I do my own printing because I think the quality needs to be perfect and it's part of my craft. What's wrong with that approach?

Ask yourself: is anyone actually complaining about your print quality? The answer is almost always no - customers aren’t complaining. Here’s the real issue: you say you want to grow your business, but your business isn’t growing because you’re not working on marketing and sales. Why aren’t you working on marketing? Because you’re spending all your time on printing. You’re deluding yourself into thinking you’re working on the business when you’re actually working on something no one should be working on. You don’t have a printing problem - you have a marketing problem. The artists who are successful focus on marketing as much as you focus on print details. They’ve built those skills over years. If you cared about marketing as much as you care about that last 5% of print quality that customers can’t even see, you’d be in a completely different position.

---

Asked by an artist who does their own printing · Answered by Patrick Shanahan and Nick Friend · art-marketing-podcast · 2022-02-27