Today’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Miriam Schulman who is an artist, author and founder of The Inspiration Place and The Artists Incubator Coaching Program where she helps artists develop their skills, tap into their creativity, and grow thriving art businesses. We talk all about how you can market yourself and turning your passion into profit!

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

 

• You don’t need thousands of clients – you need to sell to the high end of the market.
• Start with your goal/destination in mind.
• You need to have a signature style to be able to market yourself.
• Cheaper does not mean it is easier to sell! People are looking for value.
• The 5-part Passion to Profit framework:
• Production – making sure you have the capacity to produce assets
• Pricing – how much will you charge and will it work?
• Prospecting – start telling everyone who you are and what you do and own it!
• Promotion – getting prospects and getting sales
• Productivity – your system for making it all work
• The first part of promotion is to get attention, the second part is getting sales through building relationships.
• Write down your goals – when you imagine, you use the creative part of your brain and when you write it down it uses the logical side of your brain.
• Setting goals enables you to be more realistic.
• We have to help our team manage their time as well – we need to know when they are working on projects.

 

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

 

Just because something is cheaper, does not mean it is easier to market and sell!

 

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS

 

·

• An introduction to Miriam 04:29
• Finding your market 17:35
• 5-Part Passion to Profit Framework 18:41
• Setting goals for your business 30:38
• Taking your business online 37:07
• Miriam’s new book 41:20

 

CHECK MIRIAM OUT:

 

Website

Facebook

Instagram

The Inspiration Place

 

Transcript

 

Firstly, I'd like to start by wishing you a very, very Merry Christmas. Now, and I'm a little bit late. It was a couple of days ago, but I wanted to take the chance to hope that you had a lovely, lovely time with your family and friends. And you got to celebrate, you got to take time off. You've got to relax and you've got to remember what all this hard work all year round was for. So I'm really hoping that you've had a lovely, lovely break. And also, if you are listening to this at the time it comes out, then I hope you've got exciting plans for new year. Have to say I'm not big new year fan if I'm honest. We tend to stay at home with a bottle of fares or seven and yeah, just watch a bit of TV.

Just, it's not really my thing. It's not really my thing. Then my husband did try and convince me that we should go to LA this year for like four days, which I quickly assured him I was not up to doing because I'm very tired. Okay. So before I get started today's interview, which is awesome. It's with Miriam who is so much fun and talks about lots of good things, including her five step passion to profit framework.

Teresa: I want to just give you a heads up of something that might be happening soon. I have been going through the process of a rebrand, and also looking at my names of everything, not my name, my name stays the same, but as in the name of my membership, and my podcast and all these other good things, and they are changing, I'm not ready at this point just to share yet what it's going to be.

Teresa: With such a seconds of I've changed my podcast name. The first time it was Social Media Marketing Made Simple. Then I realized it was way too much more about marketing than just social media. So I changed it to Marketing That Converts. And now I'm realizing that it's way more about just marketing.

Teresa: Because the time that I've gone on in my business, as I'm like seven plus years into my business, I realized that I can obviously talk and support in lots of other areas than I currently, you know, than I did. So it's going through another little tweak and a change, which I'm very excited about. I hope you'll love.

Teresa: It's coming soon, but I just want you to keep an eye out for us, keep an eye on my socials and things, and you'll find it as it starts to happen, but I just wants to give you a heads up. Okay. So like I said, we talked today to the lovely Miriam. Now Miriam is the founder of Inspiration Place The Artists Incubator Coaching Program where she helps artists from amateur to professionals to develop their skills, tap into their creativity and grow thriving art businesses.

Teresa: She's also an artist herself and an author. And basically today, we talk about how you can market yourself and how you can turn your passion into profit. Because now I don't know about you and we talked about this on the podcast, but lots of people think, you know, struggling artists, like that's the name.

Teresa: And actually she talks more about just the fact of her being artists talks about having an online business and how to really sort of stand firm in the fact of what you do and who you are and your personality. So I think there's loads you're going to get from this episode. So without further ado here is the lovely Miriam.

Teresa: Okay, welcome to this week's podcast. The very lovely Miriam Schulman. Miriam how are you doing?

Miriam: Good. Thank you so much for having me.

Teresa: My pleasure. I am really excited to have you on. I'm really excited to share with my listeners your story and how you got to kind of what you're doing now because it's something that's quite close to my heart in terms of doing your passion and doing something that you absolutely love. So I always start exactly the same way. I'm sure it bored listeners to death, but I don't mix it up a bit, but can you start by introducing yourself and tell us how you got to do what you're doing now?

Miriam: Okay. So I'm in my fifties. So like the let's, let's get the short version of the life story journey.

Miriam: Uh, so I am an artist and what I primarily do is I help other people who either want to reconnect with that creativity. Cause they haven't, they either, they always wanted to paint and never got around to it. They used to be creative in college. So I help those people. And I also, for the past few years, been helping other emerging artists make a full-time living from their art.

Teresa: Okay.

Miriam: Okay, so here's the journey part? In a shortest version possible. So I haven't always been an artist. Like most people like my audience, I took the longer path. I did the practical route first I worked on wall street and after 9/11 happened, I decided I was no longer going to do that just as I'm sure there's many people now during the pandemic who are taking stock of what they're doing in their life.

Miriam: Um, people who were laid off and maybe don't want to go back to what they were doing before. So that was my experience after 9/11, is that I was not going to go back to the world to finance. And that's when I committed myself to becoming an artist.

Teresa: So can I just touch on that bit? Because obviously that is, that is a huge, huge event that took place. And life-changing for the world almost. Um, were you in wall street at that point? During 9/11 or so were you physically very close to where it all happened?

Miriam: Well, that's a really good question. And what most people don't remember is there was another bombing of the world trade center in 93. And I was working in the world trade center at that time.

Miriam: And I, we were working my office faced directly the tower that where the bomb went off and in my office, everyone kept working. And that vision of seeing the terrorism happen in the building next to ours, while my office stayed working that stuck with me. So that when 9/11 happened, If you recall, there was 20 minutes between when the two planes hit and the second tower, they did not rush to evacuate that, they were not evacuating that.

Miriam: So it was that culture that you keep working, even though there's a terrorist attack going on right next door, um, so even though I was not working in the world trade center during 9/11, I had been so close to that world and it was so close to what, who I, it could have been me. So it was so close to that.

Miriam: Um, that was a very frightening, kind of like a PTSD moment for me when, when I saw, um, 9/11, it was like brought me right back to that first bombing.

Teresa: Yeah. And you're right, like, what kind of world do we live in where something like that happens. And yet we just keep working. Like that, would you say it like that?

Teresa: It's like, well, that's insane. Who does that? But kind...

Miriam: For the record, I didn't keep working. Like I, okay. So when the first bomb went off, I was having lunch with a girlfriend in the cafeteria, which is on the second floor. The power went out. So there was like backup generators that kept the lights on and the computers humming, but they stopped running the elevators.

Miriam: They didn't tell us what was happening. They told us it was a cone failure. So my friend and I, we walked up, back up 37 flights of stairs. Could you imagine if like this was during, you know, okay. So we walked back up and it wasn't until we got to the, to our desks, that we could see what the truth of what was actually happening outside the windows.

Miriam: And people were smashing the windows with their computers to, um, try to breathe. And I just turned right around and left. I turn around.

Teresa: And I'm glad to say I can't imagine because that's just, I mean, obviously we will watch 9/11 in absolute horror and, but to be so close to it and to, and I think not that you know, you don't ever want to think, you know, what good came of it, but the fact is that you looked at what your life was at that point of when this is not worth it.

Miriam: No. Like if I was waiting for a sign from the universe, it's pretty big sign. So at the time, like I said, I wasn't working on wall street. In fact, I wasn't even working at all. I has taking an extended maternity leave, but that's when I said to my husband, I'm not going back.

Teresa: No. You happened to live like, you know, and I know we can't live in fear and I know that things happen all the time, but just living and working in that environment.

Teresa: And funny enough, I have a family member who worked in New York and that was the point that she decided 'I'm not working in New York anymore.' And she came away and moved and they now work somewhere else in the States. But I think sometimes, although we don't like it. Although no one liked the pandemic. No one is pleased that terrorist attacks happen. But those things make you see things in a way that maybe you could never have seen things.

Miriam: Absolutely. There's nothing like a crisis, whether it's a global thing or a personal crisis, like a death, a death in your life that lifts the veil of whatever's not working in your life.

Teresa: Yeah.

Miriam: And you see very clearly what is, and isn't it important to you. I mean, I think we've all had that experience, Teresa. I bet you have as well where you've had like a death in the family or some sort of crisis and all of a sudden, like your to-do list gets caught in half. You're like, oh yeah, I don't have to do this stuff anymore, you know, this is not necessary. Create a real, you know, whatever ridiculous thing you had on your list.

Teresa: Yeah, exactly. All right. So can I ask you. So, what was the transition then between having a job in wall street to then, like, I'm really fascinated in, in that kind of, not just the, how did you do it? How did you get from one to the other, but also how you fell? Because I'm assuming that working in wall street and the trade center is doing all that stuff.

Teresa: Like. It must've felt very powerful and empowering. And then like to say to your wall street colleagues, I'm going to go off and do something around painting. Like obviously I am simply playing, which, you know, what I mean, like how did that feel?

Miriam: That's a good question. I haven't been asked that before. Yeah, there is, there was something, there is you tapped on something that most people don't realize, um, most people, when they talk to me, they assume I hated that world. And what you just tapped into was the truth that there was something very seductive about all that power of the money. And I grew up very poor. So I had never had that before. So that was like very difficult to walk to walk away from.

Miriam: And there was a little bit of that. I hope people don't see what I'm doing right now at first, you know, there was a little bit of that. I also like Teresa to kind of compare it. So most people will have this experience. It's like the hero's journey in all those heroes journey story. So, um, pick, pick any of them, wizard of Oz, let's just pick where the heroin decides they're going to go on this great journey.

Miriam: And there's that moment where they, they want to go back. So like Dorothy's has no, I'm not running away from home and going back to get that. And then there's that big moment that happens where it's no, you're not going back. So there was really the two steps that had happened Teresa. There was the extended maternity leave, which was kind of like my first I'm stepping back from this world because I was already feeling jaded.

Miriam: And then when 9/11 happened, that was like the crossing of the threshold. In that hero's journey. So, um, you know, like in star wars where Luke's planet gets blown up, for example, or Dorothy, her house goes to Oz. So that crossing of the threshold moment makes it impossible to go back. So I felt like it was impossible to go back at that point.

Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. So then you only had one choice which was then to make this a success. So did you leave or did you cross that threshold knowing full well, what you were going into?

Miriam: Oh, no.

Teresa: I was going to say.

Miriam: I didn't, did not. I just knew I wasn't. I was so confused. I was so confused. I didn't, I, I didn't believe I could make a living as an artist, which is why I didn't pursue it in the first place.

Miriam: So I did start painting was always my passion. So I was painting and I thought I was going to be a Pilates instructor. So I took a job, um, at a very big chain of gyms and Teresa it was um, the gym may sit their mission to teach there, um, since New York sports club, which I don't know how they did during the pandemic, but prior to the pandemic, a huge chain of gyms. They train their instructors, not just on how to do the exercises and how to sell, because that's where the money is, is how to sell personal training packages.

Miriam: And it was during these sales training sessions that I had my aha moment. I was like, oh, you mean I could do these things. I'm not going to do it to sell personal training packages. I'm going to do it to sell my portraits. And since then that was like, became a lifelong mission for me to learn everything that you spend your time and in your world, like the email marketing and building my like, and the more I learned about how to do that, the more excited I became because I felt I had control over my destiny.

Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. And isn't that funny? I think, I don't know many people who just take that step into being an entrepreneur who then go, oh, this is the thing exactly. Like they have the passion, they have the thing, but actually what's really fascinating is the fact that the thing that you, that held you back is the thing that you're helping other people with now.

Teresa: You thought I could never make money. And I think like, as a complete layman to this, I know very little about the art world. My friend owns an art gallery, which she loans me lovely art to put in my office which is nice. Um, but like, you know, the only thing I know really about art, this is the big assets that sell their paintings, but hundreds of thousands, millions, whatever, and you kind of don't or the really disposable art that you get an Ikea or, you know what I mean?

Teresa: Like habitat or whatever it is. I don't, I don't really see the in between bit, which is like the, not the Van Goghs and not the Ikea. So how was that getting started in that and trying to then sell your own stuff?

Miriam: Okay. So the great question, and I think what most people don't realize is there are so many artists making a living who are not household names because they think either you're a household name or you're starving and they, and the media loves to play the story of Van Gogh to tragic hero.

Miriam: Meanwhile, he was never starving. Let's just be honest. He had a trust fund, you know, Theo sent him plenty of money. Um, okay. So they love to play that up, but you don't need, and Teresa I'm sure you'll agree with this when you're, when you're at, let's say, and you help a lot of coaches I assume as that true.

Miriam: Right. So coaches, for example, they don't need thousands of clients. Same thing with art. You, as long as you are selling to the high, uh, high end of the market and not the hundred thousand market, but you know, paintings that are, um, I'm going to say this in pounds, because for your audience, you know, you're selling paintings for 2 to 5,000 pounds.

Miriam: You don't need to sell a lot of paintings to make a full-time living. 5,000 paintings, a 5,000 pounds of painting with 10 to 20 paintings a year.

Teresa: So I'm interested then, how do you find, or how did you find your market. Like you just said that to me. And it's like, and I immediate thought, well, that sounds really hard.

Teresa: How did you find these people? Because with art as with anything in that kind of creative space, it's so subjective and it's in fact, I think I'm going to like put my neck out and set, especially with art because we all know I've seen art that I think is stunning. And it's not much money. And then I've seen art that I don't understand, or is not my thing that we'll be selling for loads of...