Whether you’re overseeing a single part-time assistant or a team of helpers, when you’re the boss, you have to step up and own your authority.

You have to be more organized, more focused, and more responsible.

Want help editing your video? You’d better get the raw footage to your helper a couple of weeks before your deadline. Ditto for social media posts that need to be plotted and emails that must be created and scheduled.

You have to be more deliberate because people are depending on you.

You must hire thoughtfully and thoroughly and know when it’s time to fire people who aren’t a good fit.

It takes a great deal of effort to find the right person to help with your art business, so you want to get it right. Because of this, you need to find a way to retain good team members. You want them to take ownership in your business and pride in the work they do on your behalf.

You won’t think about this from the beginning of the relationship with a new team member because you’re so focused on getting the help you need fast. But you absolutely should be thinking about it: How do I keep good people on my team?

We talked about working with a team with Angela Fehr and Robin Edmundson back in episode 104. Then in episode 105, Trudy Rice discussed how she assumes the roll of boss even while working with her sister as an employee.

In this episode I talk with Ali Manning about the responsibilities she feels as the person in charge of her business. In particular, the responsibilities she has to team members.

We discuss her membership-based business model, the dynamics between team members, how she hires, when and why she hires employees instead of contractors, and how she keeps team members happy. We also get into the hiring mistakes that both of us have made in the past—freely admitting that it was our fault, not that of the employees.

Whenever you have multiple styles or subjects, you probably also have multiple audiences. The abstract work might have one following, the functional pottery another, and the pet portraits yet a third. It’s hard to find people who are interested in all of them.

This means you’re kind of running multiple businesses.

On the one hand, you’re looking for exhibitions and venues for showing your abstracts. On the other, you’re promoting your handbuilt ceramics to people who appreciate their beauty far above what they would find at a big box store.

At the same time, you are trying to connect with pet guardians proud enough of their animal that they want to memorialize their mug with a framed original piece of art.

This is a lot of work you’ve created for yourself!

I’d never tell you not to do this, though I’d be tempted, because experimentation is such an important part of your life as an artist. Sometimes you need the different styles because they feed off of one another. Or they fulfill different parts of your artist’s soul.

Still, did I mention? It’s a lot of work to juggle different styles and audiences. You’ve been warned.

In this episode of The Art Biz with Robin Maria Pedrero, you’ll hear about the three different styles and subjects she paints. Robin has a very full art business, and she has joined the podcast to share her story about how she juggles her various styles of art and the diverse audiences for her work.

She also has fun during the process.