It Works Until It Doesn’t
The biggest mistake I’ve made in eight years of running a creative business
This month, for my paid subscribers, I had planned to document my creative process as I prepared for my first solo gallery show in eight years. Instead, there’s been two big disruptions this month that have thrown December wildly off-course.
First of all, I came down with the respiratory infection that everyone in London seems to be battling at the moment. My chest has been dodgy for a while (is weaver’s lung still a thing?) but for the last few days I’ve felt like I’m trying to breathe through a tea strainer.
Second of all I decided, quite abruptly, to move out of the studio that I’ve occupied for the last 18 months.
You may remember that I originally moved into a smaller studio in order to cut costs, and give myself more time to make art. But while my previous workspace was expensive, it was big enough for me to make art in and run Balfour & Co.
In this new (soon to be old) studio, everything was piled on top of each other. My looms have stood collecting dust as I rearranged the space to pack orders, and then rearranged it again for workshops. I tried to be optimistic, and even wrote about how I was trying to manage the space. But after 18 months of effort, I’m still not making art, and Balfour & Co is barely breaking even.
So I’m changing things again. Soon I’ll be moving all of the remaining Balfour & Co stock into a storage unit, and moving my looms into a brand new studio. And I’m taking this change as an opportunity to reflect, reassess, and maybe start doing things differently.
Last time I downsized I was too overwhelmed to think straight. In theory I was cutting costs and freeing up time to make more art, but in practice, Balfour & Co continued as normal. Every time I tried to cut back on something like online courses or workshops, I would find myself restarting them a few months down the line, simply because I needed to make money.
This time, I’m determined that things will be different, and I want the downsizing process to lead to long-term change. In the past week I’ve sat down with my accountants to go over the business finances for the coming year, and had extensive whiteboard brainstorm sessions with my fiancé (every artist should have a civil servant for a life partner 😉)
These discussions have helped me see with renewed clarity what the problem areas are in my creative business.So here’s another change I’m making, and one major New Year’s Resolution for 2024 - stop working for free!
This may seem bizarre, given that I’ve been self-employed for almost a decade, but this really is something I need to confront head-on. I put my art first and my business first. All the money that I made from my business and my art through them went straight back into paying for my business and my art, and I syphoned a little off the top for myself to live on.