Seeing entrepreneurship through the eyes of a rising artist

I have a great relationship with my ex-girlfriend. She is an artist — a fine art painter — and a teacher. She is an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word.

I am a technology entrepreneur. I build technology businesses and that’s hard. She is an artist trying to build a reputation and a brand. That’s harder.

When we talk about it, she espouses very familiar motivations and values.

Things like;

• She has a vision for what she wants to create and a drive to go out and create it.
• She wants to feel in control of her own destiny instead of feeling like she’s having to be told what to do and when.
• She realizes that the rewards and success she gets out of her effort is directly proportional to the work she puts into it.
• She knows the time she spends building things represent investments. She has to choose and manage where she invests her time.
• She has to think about her accounting, her marketing, her inventory, her sales pipeline, her forecasts… albeit not on the scale of a product-oriented business.

7 years ago she opened a private school in her apartment’s studio in order to sustain herself and her work. She leveraged an existing skill, something she knew she enjoyed doing, in order to get something off the ground.

When she started we did all the basic things — registered her as a business, created a website, a Facebook page, a Google Maps marker, etc. We talked about pricing and we made budgets and calculated how many students she’d need in order to cover all her expenses. I showed her how to account for her taxes (and how to do them) including what and how to track her expenses. All the things a good small business owner does.

Then she had to take on the challenge of customer acquisition. She left business cards at other small businesses to some small effect. Then she printed and distributed fliers around the neighbourhood and found that that actually worked pretty well. In fact, this was the first marketing strategy that she was able to measure in a sense and get a real feel for the principle of “work in, reward out.”

Once she felt her teaching business was stable, she started feeling more confident in her ability to build her own brand.

4 years ago she started participating in national pastellists’ exhibitions and has won a top 5 prize every year but one. Two out of four she also won the public voted people’s choice award.

Last year she made a concerted effort to apply to contests and try to improve her notoriety. At the start, she only wanted to apply for the sake of it, with no expectation of winning anything. Her goal was modest in that she merely wanted to motivate herself into action on this front — something she never had the confidence to do before. In the end, she ended up taking home a prize or honourable mention in every single contest she applied to.

This year, she is expanding both her network and notoriety by organizing a major exhibition with herself and 6 other prominent artists, and it’s shaping up to be one of the most must-see art exhibits of the year so far (all January of it)!

She is continually pushing herself and her skills and her career and brand. She tries new things and embraces her entrepreneurial spirit more and more as time goes on.

This is the essence of entrepreneurship. That is, the intersection of personal growth, personal challenge, and business.

To me, she represents a great example of how you just have to go for it, and figure it out, and do what you have to to survive… and then expand! Decide what you want, dream it up, and go create it!

She is proof that the investment pays off.. even in such a difficult and competitive field as hers.

Melissa Breault teaches fine art drawing and painting out of her studio in Montreal, Canada. She is exhibiting her work at Gallery MAE from January 20th to March 31st 2017 at 3495 Rue Hochelaga, Montréal, QC H1W 1H6, Canada. See the event page here. See her work and learn about her classes at http://www.melissabreault.ca

Dan Lazar is a technology entrepreneur, also in Montreal, Canada. He leads the technology team at Spotful. We make technology that turns any every day video into interactive content.