Three years ago, I founded my online mentorship program, Artists and Profit Makers. But you might be surprised to know that wasn’t the original idea for the name.
I originally toyed with calling the community High-End Handmade.
But something about that name never quite rang true for me. Yes, it encapsulated the idea that I wanted to work with makers who were selling more expensive products. (Because selling something for $200 or $2000 is very different than selling something for $20, and I felt like there weren’t enough resources for the makers selling at those price points.)
But it really didn’t reflect the way I thought about the work I made or the work of the people I wanted to work with. One of my biggest goals is to get makers to see themselves as what they truly are – artists.
And so I decided to put artists right there in the name of the group.
I know that was a tricky decision. Not every maker, designer, or creative views themselves as an artist. But I do.
I believe we’ve been operating with too narrow a view of the art world. The art world is more than fancy galleries and wealthy collectors. It’s more than the art that gets displayed in museums. It’s the work that you and I create everyday. (Whether that’s actually making things, teaching other people to make things, or some combination of both.)
And I believe that the art that we create, the art that people live with every day, has tremendous value to the world. It’s why I focus my teaching on helping artists and makers build successful businesses. And it’s why I put the word “Artist” front and center.
Of course, choosing to put the word “Profit” in the name of the group might be even more contentious. I know, because people have told me, that they feel like they can’t join A&PM because their businesses aren’t yet making a profit. (Spoiler alert: you don’t have to be making a profit to join A&PM, you just have to have profitability as a goal.)
I also know that profit is a scary word for artists and makers, because I’ve been talking and teaching about profit since the early days of Designing an MBA. (Back when it was still called Crafting an MBA.) Everything I do is in service of helping artists and makers profit in their businesses.
But profit is a loaded word. For anyone with half a social conscious, it brings up feelings of corporate greed and exploitation. And it’s true. A lot of shitty things have been done in the name of profit.
But at its core, profit doesn’t have to equal exploitation. Profit is simply the margin between what something costs to make and what it sells for.
For artists and makers, profit is what gives us space. It’s what keeps us from operating on the brink of financial disaster. Profit lets us put money into savings. It lets us rest, recharge, spend time with our friends and families, and take vacations. It lets us build time into our studio practice for creative play and exploration.
Profit is what gives us the time and space to produce our best art and live our best lives.
The irony is that when we, as artists and makers, don’t build profit into our businesses, we actually end up exploiting ourselves. When we view profit as the pursuit of corporate greed, we let our fear of turning into greedy capitalists actually turn us into shitty bosses to ourselves. We’re so afraid of profit that we’re willing to exploit ourselves to not be like “them”.
And I don’t want that for us. I believe that art is important enough to the world that artists and makers deserve to be paid well for what we make. At the same time, I also believe that making art is a job, and that we deserve to be able to make a living from that job while working normal(ish) hours and not working ourselves to the point of exhaustion or bodily harm. (Because let’s face it, too many hours a day spent making can take a toll on our bodies.) And just so we’re clear, I believe every job deserves that basic decency. (It’s just that I work specifically with artists and makers, so it’s our labor not getting exploited that I’m most focused on.)
At the end of the day, I know that both “Artist” and “Profit” are loaded words, filled with lots of baggage, that might turn off many people who might consider working with me.
But they are also powerful words – words that can help reframe the way we think about ourselves, the work we make, and what we should get paid for that work. Helping artists build profitable businesses, so that they can put their art into the world in a sustainable way, is at the core of what I do. So it only makes sense that I put those two words – artist and profit – front and center in the name of my online mentorship program.
For more on this, be sure to watch this IGTV video I made talking about the importance of art and profit:
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