Two shifts to help you sell more without selling out.

By guest writer, Business Strategist Sarah M. Chappell

You make beautiful work. You provide a service that helps your customers. You craft gorgeous products. You teach people life-enriching skills. There’s only one problem:

You feel so gross when you have to sell.

Most artists and creative small business owners operate from the “sales are slimy” belief at some point in their journey to make sustainable incomes from their work. But being afraid to sell because you feel that it’s manipulative or unethical—or that if your work were any good people would just buy anyway—leads to the same result: low sales that prevent you from having the freedom to devote your time to your craft.

If you experience this tension between wanting to be financially fueled by your work but afraid to actually ask people to pay you, you’re not alone. The good news? There are two simple shifts that you can make in your relationship to sales that will help you to promote your work without feeling like you’re selling out.

1. Stop making sales about you

Have you ever started a newsletter or social media post with the words “I’m so excited to share…”?

Or maybe it’s “I love this new piece” or “I’ve worked so hard to make this.”

(You can raise your hand. No one can see you.)

What do all of these have in common?

“I.” The focus is firmly on your experience as the maker, creator, business owner. No wonder you feel gross asking people to buy things from you! It sounds like you’re asking for a favor rather than an appropriate exchange for your brilliance, labor, and what your work will bring to the customer. 

Instead of centering your experience when talking about your work, try focusing on the customer: what does your piece, product, or service make possible for them? What will they experience through their purchase? What do they get out of it? 

This simple shift can have a massive impact on your relationship to selling. Your potential customers are not doing you a favor, or buying to make you happy. They’re buying your work because they want to!

2. Start focusing on service

There’s a business idiom that states “selling is a service,” and for good reason. Selling is not about forcing someone to buy your thing or reaching through the computer screen or across the event booth to grab their credit card.

Selling is about helping your potential customer to make a decision.

If someone is following your social media, walking into your shop, on your mailing list, or visiting your website, there’s usually a pretty simple reason: they’re interested in your work. They are actively seeking you out and want to know what you have to offer.

This means that your job is not to convince a potential customer that they need what you make, but to ensure that they have all of the information to make a buying decision.

Purchasing is an exercise in prioritization. Do I need this thing now? Is this experience or outcome what is most important to me at this moment? Does this solve a problem that feels urgent or like I’m ready to tackle? Will it help me?

When a customer is exploring your work, they’re running through these kinds of questions in their minds, even if they’re not conscious of it. And now that you know this, you get to answer them! Your sales materials are not going to focus on why you love your work, but how your work helps your potential customer. What transformation it will facilitate. What values it will affirm. What beauty it will bring to their lives.

Your customer is looking to you to help them navigate your work, understand its impact, and ultimately decide whether or not they want to prioritize it. You don’t need to sell them on it. You just need to help them.

Want to learn more about how to sell without that slimy feeling in the pit of your stomach? Business strategist Sarah M. Chappell is leading a free live training just for the Sunlight Tax community all about attracting your ideal customers without doing all the things or feeling like you’re selling out. Learn more and reserve your spot HERE.

Your Superpower: Seeing What Others Don't, a podcast interview

A podcast episode about art + entrepreneurship on Brand New Women, hosted by Scarlet Batchelor

“I want to say to you if you’re a woman or are BIPOC or are from a historically marginalized group:

You have a superpower. If you have had to operate in a world that doesn’t always see you, or that underestimates you, then you see things that they don’t see. And there’s business opportunity in that.”

Fostering democracy in the art world: an interview on the Not Real Art podcast

In this episode, Hannah debunks the myth that artists are no good with numbers and shares some practical advice to help us impart our own ‘freaky flavor’ into our businesses while also taking money-making seriously. You’ll also gain some insight into her journey from punk-rock-loving anticapitalist to creative tax specialist and what she learned about the art world and her own practice along the way, plus so much more!

In all of my talks, I always end with an appreciation for what artists do in the world, which is [that] we are the empathy builders. We are the people bridging divides and showing the less creative part of the population that a better world is possible. I think it can be really hard when you are an artist. I want all artists to take the making-money part more seriously, treat themselves like they deserve it, and not think of all money as evil and all people with money as evil, because those are attitudes that shoot you in the foot. They stop you from having any financial security.

Listen to the episode here.

Money Story: Lex Ritchie

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Lex Ritchie is a tarot reader and folk magical educator. You can find more about their work at www.thelexritchie.com IG @thelexritchie

HC: Who are you, what are your pronouns, and what do you do?

I’m Lex Ritchie, I use they/them pronouns, and I’m a tarot reader and folk magical educator. I help folks connect to their magic so they can make change in their lives and in their world.

HC: What brought you to a place where you wanted to learn how to get your money stuff together?

LR: It was really starting my own business that prompted it. I’m not someone who has a ton of experience with money. I grew up working class, not affluent. For a large part of my adult life, I didn’t make enough money to have to file taxes. By the time I started a business, I had never filed taxes. The other half of my adult life was filled with bad tax experiences--I had terrible luck with taxes. One year my partner's employer was committing tax fraud. Another year a number was wrong on our W2, and caused an enormous headache, and another year I was paid differently because I was a grad student. 

I went from making too little to file to owing taxes every year after that. When I started my business, I needed to figure this out and know what I’m doing.

Like a lot of people who go from being poor to having some money, there’s this pain around that. There is a shame of not knowing. A shame that you have to know these things now. I needed to go into this business with my eyes open, not giving in to the past trauma or knee-jerk responses I had before. I wanted to build my business and grow it into something that can support me. I had to take responsibility towards my business, like taxes. I wanted to take personal responsibility towards that.

HC: Is there anything that being in Money Bootcamp has taught you, or that has changed for you?

LR: It’s funny. I’ve been a part of Money Bootcamp for two years. I wouldn't at any point have been able to pinpoint that I know these things or that my relationship to money is changing, until I was talking to a friend who is switching to contract work from full time employment, because she has a baby. And I’m like, “hey, there are these tax benefits, and she’s like hey, how do you know all this?”

The fact I pay my quarterly taxes, I’m in this position where I know enough to ask the right questions, I don’t have to just go along with it. I know enough to advocate for myself - it provides me with knowledge and not just garbled nonsense. 

I come from a science background. My major was in science communication, so I know a lot about communication.

One thing that comes from having greater financial literacy is that I, as someone who owns my own business, have to pay taxes out of my account every quarter. It’s not automatic. Better financial literacy means knowing when I have enough, and don’t. Budgeting. That’s been part of this larger effort in my life of how to navigate money. Because I have this thing--I didn’t have money growing up, so I never feel like I have enough. I’ve learned how to navigate what I need, earmark for savings, and figure what is ok. Both my partner and I are chronically ill. Figuring out that my partner will not be able to do his work forever. Ensuring ok-ness with that. Past baggage from not knowing when we had enough. 

It’s easy to hoard. That is the default. When you grew up feeling like you needed to hoard money, its easy to do, because there’s a cultural default. [Having a sense of enough-ness is] helping me live my values in that way.

Having enough: for me, when I was in engineering, I studied sustainability. Sustainability is important to me. One reason I left grad school is that when we talk about sustainability, we aren't’ critiquing the ways we talk about progress, money, and the economy. The ways those feed sustainability and feed structures of unsustainability. The same goes for money and my values--I value sustainability and abundance. There’s a ceiling to that. It looks different. It manifests differently for different people. I’m recognizing that sufficiency for myself. Growing up poor, when you're stuck in insufficiency for so long, it’s hard to recognize when you really do have enough. For me, numbers make sense. Seeing it in my numbers was helpful, and allowed me to see that it is sustainable, that I could share more, and that saving wasn’t just pointless--I was able to build a cushion.

HC: Is there anything else you’d like other people to know?

LR: Something I want to talk about is to shout out to you, and how amazingly you hold space for how complicated and stressful and wrapped up in trauma and injustice taxes are. 

When we had our conversation last year, I was like “I have perennial problems around taxes” and you were like “none of that is your fault.”

You can learn more about what Lex does at their website: https://thelexritchie.com/ 

The Civic Impact of Taxes

This post originally appeared in Hyperallergic on March 15, 2019. 

Taxes are our only mandatory civic duty : So why is tax education left out of civics? 

You probably recall a school lesson in your past about our “bicameral legislature” or the “separation of powers” between our three branches of government. But did you ever get a lesson in graduated income tax rates, the personal exemption, or how freelancers pay into Social Security?

When the president tries to extract a pledge of loyalty from someone in the Justice Department, an alarm goes off about those “separation of powers,” and as a citizen, you understand a basic tenet of our democracy is being tested. But what about when states propose funding budget shortfalls by increasing the sales tax (which is one of our most regressive taxes), or politicians quietly double the threshold on the estate tax (one of our most powerful tools for fighting the widening wealth gap)? Do these actions trigger the same sense of alarm?

Our founding fathers recognized that the maintenance of our democracy would require a population educated in basic civic responsibility. The establishment of a public school system was a part of this understanding — without public education, civic education would be reserved for the wealthy, and the uneducated masses would be subject to the whims of tyrants. Public schools and civic education have been a deliberate cornerstone of our democracy since the American Revolution.

We should all be educated in the basic structure and functions of our government so that we can advocate for ourselves, and keep our democracy healthy. While civic participation is not as robust as it could be, it exists. People do vote; they do advocate for different policies and appeal to their legislators, or run for public office themselves. So why in our democracy is the one part of civic engagement that is mandatory — paying taxes — not also a part of our basic civic education?

From my vantage as a tax accountant for artists, I can see how acute this lack of information is. In my tax practice, I regularly explain the basic mechanics of tax-sheltered retirement plans and clear up the near constant confusion between itemized deductions and the business deductions one takes on one’s Schedule C. I give workshops to packed room after packed room of professional artists who have never had a lesson on how self-employment tax works, how to pay estimated quarterly taxes or how their self-employment tax pays into Social Security and Medicare. 

I say this with deep respect. Artists and creative professionals are generally better educated and more civically engaged than the average citizen. So, if this population is under-informed on basic tax issues, I think the problem is much bigger. I think we have a civic education crisis.

Again, the point of civic education is to cultivate an engaged, participatory population. One that engages in honest, intellectually rigorous debate and makes good faith arguments about fairness and the society we want. And what place is more important than the mandatory civic engagement of tax-paying? What shapes our society more than the money we all pay into it? What is more worthy of scrutiny than who pays a disproportionate share of their income compared to everyone else, and why? What is a more important civic question than how our tax dollars are apportioned? What is a more fundamental civic question than what kind of society do we want to build with our tax dollars? 

I see a direct link between the general lack of understanding of our tax code and the thorough lack of advocacy on the part of the people most affected by it. Without this education in how our tax system is structured and who pays what proportion of their income, we can’t engage in shaping a fairer tax policy. When politicians lie about who pays taxes, these lies don’t get called out properly, because they aren’t obvious to everyone. When regressive tax policies are floated — such as increases to sales tax, which are disproportionately paid by the poor, people often don’t realize that these taxes are regressive, so fairer alternatives don’t get surfaced. The estate tax (the “death tax” label is dishonest) — which is a clear solution to a widening wealth gap, based on centuries of evidence and decades of policy work, gets chipped away at constantly, without enough defenders rising up to support it. 

As the massive new tax law changes were being passed, I kept wondering why were people not more up in arms over:

–the dramatic reduction in charitable contributions that would likely result from doubling the standard deduction

–the punishing of electorates in high-tax states with the capping of state and local income tax deductions and

–the boon provided to the wealthiest families in the US by doubling the estate tax exemption. In 2017, before the tax law change, only 5,500 estates paid any estate tax. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 is expected to reduce that number to 1,900).

All of these policies are the opposite of what most Americans want. Polling from the months before the passage of the bill made clear that Americans want higher — not lower — taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. But where was the debate? The bill was passed with breakneck speed – that is one reason for the lack of debate. But was our society’s general lack of tax education another reason?

But there’s hope. I want to tell a story of a tax victory won by artists. The last time a tax bill this big was passed was The Tax Reform Act of 1986. In that law, Congress forced artists, writers and performers to portion out the costs of producing their work and take the expenses on their taxes only when that work was sold. The law was so broad that even small amounts of material were to be accounted for in this way — so a painter was supposed to calculate the amount of paint she used on one canvas, and then only take that expense on her taxes when that painting sold. This left artists with an accounting nightmare as well as a dramatic reduction in their ability to claim expenses. Julia Child, the author and chef, protested the ridiculousness of the provision by saying, “How do I allocate the oregano?” 

But the part I love is that we won. Artists understood the impact of this law, and they organized and protested. And what’s more, when the resulting law change did not go far enough, they stuck with it, protested more and got it changed again. The result is that independent artists, writers and performers no longer have to keep inventory. We are allowed — by the sweat of our protesting peers — to expense all of our supplies in the year we buy them. 

So disengaging and accepting our fate is not a given. Correcting unfair tax laws is possible. But first, we do need to understand the laws.

I personally do a lot of education on taxes. But the problem is nationwide. And I’m just using the tools I have — I don’t think it’s the role of business to fill this gap. This is a failure on a societal level that needs a policy solution.

When we have the education, we make better decisions, and we stop unjust laws from being passed. But when we check out or succumb to the idea that taxes are too complicated, we leave the laws to be crafted by lobbyists for well-funded groups that typically have a lot to gain.

Everyone pays taxes. That is the one civic engagement with the most participation, and taxes are at the root of all other policies. Our advocacy won’t be possible until we understand how we pay, who pays what, and who is getting the worst impact. We need tax education so we can better engage as citizens.

DISCLAIMER: True tax advice is a two-way conversation, and your accountant needs to hear your full situation to apply the rules correctly in your case. This post is meant for general information only. Please don’t act on this alone. 

If you DO want to track your inventory, Artwork Archive is an excellent tool for tracking your art inventory. And yes, this is an affiliate link, because I think it is a good product.