John Paul Fischbach is a director, designer, educator, and arts business consultant with over 25 years experience in the arts industry. As the CEO and co-founder of Auspicious Arts Incubator, a not-for-profit arts business incubator, John Paul has worked with more than 3,700 artists and arts organizations to manage their businesses.
In his new book, No More Starving Artists: How to Master Your Art, Your Life and Build Your Business, Fischbach teaches artists the 5 pillars they need to run a successful arts business and avoid burnout.
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Since starting my career in theatre over 30 years ago, I have seen myself and artists in all disciplines go through the painful process of learning how to run an arts business. ‘No More Starving Artists’ is written for all independent artists who have made the empowering choice of using their creative talent, to live a life full of passion and to be the authors of their own destiny. We artists are awesome creators. Unfortunately, most working artists were often never told early on that you needed a whole bunch of other skills to complement your artistic talent.
If you want to succeed in business as an artist and make a living from your awesome talent, some basic skills, once you acquire them, will keep you from living on the brink of poverty. Artists need help to learn marketing and sales, time management, bookkeeping, and some of the 88 other skills that it takes to run a successful small arts business.
In my 10 years of working with artists from all disciplines on their businesses, I have indentified 5 main pillars without which no working artists can thrive. You can use these pillars as a framework to master your art and your life, and build a more successful and sustainable career from your passion.
The first three pillars help you, the business owner, to clarify what your unique arts business is about:
Pillar 1: Vision & Mindset
You develop your vision and your mindset first. These two skill elements are critical for artists to be able to build your unique and successful small business. You must be able to construct a vision of where you’re going, and you must have the right mindset to believe that you’ll get there. You have to ask yourself:
- What does your version of success look like?
- Do you believe you can and will succeed?
Pillar 2: Branding & Values
Once you’ve got your vision down, you need to develop your brand by communicating with your fans, followers, customers, and your audience to find out what they say about you and your art. You need to align their description of you with your values. You want to make sure that your business is delivering benefits, solving problems, and helping others in ways that are important to you and to them. The vital questions are:
- Why are you doing this?
- How do you stay true to what’s important to you?
Pillar 3: Marketing & Message
And then, if you know where you’re heading, and your customers want you and what you have to offer, it’s time to work on finding more customers and growing your market. That boils down to learning about marketing and using value-based language to deliver your unique message of value and impact. You need to research:
- Who are your customers?
- Why do they want you, and what you have to offer?
Once you’ve got those three pillars in place, you have a viable business. You have steady money coming in from your products and services and money going out to create your art and grow your business.
The next two pillars comprise the skills you need as the CEO of your arts business.
Pillar 4: Money & Finance
Now it’s time to learn to manage all this money and educate yourself about the financial side of your arts business. You need this fourth pillar because you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Every small business owner (artists included) must be able to understand, measure, and manage their money. The more you learn and grow, the bigger your business gets. Your market expands, and the value of what you produce increases. More money starts to come into the business, and more business means longer hours and more work. But you don’t want to burn out. You need to know:
- How to manage your money
- How to get comfortable seeing your art from the perspective of numbers.
Pillar 5: Planning & Productivity
It’s time for the fifth and final pillar of planning and productivity. You must make plans, set goals, measure progress, and make course corrections when necessary. It is essential at this stage to learn to manage your time and build a team around you. Your final piece of knowledge is:
- How to grow your business and manage it all so that you don’t burn out.
You build or re-engineer your arts business by erecting these five pillars in order. If you jump around, just doing what you feel is urgent, you’ll build an interesting business, but you’re likely to burn out too quickly because the success that you experience will be sporadic. Your success won’t be managed, and worst of all, it won’t be built on a solid foundation of these five pillars. You won’t be able to support the growth of your business.
You are a powerful artist with an amazing talent that the world needs. Make sure that you master your arts business.
