What I learned from a Mediterranean street artist a few years ago, and have never forgotten…
I’m sure if you have been to one of the many islands in the Med, you will have seen this too…
In the square amongst all the restaurants (where the customers are!), an artist kneels on the pavement, his canvas laid out, among his pre-prepared frames, spray cans (for his paintings are spray paintings), the series of shapes to mask parts of the painting when applying the different coloured sprays, and a set of techniques honed over the years, and some minor knife work to spread bits of paint into certain shapes to add detail. Perfect colours, evocative of the Mediterranean, magically capturing the colours all around us, and particularly the sunsets, the sea, rocks and sand.
The next evening I got a good seat in a restaurant nearby, and watched…
The Artist… was Focused absolutely 100 percent on his spray painting.
I counted
– How many paintings per night
– How quickly he did them, time per painting
– How many were sold (not by him, but by his assistant… he barely looked up from the work he was focused on),
– How a crowd gathered,
…the whole system… I’m sure everyone who went to that part of the island will have left with at least one of his paintings!
I also observed his helper… doing all the interaction with customers, settling all the payments (not once did I see her struggle to have the right change), setting them out to dry, before wrapping them up an hour later when the people returned to collect them.
The maths was astonishing… at 20-30 Euros, they made great presents (an alternative to what is available from the shops), knocking out 10-12 per hour, and selling many more than that (approximately double the number), from his stock of pre-painted smaller versions. His 4 –5 hours per evening were certainly well worth it.
And what a brilliant business… because he was operating the principle of sticking to the things you do well, and making sure your execution of these things is the best it can be.
This goes for the business as a whole as well as for you individually…
for the vast majority of businesses, for the small-medium businesses, the dynamic half of the western economies, which many of you belong to, it is essential to understand that YOU CANNOT DO EVERYTHING. AND YOU CAN’T be brilliant at everything.
This might come as astonishing news!!! Of course, it sounds obvious…
BUT if you know you can’t do everything, ask yourself what is it that you are deliberately setting out to be brilliant at.
This principle is all about identifying
– what you do really well,
– who you do it best for
– how you can do it even better
– and how you can attract those people to keep coming back for more, and more often,
– and how they can be so bowled over by it that they want to introduce others of their ilk to come and enjoy it as well.
It’s also about having no barriers to you doing that. To having nothing blocking the pathway, the whole process is simplified to allow you to execute your work, your business brilliantly.