How do you get people to come to you for henna?
Start by ALWAYS having your hands wonderfully hennaed,
and always having henna with you. Be charming, talk to people, and offer
a little TINY henna FREE. (When you're sitting in the food court, coffee
house, bar, party, dorm lounge, park, breach, outside on a lovely day....be
sweet, be friendly, just go do it!) (I said FREE...it is frequently illegal
or uncool to charge in such places) Let them fall in love with your
henna. Let then know where to find you when they want more! (When they
want more they can pay.) Always have a purse full of business cards.
If you can afford to do color copies with a lovely picture of your henna
and business info, pin up flyers everywhere you can think of. Let
people know you exist, and what you do. If you're GOOD, your henna and
your pictures of it will tell your story!
Look on bulletin boards for concerts, raves, events...call
up the phone numbers of the organizers and see what the vending fees and
arrangements. Set a goal of doing one event every week. Start with small
inexpensive events. Make your mistakes at the small places. When you have
more experience, then go to the larger events. When you start to do events,
and not just having people come to you for the occasional henna ...
you need to switch over to the "business rant" rules. As long as you're
very, very small time....cash only, no place of business, no DBA...you
can get by without real business practices.
For an excellent model of part time business practices....think
about the way a part-time high school or college supplier of recreational
pharmaceuticals goes about establishing and maintaining a clientele. Many
of them have excellent business sense....small free samples, cordiality,
keeping a very low profile, relying on word of mouth ... this is very good
for beginning and maintaining little part time henna business. (There is
a crucial legal and ethical issue in the "happy candy" line of work though
that many of them overlook, and thus at some point, their business, life
and everything else comes to a screeching halt). (Henna artists need not
fear being arrested in
their underwear.) Other than that, the "purveyor of small
pleasures" model of part time business is very instructive. With a little
luck, you will have, by word of mouth, a group of happy henna addicts who
MUST have their henna fix every weekend. But, where should you meet your
henna addicts, and how can you attract more?
A college situation, or a relaxed workplace, or a large
circle of friends is ideal for a very small part time henna business .
Word of mouth is always best for getting a part time business going.
It makes your business grow slowly enough for you to do your learning
and esperimenting, so you will become a better artist. When you are
regularly busy, and it gets to the point that you need to buy supplies
wholesale, be a vendor at shows, have a business name, start to expand
and grow and even depend on henna to help pay your bills ....THEN you need
to think about henna as a business rather than a pleasant profitable hobby,
wherein the Business Rant applies.
When you are confident that you can do a good job on anyone
without running into trouble, then think about setting yourself up a weekend
business as a henna artist. Think about festivals, a table at a nail
parlor, a henna salon in your house, or some regular place of business.
This will require setting up your business as outlined in the "full-time
rant" but without committing yourself to leaving your day job. Henna
is very suitable for a part time business!
Going beyond occasional cash-in-hand
henna work? Read on to the "full time business rant" and use the
business rules that apply! Good luck! Here are the next steps!
This is The Full Time Artist's
Business Rant,
in four part harmony:
There are two reasons to begin a business of your own
in the arts, Love or Money.
You may begin a business if you love art and want to do
it a lot, and want to make money at it. This works, but often not
very well, because once you've done something a few thousand times for
money, and experienced all the difficulties that go along with doing business,
the thing you once loved accumulates a lot of emotional baggage and it's
not much fun anymore. Love is not a particularly good reason to begin
a business. Love is an excellent reason to keep your art business
part time, or as a hobby.
Two, you may begin a business because you NEED MONEY!
A sudden change in circumstances that forces you to find a way to make
money
to survive with whatever skills and resources you can muster in a hurry
is an excellent way to begin. Impoverishment is a great motivator
and clarifier of thought. Most artists I know who are making
a full time living in the arts are there because they lost their
steady job and found themselves desparate to pay the bills. Dire
necessity forces an artist to make more realistic business decisions,
and work much more effectively than would usually be the case.
If, for whatever reason you find yourself in a position
to earn money as an artist, you will need to take care of several things
which artists are unaccustomed to doing. These things are absolutely
essential, and if you don't do them, you will not stay in business
long. You must do your bookkeeping. You must have all your
legal permits and banking arrangements in order. You must have no
complications in terms of health or personal relationships. You must
be boundlessly enegetic, intense and highly motivated, with a strong ego
and undaunting will. You must be unquestionably excellent in your
art. You will need a reliable car. You must have an answering
machine. You must have no difficulty making decisions.
Do the numbers of what you need to earn. Add up
all your monthly expenses. Double that. (Things screw up.)
Add up what you can reasonably expect to earn in a month's art business,
minus all the expenses. Divide that in half. ( Things screw
up.) In your grimmest, most pessimistic evaluation, will this work?
It takes at least $750 a week to support a middle class family of four
comfortably. If you pace yourself to earn double that, the money should
even out to where you just squeek by. Always put 10% off the top
of your earnings aside for hard times and emergencies. If those
numbers really don't line up, do your art business part time and
make peace with some job that pays the bills. Actually, it's a little
easier to bear a dreary job that pays the bills if you have a little business
of your own where you maintain your sanity and do someting creative.
Every single day, without fail, you must record your expenses
and income. It does not matter very much how you do it in in a small
one-person business, as long as you understand everything you have written
down. What makes your bookkeeping system good enough? If you
can find any expense, any receipt, any income amount in less than 20 minutes,
your system is good enough. If you cannot tell someone how much you
spent on travel, or on supplies, or how much you earned in any particular
month in the last 5 years within 20 minutes...your system is NOT good enough.
Use a notebook, or use software, but USE it and use it daily! Keep
records of everything. Keep the records orderly. If you've
never kept books on a business before, go to a big bookstore and ask to
see books on home businesses. Buy one or two that seem to make sense.
Bookkeeping software is a wonderful thing, and not difficult.
Bookkeeping is tedious, like flossing your teeth and doing the dishes,
but it is crucial. If you don't have well-kept books, when you get
audited by the IRS or try to improve your financial situation at the bank,
you will go down in flames. Never, ever, throw away a receipt.
Any receipt you don't have will be the one that someone behind a desk will
absolutely require to approve you for some loan or audit, refund or bill.
Buy receipt books. Use them. Either
get purchase order books and invoice books at your local office supply
store, or use your bookkeeping software to create them. When
you order supplies, make out a purchace order with a number. When
you sell something, give that person a receipt. When you do henna
at a party, write up an invoice for the person paying you. Have them sign
it when you are paid. Keep ALL of these in meticulous order.
Most artists find this oppressive and tedious, but your tax auditor and
bank loan manager will adore you for it. It may help you get yourself
into a more stable business situation, like a mall kiosk, if you have a
proveable track record of sales.
Get legal and stay legal. Visit your local city
hall, and see what permits you need to have a home business. Get them.
See what paperwork you need to file to have a name for your business.
Do that. Go to your bank and set up a business account.
Keep all these papers where you can find them. File your returns
on time. Find out what liability insurance you need for a business
in your state and get it. If you want your business to grow
and stay afloat, you will have to have these things and keep them up to
date.
Make sure what you're doing is legal. Make sure
you HURT NO ONE! No quick profit is ever worth a lawsuit
for pain and suffering! Are
you considering using black henna?
Every day, without fail, make at least one of the ugly
phone calls that you have been avoiding.
What is your payback for all this bookkeeping and permit
holding? As an artist running a home business, a world of thumbing
your nose at the IRS will open before you! You will legally be eligable
to deduct from your income part or all of the following as legitimate business
expenses: mileage allowance when travelling, food allowance when
travelling, accomodations when travelling, other transportation expenses,
your mortgage, rentals related to business, insurance, all your supplies,
costumes, books, internet access, banking expenses, utilities in your home,
all the purchases you make that can concievably be regarded as business
related, phone line, home repairs or improvements if they can be
related to your business, computer upgrades, promotions, festival fees,
business lunches with other artists, commissions, donations to non-profit
organizations ... and you can get quite creative with this as long as you
can make a bullet-proof paper trail that implies that the expense was part
of your business. In short, virtually every year that you are in
business as an artist-craftsman, you can arrange your legitimate deductible
home business expenses to very nearly cancel out your income, and
you will pay little or no income tax on your earnings. If you do
this and have children, you can recieve low income-related benefits
such as EIC, and later your children will be eligible for outstanding grants
and scholarships based on financial need as they enter college.
The IRS WILL audit you every 5 to 7 years. The IRS
deeply fears and loathes home businesses. Be ready for them.
I won both my audits.
Running a home business can put a strain on your health,
because you will need to be boundlessly energetic and enthusiastic, and
working about 70 hours a week for many weeks on end as your business grows.
There is no sick leave in a artist's home business. You have to be
producing your art, or no money comes in. Take care of yourself!
You can get health insurance for yourself as self-employed,
but it is expensive and may be difficult to find if you have any pre-existing
conditions. If you have a health problem, you may need to stay with
a "straight job" and do your art part time, unless you can get good
medical coverage from your spouse's job. A pregnancy
can be an excellent reason for you to go into a home arts business,
so you can both have an income and be with your child, but it is unwise
to put your pregnancy and child at risk with no medical care. Be
as sensible and well-advised as you can in terms of combining mothering
and business. If you have not been pregnant and had children before,
you may underestimate the time and energy required to manage infants and
business in the same space. It certainly can be done, and done wonderfully,
but it is NOT EASY!
Running a home business can create strains in your
personal relationships. Spouse, lovers, and children can become very
jealous of the time you spend on your business, and can become very inventive
at creating distractions to draw your attention back to them.
People often do not understand that being at home doing art
is for you serious employment. If people continually interrupt
your work, to the point of reducing your productivity and money, set firm
limits in terms of time and space. You may find it useful to have
"business hours" or a "business space" and make it clear to people that
you are at work, and are not to be bothered until you take a break.
"Business space" and "business hours" are also useful in making YOU leave
business behind you when it is time to be a spouse, lover, or parent.
It's very easy to become totally consumed by your art and business, and
to drag it around physically or mentally with you always. This will
annoy the hell out of all the people who love you. Learn to separate
yourself from your arts business, and remember to set it aside as you prefer
other people to leave their business at the office too.
To succeed in your art business, you will need to get
visible and stay visible. Find out how to get into festivals,
concerts, street fairs, open markets, mall kiosks, coffee houses, spas.....anything
that looks promising. Sometimes you can find out by going
to the place and asking, or try the local city hall or chamber of commerce,
state arts commission, or internet. Get the application forms.
Send them in on time. Make sure you have an excellent presentation,
simple enough to be understood at a glance. Your biggest investment
in time and resources early on in your business will be in making sure
people know you exist, and presenting yourself well. Take clear,
beautiful, uncomplicated slides of your work for festival applications.
A great looking website with beautiful pictures of your work is very helpful!
Subtlety, cunning, complexity and mystery in these presentations is a bad
idea. The arts world is very competitive, and you need to get people's
attention instantly, and hold it. The business managers of the places where
you hope to do business may know little about your art and care less about
it. You will have to market yourself aggressively and concisely.
Go for every bit of public exposure you possibly can. Every time
you are out, you must look charming, be eager and cheerful, and be, yourself,
a work of art. You are selling yourself as much as your art.
If you can get out in public with your art 40 weekends in the first
year, you will be well on your way to either being a success in business,
or you will have found out that this way of life is not for you.
All contracts must be in writing. This protects
you. There are books and software with lovely sample contracts for
all sorts of occasions. Have a look at them! You may not have
thought about copyright, model release forms, billing, delivery, bookings
for parties and such, but you may need to think about them soon!
To endure in business, you will need patience and
a vast sense of humor, particularly in regards to the general dimness
of this species, and an unshakeable confidence in yourself.
Keep little cards with your business info on it with you
at all times. Always keep your hands beautifully hennaed. Never
pass up an opportunity to promote yourself, short of being a real pain
in the ass.
When you talk to artists similar to yourself, ask them
what works, and what doesn't work. If they are honest, open and helpful
, they are wonderful people and try to keep them as your friends.
If they are secretive and unhelpful about business, they suck.
Ignore them. Karma will take care of them.
When you chose festivals to attend, try to get maximum
exposure for minimum expense. In your first year of work, your
well-kept books will show you which are the most profibable venues. Aim
for situations where your fees bring back 10 times as much in sales.
That will help your cash flow a great deal. The most expensive festivals
may not be the best money-makers for you. In henna art, particularly, you
are limited by the number of hours you are hennaeing, rather than the inventory
you can bring, unless you can arrange to do both. Every business-artist
will find a niche....search diligently for it, then work it for all its
worth! It is very difficult to guess what venue will be the best
money maker for you....good instincts may help, or cast whatever household
oracle you have at hand. Seeking auspices of one business project
by casting an oracle is as valid as trying to forcast what will happen
by any other means. Personally, I prefer the I Ching, and the edition
published by Asiapac is particularly helpful. Most artists I know
have small household shrines where they offer modest bribes to deities,
to better their chances of business success, and to relieve themselves
of the strain of worrying unneccessarily about circumstances they really
cannot control.
If a festival or business situation begins to suck and
waste your time beyond reason, pack up, leave and cut your losses.
There are some situations wherein it is truely useless to keep trying.
Don't spend time or money accomplishing nothing.
If you find that festivals are the best place for you
to to earn money as an artist, establish a bank account and put the fees
for each show away in that account for a year, as you do shows. Show
fees can be cash flow headache. The sooner you establish a fund for
this, the better. Show fees also cause problems for your regular
bank account because the promoters can wait months before they deposit
the check...and cause you a sudden overdraft if you've forgotten about
it!
It is very useful to make the banking arrangements to
accept credit cards. When you have improved in your art enough that
you can do larger jobs and charge more, you can improve your sales hugely
by accepting credit cards. Keep excellent books for the first year,
and go to the bank where you have your business account and ask about accepting
credit cards. They will want to know how much your average
sale is, and your rate will be based on that. It will cost you to
do this, but most art businesses triple in sales when they accept credit
cards, because you can encourage people to choose a much more expensive
piece of artistry. If people can only spend on you the cash they
have in their pockets, they will spend very little. Visa and Mastercard
are by far the most useful cards to accept.
It may not be all that crucial to have business capital
to run an arts business. If you have very little money, you spend
what you have very, very carefully, and that is an excellent thing in business.
Earn as much as you possibly can. Spend as little as you possibly
can. Businesses that depend on inventory, manufacturing or importing
requre more capital, and the strategy for running those businesses is very
different than running a business based on your artistic output.
If you must go into debt to finance your business, do so at the lowest
possible interest rate, and pay it off immediately. A henna
artist's business is similar to the strategy of a performer....where
money is produced by time spent doing the art rather than accumulating
objects and selling them. If you are a henna artist, and not carrying
inventory, it is important to have lots of hours hennaeing, at as little
expense as possible. If an artist is producing works and then taking
them to a festival, it is often far more profitable to travel with
samples and take custom orders than to travel with inventory and pray that
the stuff sells. Take plenty of photos of the work you have done.
That is your resume. People will order from you if they can
see that you've delivered well in the past.
Consignment is a great way to get no money fast.
In 30 years of business, I found exactly one gallery that paid honestly
and promptly for consigned goods.
If you want to take your henna business the direction
of importing and distributing, that is an entirely different matter, and
requires very different management skills. If you are expanding your
business in a way that will require investment , loans and inventory, you
may need to talk to someone experienced in managing business and finances,
or read books on such. Business and money management is not
a difficult game, but you do have to know the rules. Importing, also
has rules, and you will have to learn to love your bookkeeping, permits,
phone and paperwork in ways that a single henna artist would not.
I never expanded my business beyond the one-artist, one-home-business,
no employees point, so I can't offer much advice on major business growth.
Learn to be very firm about collecting money that is owed
you.
Decide what you want out of your business. Do you
want adulation, time with your kids, money, security, control over your
own time, job satisfaction, independence, or relief from boredom?
What do you want most? Structure your business in the way that will
deliver what you want most best. Decide what you want your
business to be in 5 years. Figure out how to get to that point in
5 years. Write these things down and re-evaluate them once a year.
Do not fear making decisions. Being wrong is no
big deal, but being indecisive is a killer. If you must decide between
artistic integrity and making the mortgage payment or feeding your children,
go for the money. You can have artistic integrity AFTER the mortgage
check clears the bank and the children are fed.
Failure is a bitch. Failure in your own business
is an expensive bitch, and can be overwhelming and depressing. However,
misery is not very useful. When you have, for whatever reason, gone
down in flames with bounced checks, a disasterous show, wrecked art, or
abject humiliation ... allow yourself one hour to hide in the bathroom
crying, then stop and evaluate the situation. Does this disaster
require a lawyer, a policeman, a bailbondsman, a physician, a paramedic,
a mortician, a coroner's inquest or a priest? If it does, things
really suck, and you should call for help. Does this disaster simply
require a large infusion of money, time or apologies? If that
is all that's needed to repair the damage, it's is not a very big deal
then, and you can sort it out, though it will be painful and take some
doing. Never avoid dealing with disasters. They fester and
go septic if you do not take care of them directly. The faster and
more honestly you confront difficult situations, the easier they are to
get through. Cultivate a circle of friends who have also been artist-businessmen.
You'll quickly find out from them that not only are disasters and failures
inevitable, but that they can be dealt with, and most of them are not a
very big deal. If you must go into debt to cure a disaster, seek
professional debt management advice. Money is difficult only if you
do not understand it well.
Success in your own business is a magnificent high.
Allow yourself one hour of feeling insufferably pleased with yourself.
Treat yourself to something nice that costs no more than $25.
After that, get a grip.
Don't trust anyone farther than you can throw them if
there is money involved. Really.
This doesn't mean you have to be paranoid and evil tempered
... it just means that you must get everything in writing, and keep all
your papers in order. Arguing over money is very tiresome, broken
promices leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and true rip-off artists
turn up where least expected. Don't trust in people's good intentions
and generosity. Put everything in writing and keep your eyes open.
Never risk what you can't afford to lose.
I ran a home business as an artist for 30 years, and in
many years it was the sole source of income for a family of four.
In nearly all other years, it was still equal to or more than other sources
of income. It was never boring.
Other useful stuff for henna artists:
Get Insurance if you're going to work at festivals!
Many larger festivals will require proof of insurance before you set up!
"Ye Olde World Living History Foundation" has an excellent
insurance plan for henna artists! To qualify for their coverage, you must
be preserving an ancient tradition, or doing "living history". Henna artists
qualify! Get the "Merchants & Artisans" plan, which
costs $100 per year and protection for ownership, maintenance or use of
premises & operations, and includes coverage of 2 million special &
general liability, $5,000 reenactors special risk & $2,500 personal
and medical.
Very few people sue reenactors and renfaire merchants
so your insurance rates will be reasonable. But, If you try to insure yourself
as a tattoo artist, your rates and risk category will be sky high!
Talk to Dusty at:
Ye Olde World Living History Foundation
1130 Sheridan Ave, Suite #160
Cody, WY 82414
Phone: (307) 587-1872
Fax: (307) 587-1875
email: dusty@renfaire.org
Tell him Carrie at Red Veil Mehndi sent you - he knows
exactly what henna is!!