2339 - Unlocking the Five Pillars of Success for Creative Entrepreneurs with Schulman Art's Miriam Schulman

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Miriam Shulman. Miriam, you are the founder and CEO of Shulman Art and the Inspiration Place, and you are the author of the book published by, you said HarperCollins, right? Yeah, that's right. Artpreneur. Congratulations on this. It's the step-by-step guide to making a sustainable living from your creativity. Valuable message for a lot of our creatives who are passionate about what they do so we can help them be able to keep doing what they're doing. But Miriam, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you so much for having me, Josh. It's great to meet you. I suspect that as someone who is right-brained, the creative sort, that you probably have passions outside of the normal day-to-day work that you do for your business and your clients and so forth.

1:49What are some things that you're currently geeking out on? Okay. So this summer was my big fat Greek reading project where I completely nerded out on books having to do with Greek mythology. So I started with Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles and Searcy, highly recommend. And then I moved backwards and forward. Apparently there's a lot of authors that like to rewrite the Greek mythology as like modern day. And so I've just been in that world, having a lot of fun. Good fantasy escape. What did, is, is, so is reading, tell me what you got from, from that experience beyond entertainment. Okay. So I'm glad you asked me that because one of the things I'm finding right now, Josh, that I am learning more from reading fiction than I am from reading business books.

2:46Mind-blowing. Share as much as you want to talk about that. Okay. I think that also segues very nicely into your work, but have at it. Let me give you the stage. Talk about that. Okay. So I am going to imagine that people don't know the Greek characters as much as I do, But what one author did who I really loved, Mary Renaud, is she took one of the Greek myths and wrote it like historical fiction and showed us that the myth making was really the hype artist of this guy. So for example, he hired bards. So bards are people who sing tales about the heroics. He hired bards to sing stories about him to create a mythology around himself.

3:35Well, that's what we do now. We hire copywriters or maybe we're using AI. So basically she was showing how people created like their celebrity around themselves. So I found that fascinating how she could say like, oh, no, no, this guy wasn't really all that he said he was. He just created this mythology around himself. And I think some of the best marketers today, that's what we do. We create this micro celebrity. We create this hype. We hire copywriters or we do it ourselves. However we're doing it, we are creating these stories that help sell what it is that we do. Yeah. And then so perfect segue, please share the message behind Artpreneur.

4:22By the way, you can get the book now. It's on Amazon. It's everywhere. You obviously can get to it by going to shulmanart.com. But who should be reading this book? Okay. So I did write it with artists in mind. artists not artists with a capital a but creative entrepreneurs but because the concepts that artists need to use to make a sustainable living are really solid business principles really anyone could read this book but it is geared towards creative entrepreneurs because us artists tend to think we're unicorns and standard business advice doesn't apply to us newsflash it does So what I break down in the book is the five pillars of production, pricing, prospecting, promotion, and productivity, and also give my readers the mindset tools that they really need to have in order to put it into place so they don't self-sabotage.

5:24So it's both the strategy as well as the mindset in this book in order to be successful. Self-sabotage, Miriam. Tell me more. Okay. Well, Josh, I know this is not your first rodeo and you've been around the block a few times, but for our listeners, I'm going to just say that our brains have evolved for survival, not goal achievement. So in order to be successful, you have to do a lot of things that are going to make you feel uncomfortable. And anytime you do something that makes you feel uncomfortable, your brain goes danger, danger, danger, because it doesn't know the difference between leaving the cave and being eaten by a tiger or doing a webinar or sending an email that you think might not work for you.

6:10So what's going to happen is when you feel uncomfortable, your brain's going to come up with all kinds of reasons why this is a terrible idea. Notice I didn't say excuse. It does not feel like an excuse to you. It feels real. So these reasons that you come up with are going to keep you from taking the right actions that you need to take in order to succeed. Now, the smarter you are and the more creative you are, which are my audience at Creative Entrepreneurs, the better you're going to be at coming up with these stories about why the thing you don't want to do is a terrible idea. So you will talk yourself out of it every time.

6:49So that is why there's so much mindset in my book to like help show people like, oh, you might be thinking this is going to bother people, or you might be thinking this and help them work through those mindset hurdles. Yeah. Cause they want to be artists, right? And, and to, to, to sell and to become a capitalist might be there. There might be some baggage there around those concepts. Yeah, there. I mean, in the traditional art world, there is that belief that if you are trying to monetize your art, you're selling out, you're doing something wrong. But meanwhile, the greatest artist of all time, like let's say Michelangelo, he died a wealthy man because he He was painting what his patrons wanted him to.

7:37And he was sculpting what they wanted him to. When the Pope said, I'd like you to paint my ceiling, he didn't say, no, sorry, Pope. I'm a sculptor and I only do what I want to do because that's what a real artist does. He's like, well, how much? Okay, good. Show me the ladder. You know, he's like, I'll do it. But Miriam, to get there, to be hired by the Pope, my suspicion is that he found a lane. He was passionate about it. He put it all in on that. And that, I'm just speculating here. I have no idea what the history is. But that's my guess, is that somehow Michelangelo had developed a bit of a problem.

8:20Give me what you know about that. Yes, and he actually had a lot of arrogance. So he went to one of the best, I'm just going to simplify what this is like, you know, they used to get apprenticeships in order to train and he went to one of the best ones. And usually the parents families would pay the guy to train their kid. And he says, no, no, no, I'm so good that you're going to pay me to work in the studio. So again, we're going back to that concept I brought up in the beginning. he hyped himself up basically he went in with that belief i'm so good you're gonna want me in my studio in your studio so he got somebody instead of like an internship where and this is something that still happens today parents are paying for internships for their kids i don't know if you know about that josh it's kind of a it's kind of a thing um but he said no no you're gonna pay me to be an intern in your studio so he had a lot of chutzpah to get a get himself to where he was.

9:21It didn't just happen because somebody discovered him. He put himself in harm's way. He didn't say, oh no, I'm going to be bothering him. He didn't say, no, that's a bad idea to ask to be paid. So he got, he got over himself to do the uncomfortable thing. Cause that's what successful people do. Successful people do things that unsuccessful people are not willing to do. period period yes there's your quote social media repurposers uh to grab that out um miriam one thing i wanted to ask you about uh i i have a lot of friends who are in bands in in here in florida and i love to support them i love to support them on social media i love to go you know my wife and i love it in particular we love tribute bands and for whatever reason you know we we love that vibe I have a friend who is, he's the leader of several bands and he has had a lot of success.

10:22Like he's done very well, but we caught him at a show. And for whatever reason, I don't know what happened, but I mean, it was a very poorly attended show. And I, you know, I was like, oh my gosh, I feel so bad for him. You know, that, you know, here he is as an artist, as a performer, as a musician. and he's like, you know, playing to a crowd that's like one 20th of what we've seen him. But yet he comes out and they played, you know, they all stayed 10 out of 10. And that was just such an informative moment for me, I think, as entrepreneurs that sometimes it's going to be like that. And it can feel so demoralizing, I think, for many of us.

11:06But boy, as true artists and true performers, you would have never suspected that from the energy that they gave. Anything that you're picking up here on that story? Yeah. Well, the one thing, the one question I have in my mind is that, um, was he relying on social media in the past and those strategies weren't working for him anymore? Was he using an email list to promote his thing? Because, um, social media, when I first started writing my book artpreneur, the engagement rate was 1%. By the time I went to edit that chapter, it had dropped to 0.6%, not 6%, 0.6%. That means six people out of a thousand are going to see it.

11:49And now in 2025, we're moving into 2026, the average engagement on Instagram is now 0.35%. And it's only that high because of sports teams and colleges, which are probably sports teams. So for most people, it's more like 0.2, 0.15. Again, that means out of a thousand people, one person might engage with you. If you compare that to something like email, which has a 25 % open rate, you would have to have 6 ,000 followers on Instagram to have the same results as only a hundred people subscribe to your email list. So the question running through my mind is, was he relying on social media? Did he build up an email list?

12:35Was he getting the word out in the way that's actually going to reach people? Because on Instagram, TikTok, it doesn't even matter which channel you're using. It doesn't matter. It's not, we're not, you know, trying to shit on Instagram. It's just that whatever channel you're using, it's algorithm dependent. The email, the algorithm doesn't depend on it. The person receiving it decides, Josh, you decide, oh, this is a band I really like. What's his next show let me open it you decide if you're opening it and on social media the algorithm decides if you're even going to see it no yeah i i very intentionally as a fan of tribute bands like i intentionally engage on posts even if i don't care so that i can keep seeing that but most people don't most people are like oh what's this and just you know just a stream of shiny objects impossible to keep up with everything you want to keep up with on social media so it's not like you see a subject line and you remember if something's in your inbox and you don't open it at least you have a subject line winking at you like you may not open it today but you see a subject line saying you know did you get your tickets for my show in in november or december whenever it is so you have a lot better odds if you are promoting yourself that way so email marketing it's not going anywhere it's the cockroach of marketing very hard to kill it will be here.

13:58It'll be around for a long time. Email marketing is the cockroach of marketing. I love it. Miriam, so we talked about your book. We didn't talk about your podcast last thing. And then I want to use that to kind of share your both your podcast and other resources that you would recommend our friend who's been listening to our conversation where they go from here. Okay, thanks for asking me. So I'm very proud of my podcast. We're at a million downloads. We're a top 1 % podcast. So if you like the kinds of things I said today, you can hear more about that on the inspiration place. And if you want to check out my book, I'll even give you a free chapter shulmanart.com slash believe.

14:40All right. And the book is artpreneur. You can get there again at shulmanart.com. Of course, it's available everywhere in all of the formats, including audiobook. Thank you so much for getting that done. Did you voice it or did you? I did. I, not only did I voice it, but because I included so many of my podcast guests, we have actually in their, when they are speaking or being quoted, we got the clips from the podcast. So we have Amy Porterfield and Michael Shine and Jennifer Kem, and a lot of people are in my, in my book as their own voice. How cool. Well, very, very cool. Again, all of that is at shulmanart.com, which we have linked up.

15:25Miriam Shulman, again, the book Artpreneur and the podcast is headed just to The Inspiration Place, which if you're in a podcast app right now, you can search for that. Just search for The Inspiration Place and you will find it. Miriam, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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16:32And of course, if you'd like to be a guest right here on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur, just go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. Thanks for being a part of this movement. We rise by lifting others. Transcription by CastingWords