Words    Words    Words

Welcome back! My apologies for the lateness of the post, I have been without internet while traveling internationally. We’re happily and safely home now, and there should be no further blog interruptions.

We last discussed the “5 Ws” method. A second method to evaluating business model viability is called DMAIC (pronounced dee may ick):

• D - Define. This is quite similar to the “what is it?” step listed in the last section. You can’t fix any problems until you know what specific issues you have to address. Find the specific definitions of your creative endeavor, delineate its boundaries. Make sure you include your goals in this section. What do you want to achieve? This is also a good place for deciding your ideal “blue-sky” outcome(s); if you don’t know where you would like to go, you can’t easily determine the path(s) to get there.
• M – Measure. On the surface, this looks like the least translatable point from business to art, since there are often fewer specific formulas to quantify in the art versus the business world. The art side has dimensions and qualities that aren’t found on the business side as well. Dig a little deeper though, and you’ll find that anything can be measured. What exists now; what do you want to exist; and what are the steps leading from one to the other? Did you paint the picture you set out to paint? If not, why not? Remember your self-honesty again here. Measure may not be as numerical in the arts as in a business environment, but you can still determine how far you got toward what you wanted. This step is also a good place to ask yourself, “What is missing? What did I leave out?”
• A – Analyze. In this stage, you categorize your existing data, or the disparate pieces of your project, and evaluate what has and hasn’t worked; make sure to discover as many of the “why” points of each as you can. If you already have people providing feedback on your own work this stage is easier. This is an area where it also helps to look at what others have done that might be similar to your efforts, and find what you can adapt or learn from or improve upon in your own work.
• I – Improve. Fairly self-explanatory, you look for any areas that you can make fit more closely with your goals based on your evaluations from the first three points.
• C – Control. This can also (and more usefully for artistic purposes) be seen as the “sustainability” or “repeatable” phase. It’s not enough to successfully sell one piece of art, you want a model that allows you to repeat that success enough times to reach or surpass your desired level of income.

Each of these methods should lead you to most of the same answers, so pick the one to use that seems less scary or more understandable–though of course it’s also helpful to use both methods as a check to ensure you don’t miss an important piece of information. Tune in tomorrow where we’ll talk about 4 steps to a better organized plan.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. This entry features extra help by Mary Bass. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.