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Roadblock 2: Art School Gives You the Luxury of Working Slowly

this idea. You know, one of the biggest challenges of art school is that you do learn toe work slowly, and we ended last segment by looking at what happens if you can't find comparable proof for your prices. So we set the prices. Some of them were rather higher than our in studio audience had been charging. And so I tasked them to go out and look for comes But you may be finding it hard to actually get cops. And in that pricing formula that we looked at, this is because labor is often the most expensive piece of the pricing equation. So we talked about this formula last time. This materials plus labour plus overhead plus profit wholesale price. Times two is retail price. And for a lot of our people, we had this huge number for labour. We're talking about pieces that took hours or 40 hours to make and in art school. And if you're really not trying to make money, you have the luxury of working slowly, even though it doesn't feel like that's what you're doing at the time. So I remember w...

hat I was in school as a metal smith in major, never working with metal. We had three projects for each three credit class, and for some reason they were all due at the same time at the end of the semester. And so we would like procrastinate all semester, all semester. And then we pull an all nighter and maybe like 2. of them will get done. And we were so stressed. And so I had two of these three credit classes this semester. So every semester. So in, like, three months time, I made six pieces. I look back on that now, and it makes me laugh so hard, right? Because sometimes I have to make six pieces in like an hour. So what we want to do now is take an assessment of how much work you're producing. And if that's enough to hit your income goals now, we didn't actually set specific income goals in this class, but I think everyone can kind of at least ballpark where you want to be. But so the first thing to think about is how much work do you produce a month now? And I know most of the people in our in studio audience are wearing multiple hats. But let's just talk specifically about kind of your your more art work, right? So you know how many produces pieces you produce a month now? Of your painted furniture? 11 didn't take you more than a month on sometimes, depending on the size. Okay. It's like with your drawings. Paintings. How many about 123 Okay, you're a little bit more on production. Yeah. Yeah, I am. I make quite a few, I don't know, like 100 necklaces. Earrings, So yeah, and you're definitely I think you you have a better handle on the labor peace than I think the others in the group Russia coming up more of, like an art piece or, um, anywhere between 10 and 20 among. Okay, All right. Somewhere in the middle. So now what we want to look at is how much work do you actually need to be producing a month to hit your income goals? And even if you're making a lot of work, it may still not be enough work at your old price point to hit. Those goals were to look at it at your new price point that obviously changes things and So again, these are kind of back of the napkin calculations. Obviously, you're not gonna be producing the same thing all month long, But we just want to kind of see where you would need to be at. So I like calculating this with the product at a variety of price points just because it shows me for different kinds of work. So you're just gonna pick a number? Eso In this example, I just decided eight k month and let's talk about a $650 necklace. So that means I would need to make 13 necklaces a month necklaces like I'm wearing, which basically breaks down to a little more than three necklaces a week. Okay, so now if I look at that at a different price point. So this is $150 necklace and these air retail price points just for this exercise. Obviously, if I'm selling on the wholesale, I have to double these numbers. Um, So with this case, 54 nickels is a month or a little over two a day now, I'm looking at $60 earrings. You can see same math. How? Six pairs of earrings a day and so just looking at these different numbers to show you kind of how much you need to produce to hit those income goals and how that potentially feels to you. So I want Teoh ask our in studio audience to sharing. If anyone online is starting to crunch these numbers, you can feel free to share them as well. Let's talk about what your income goals are and how many pieces you would actually have to produce at your new price point to get there. So handle. What do you think? Ideally, how much money would you like to be bringing in a month from your furniture? Six, maybe 6000. 6000. Okay, So how many pieces is that? Well, in our new pricing Formula One. What? OK, so you might be okay. All right. Um, 10 depending on where you end up falling, it could be 1 to 2. Right? All right. A month, maybe 2000 for my art. Okay, so let's pretend that your art is the only thing making you money. Yeah, because that's what we're pretending. And if so, how much do you want to bring in 7000. Okay. So many pieces. is that? Oh, yeah. Um, depending on where you're in a price trouble. Yeah. 333 And what did your family are you producing now? 123 Okay, so you're, like, close. You're kind of getting there. Okay, I would say 5000. Okay, um, a month. And what does that look like in terms of? And I know you have, ah, greater range of price points. But, like, say, if you were only selling 100 $50 necklaces ish No, you're gonna do that math later, and you're gonna figure out how it can wait. Hold on. I have the calculator Still. All right. So what do you say? 5000? Yeah. So I'd buy 105 150. So that's like 33 pieces a month. Doable? I think so. Alright, what about you? So I didn't do the exercise with you? I did. On my perfect. So, um, my my new price point for a handbag that I make It would be $250 So I'm taking your a K. And so the math. I did the math. I would need to produce 32. Do the math. You do the math, your perfect mate. You might check it, but I think it's right. Does that feel doable? It does. Okay, that's awesome. The other thing to keep in mind is that you're probably going to produce more month than you sell. So even though you only need to sell one piece of furniture at that price point, you probably need to. Still actually would be producing somewhere in the range of 2 to 3 pieces a month instead of one to really think about something as like a viable business, because it's just gonna give you more products, get out into the marketplace. So even though I think you guys are close, they're still the potential. So think about working a little bit faster. So when we're looking at this roadblock because I also have a feeling that there are some opportunities to maybe speed up the process a little bit for everybody. Andi. One of the things that's for those of you during the more production oriented work, some of these kinks will work themselves out in the process. But so there are two methods for overcoming this roadblock. No one is simply learning to work faster on and the other is to develop a bread and butter product line that requires less labour, so lower price point higher profit margin. So you two are kind of mawr already in that range, where you've developed something that feels a little bit more like a bread and butter, um, product line. But it's something that you might want to think about as well, because it also means that gives you a different price point, which attracts a different audience. So we're gonna talk about both of these things, how to work faster and how to develop that bread and butter product line. But first I want to talk about why it is that art school develops this habit of working slowly because this is definitely something that you need to overcome and moving forward in your business. So first off, any time you're learning, you're going to be slower the first time you make anything new. The first time you learned in your technique, it's going to be slower. That's okay. So this is one of the reasons why one of the best way is to speed up your process. It's to repeat that process to make mawr things the more you make it, the faster you get. So when I was first developing this new line, my contra collection, I was figuring out how I wanted to put it together, how it was gonna work. I was still understanding all the process, and it took me so much more time to make something. Now I can make the same piece and much quicker time because I have made a bunch of them. That's the first thing is just literally the more you make, the faster you get. But the other problem and the bigger problem is that art school teaches you toe over, analyze every decision. There's this really like analysis, paralysis. And I remember when I was an undergrad. So there was one other metals major who was the same years me. Yet there were just two of us, and we would sit there hours debating the tiniest little decisions in our work. Right? If this right is this right, is this right? Is this right to the point where we literally developed a theme song to make ourselves work so we would put on Elvis is a little less conversation cause it's a little less conversation a little more action. Please. We would be like, stop talking, start working. But that was so common in school. And it just wasn't just underground happening. Grad school all the time to Hey, can you guys come over? Look at this and suddenly you're all stand around. They're deciding whether it should be like hot pink or sort of pink, right? You're like debating every decision. And I think that happens whether you went to art school or not, because a lot of makers and artists have these perfectionist tendencies, right? We want it to be perfect before it goes out in the world. And I think somebody asked that in that question from the online audience in our last segment. How do you just get over and put things out there? And that's really a question of getting over those perfectionist tendencies. So I'm curious if any of you guys are struggling with this. Is there anything that you're working on you worked on in the past that, like you couldn't finish or didn't finish because you couldn't make a decision? Shows like nodding her head there. Tell me about that. So I, um, I'm trying to design a line of lunch bags, and I'm just I'm caught up in this sort of prototyping mode. Where do I want the zipper? Here? Do I want a zipper? Do I wanted to fold this way that way. What? The shape isn't So I'm just I'm questioning every decision. I feel like I'm just going around in circles. Awesome. That's awesome. But it's often that we acknowledge that way can talk about that on DSO. Do you feel like you can actually get past it? Are you really, like I could be making these decisions forever? I think that I just need to do it, Okay. Yep. And we're gonna talk about strategies that is Anyone else have that experience or feeling that way at all? Kind of like I've been working really hard to get over that. I just try to repeat the done is better than perfect. And I can always change it later. Yeah, if it really bothers me. Yeah, okay. Perfect. And I know that there are probably a lot of people on our online audience who are struggling with this