feed my family. I got fired from multiple jobs because of this, you know, and all the hell that actually... I lost friends. I lost family members, you know? Like, there’s a price I paid for this, and you don’t even want to know what it is.” That’s the real story. That’s the real story, you know, and you don’t hear it enough. Anyways, let’s wrap it up and let’s talk about... let’s go back to Mother’s Day.
Patrick Shanahan: Reiterating, Mother’s Day, guys, it’s coming up, and the marketing begins in two and a half to three weeks, okay? Because you’re going to... you need to be making the sales during April, not right at the beginning of May when Mother’s Day happens, right? Just like Valentine’s Day, just like these other holidays, the sales happen three weeks beforehand, right? During three to four weeks beforehand, during that period. So right now is the time that you got to jump on Mother’s Day. Make sure your site is live and according to best practices, and that you’re starting on the marketing as soon as possible. If you need help with these things, now is the best time to look at joining Art Storefronts. We have our Mother’s Day sale, Pat, the Mother’s Day sale. It’s our biggest sale of the year, usually, right? I think aside from Q4, it might be the biggest sale, Mother’s Day, you know? And so if you want to take advantage of that, request a demo. You go to our website, artstorefronts.com. In the upper right-hand corner, there’s always a button that says request a demo. Request your demo, get it in there, and one of the people on our outreach team will reach out to you. There’s no commitment at all. You can see a demo. They’ll answer every single question you have, every detail about pricing and all that stuff, and see if you’re a good fit for us, right? It’s possible that you’re not. We’ll tell you if you’re not. But if you’re a good fit, then you can take advantage of the Mother’s Day sale and save some money and join Art Storefronts and potentially put your business on a much better path than it has been. Another marathon’s on the calendar, Mother’s Day. It’s coming, right?
Nick Friend: Mother’s Day is a big one, so it’s exciting. I can’t wait to see what happens this year. I think there are really big numbers. Thank you for the time today, Nick, and thanks for listening, and as always, have a great day, you guys.
Patrick Shanahan: Thank you, everyone.
