The Business of Learning Business

Recently we set up our booth at San Rafael's Food & Wine Festival at Falkirk...a lovely little Food and Wine event with art and craft booths interspersed between vintners' and restaurants' tables. The day was sunny and warm, the setting was inviting. It seemed like a perfect place to sell our work...and yet we only made one sale all day.

Disappointing doesn't begin to describe it. And for a few minutes Lisa and I felt the temptation to run back to the easy, safe life found in a corporate job. But then we sat down and analyzed ourselves, our booth, our products...pretty much everything about our business and realized we need to change our perspective from artists to business owners in order to make it work. This doesn't mean we will compromise our art, but it does mean restructuring how and on what we spend our time, it means changing how we setup our booth and what we put on the tables. It means taking a hard look at how we price our work.

So, I guess it was a good day after all. It was good because it helped us recognize that we aren't just artists; we are business owners too. On some level we knew this, but our understanding of what that means just stepped up to another level.

Peace.
--Joshua