are you an artist or a business person?

this is a question I have asked my self and anyone in this business will at some point have to ask it if they want to be successful.

an artist does not tend to compromise on how he or she positions themselves in the market place.

a business man/woman- knows that perception and positioning are the keys to make it or break it success.

on on some forums when I mention that i will walk into a area and find out who the highest paid performer in that local area is and raise my rates above him or her, i have been jumped on as being arrogant. they seem to take exception to the fact that I raise my rates over everyone in my local area. they are ok with people undercutting them...... I guess its an ego thing with these guys as they start asking me what makes me better then the guy im pricing over.....

my answer is simple i may or may not be better as a skilled performer. it is irrelevant im doing it as a positioning tool. you see im not thinking like an artist. im thinking like a company owner who wants to capture the lions share of the bookings.
my goal is to position my self in my local area as the top professional in my field. the old adage of "you get what you pay for" is looked on as gospel by a lot of people that will be booking me. so am I more skilled then the artist guy? yes....in marketing and corporate branding im WAY better! and that will make the difference in how much my paycheck is at the end of the day. I do this to feed my family not my ego.
leave the ego at home and you will be on the first step to achieving your goal of financial independence.

this does not mean that you do not need to hone your professional tools and skills, it just means you have to think like a professional to make a professionals pay.

my way of doing it, your mileage may differ.

I compromise all of the time, and to me, profit is not a dirty word.  So, I am a business person.

I am artistic.  I have a talent.  I always won "most artistic" and all the art contests throughout school...but as an adult, I went on to restaurant management.

One day, I realized-hey, why am I running a restaurant business, when my real passion is art?

I sold a few commissioned peices for a few hundred bucks, and realized the money in management was better.

Why be a starving artist?

Then one day as I was staring at my beautiful toddlers, I realized I was sitting on a goldmine here-I should be painting their faces.

The skills I learned in my freetime being so passionate about art and color and painting have come to an impasse as I combine it with the stint in early childhood education and my previous experience as a nanny...........

Instead of marketing myself for childcare-something I'm no longer interested in doing, as I am a full time mom now-and instead of investing all of my freetime drawing and painting portraits for only one person, for a one-time bit of money on something I'll never see again.....why not better invest that time into creating temporary art on childrens faces and contributing to their early childhood experiences and give them a positive memory.

Voila!
I'm now the manager of myself-the skills I've learned in management easily transfer over to the skills needed to run my own business.

The mentality here is like fastfood vs casual restaurants vs fine dining.


In this economy, casual diners will resort to fast food, while fine diners will continue going to fine diners.

In facepainting-the middle income will have no problem switching over to the cheaper lower quality, but the upper income will have no problem continueing to pay for the luxury fine dining they are used to.


As I say, cater to the client you want, not the condition of the economy.

Don't look at it as undercutting-look at it as fast food painters...

some people just enjoy working twice as hard to make less money.

Why, I do not know. maybe they feel more success in staying busy and struggling to make ends meet....I know quite a few people who enjoy playing the coupon freebie game-and that is easily over 40 hours of time invested weekly shopping deals, scanning sales and clipping coupons....it works, but with all the work, make it a business.

I'm business minded, to a point that when I first learned extreme couponing, I created a database, started teaching other people and started bartering my skills.

There are many ways to make money-it's not really undercutting...it's the rush that some people like. Maybe they don't want to deal with the kind of client that only wants and expects the best... Maybe they prefer customers with more realistic expectations.
I don't know...I just know, I cater to the type of client I want.

I agree with you Mike. We offer a service in our area that other people do, but they don't do it the same way we do it, and we DO charge a lot more but we created it and it is unique.

Guess what...we get booked all the time because we sell it on quality, reliability and people get to know quickly which companies out there talk the talk but doesn't walk the walk so to speak.

We get feed back all the time, especially from the "last minute" people about who doesn't return calls, or doesn't show up when they are expected or cancels last minute. That is the type of reputation we never want. We always take a deposit and we always deliver.

We are both still employed outside of our business, only because we have some commitments that don't allow us to risk it all right now. I work days and my husband works nights so he can do deliveries etc. during the day.

I used to feel like I was boasting too much if I listed the big name clients on our home page, but now I know it leads to our prospective clients taking us seriously and trusting that we are professional enough to approach.

We are in the process of trademarking our service and intend to make it the best there ever has been. It is not widely advertised until the TM goes through, but we promote it and sell it a lot with big name companies.

We are gearing more toward the corporate market to make this a full time business and we always promote ourselves as bigger and better, and that promotes trust in my opinion.

People who are serious planners will pay for that peace of mind when they are planning something special and important.

I am not marketing for birthday parties so much anymore, as most of them don't want to pay what the service costs and I won't compromise. I sell them some prepackaged product instead.

An example I know of is Smirnoff Vodka - They started out selling their product priced above the competitor brand , using newspaper ads to market, and people bought it because they believed there was quality if it cost more. ( I read this in a magazine years ago)

I was painting portraits of children. But it took me a lot of time. I was always tens how it will look like.
Face painting is a pleasure- it always looks perfect for a painted child. If someone is unhappy I can fix it in minutes not days.