Should you DIY, outsource, or invest in education?

Artists are creative entrepreneurs. In the beginning that can mean juggling all parts of your business solo. And there are A LOT of moving parts. Handling all them all with grace is ideal.

There are different ways to handle each piece of your art business.

Sometimes it’s best to learn how to do a task all by yourself. That’s DIY. And sometimes it’s best to pay someone else to do it for you, also known as outsourcing. Other situations call for a mix of the two: paying someone to teach you how to do it faster. Learning art business is split into these three paths. Let’s talk about it.

Best to DIY when:

It’s easy to learn. Of course “easy” is a subjective term. What’s easy for you may be difficult for others. But when you already know something comes naturally to you, you’ll have no trouble getting it done on your own. For me this was art style. I never had and never wanted help in this area, and my art style is perfect (for me). In fact it comes so easily to me I teach a course on it: Elements of Art Style.

It’s a good idea to DIY when there’s free information to learn from. Free content will take you from 0-5, but you’ll likely have to pay for levels 5-10 (or choose to learn the long way through trial and errors for level 5-10).

Free content education isn’t exactly DIYing, but it’s not investing in education either. The level of info that’s available for free is usually not as intense or in depth as the info you have to pay for. But if you’re a beginner in the topic, I suggest consuming some free content first. You’ll learn a bit as a head start and can combine this with personal experience. At the least it’ll inform you about what exactly you need help with when learning art business and what your problem areas are (that you can invest in later).

The only issue with free content is that sometimes it’s incorrect. (I’d argue that sometimes paid info is incorrect as well, but it’s a LOT less likely to be.) Be discerning with who you are getting the information from: What are their real-life results? Do they have a skill or result that you want? If not, do not follow their advice.

DIYing is a good idea if you’re not taking your art career seriously. If you’re dabbling, passing the time, or being a hobbyist, then by all means DIY. You don’t need to speed up the process if it’s ONLY for fun. Taking your time is nice too. Mistakes are happy accidents when there’s not the pressure of your business or career attached to it. Sometimes speeding up the progress on your hobby is satisfying, but the long winding journey can be relaxing.

Best to outsource when:

Paying someone to do it for you is a great idea in certain circumstances. I wouldn’t suggest this for your creative work (otherwise what’s the point?) but it can be perfect for the skills you don’t care to have anyway.

You can only master so many skills in this lifetime. Which ones aren’t important to you?

Let me give you an example.

When I was planning to launch my website in 2018, I knew I wanted full control over it. I wanted FULL customization, no middle man charging me listing fees, and the least amount of rules.

So I chose WordPress instead of Etsy.

That meant I now needed to build my website.

But I had no clue how to do that.

(I had a little experience with WordPress because one of my college professors made us start a blog for a journalism class. I wrote my reporting all about graffiti in Detroit. It was a project that led me down many alleyways and taught me a liiiittle about websites. But not enough.)

So I decided I would go the DIY way: I would learn how to build my website with free education.

I took a class downtown on learning to code. It was coding language specific — I can’t remember which one — and it taught you front of house code, then later, back of house code.

The first day was free. I showed up alongside 40 other people on the fifth floor overlooking Campus Martius and took notes for 5 hours. I learned a lot.

Mostly I learned that I would not be attending the next few weeks of coding classes. Coding was not for me.

It was a skill that would take lots of time and dedication to learn. And most of the people in the class were learning to code for more than just building one website – they wanted to make coding as a service into their career. I realized this was not appropriate for me to DIY. There was an easier way to get a website done.

My other option?

I paid $30 for a website template.

This template designed my website for me.

I simply copy and pasted pre-written code into a back-end section of my website and bam! The front-end was beautiful.

I spent $30 and 3 hours figuring that out to have someone else do it for me instead of spending weeks learning to write it myself.

Moral of the story: sometimes outsourcing is worth it. I saved so much time, energy, and brainpower by spending money to have it done for me.

Especially because I didn’t plan to become a professional website designer or use that knowledge outside of my one task I was trying to accomplish — outsourcing was the way to go.

I still use that same customizable template today.

I still have no idea how to code.

Outsourcing tasks or services is perfect for when you hate doing the thing, you don’t have time/desire to learn the thing, or when you’re really bad at the thing and no amount of education is fixing that. Learning art business looks like discovering which things you won’t be doing.

‌Best to pay for education when:

Invest in paid education when you want to acquire a skill and you don’t want to take 10 years and 100 mistakes to learn it.

This is like DIYing but you trade money in exchange for making it a million times faster. The thing about it though, is that reducing the mistakes made in the process of learning can save you tons of money. Mistakes can be expensive. So paying for knowledge up front can really have a positive return on that investment – meaning you end up saving time AND money.

I’ve bought masterclasses on money management and bought books on how business taxes work. I want to know what healthy financial habits look like, immediately, and I want to avoid expensive mistakes.

I’ve taken online classes on how to utilize SEO for business. I wanted to get more reach without trial an error, which would take up lots of mental energy and data tracking. Better SEO means I can get the same reach as paying for ads without paying for ads.

Ebooks, physical books, one-video masterclasses, downloadable guides are all great places to start investing in your education. And they’re the easiest to get your hands on. There’s also paid experiences, like investing in bigger art shows. (Art shows were actually my first investment I ever made in my business besides art supplies.) Other experiences include group trips, conferences and retreats. Then there are classes or courses. Then college degrees. Then 1:1 mentors. Of course all of these are optional.

Great topics to study are:

• how to use your equipment/supplies/software/paints/sewing machine
• finances/taxes/business legality
• how to build your website
• online marketing/seo/ads
• art style/personal branding/messaging/mission
• how to sell at art markets
• shipping and handling
• business etiquette/negotiating

What you choose to invest in will depend on what skills you want to learn and how quickly you need to learn them in your art business.

The speed of your art journey is up to you

With outsourcing completely, you get the job done fast but don’t gain the skills. With DIYing, you get the knowledge but it takes forever. Paying for education is the shortcut to gaining the skills quickly.

To this day I still do all three. It simply depends on what the task at hand is. What have you DIYed? What have you outsourced? What have you paid to learn?

Find free study materials alongside paid ebooks and classes here.

We’ll be learning art business together in Artsy Friends, a Patreon group for artists who are serious about their creative career. Join your new friend group here.