Ep 8 How to use statistics and charts to predict your future income as an artist?

(8 min. podcast)

In this episode of the « Living from your Art » podcast I talk about the importance of using statistics to gain more confidence and certainty that your future to make a living off your art is actually real!

Transcript:

Welcome everyone to this new episode of the “Living from Your Art” podcast. This is your host Elie Castonguay and today’s subject is about stats, statistics! It’s a really cool subject that I really love. It’s not necessarily cool for everyone and it’s not a subject that most artists actually use for their business. I will give you examples of stats that I calculate every week with my clients, as a coach.

We look every week at how many followers they have, even though it’s not a really important stat, but we look at it every week to see if it’s growing, right? So, every week we’ll look at their followers count on every social media platform, then we will look at how many calls they’ve made for that particular week to potential clients, how many emails they sent to potential clients, how many PDF of their services they sent to their potential clients. 

How money number of bookings in dollar values ($) did they make for the past week; not the money they received, but the value in money of bookings they’ve made in the week. 

Let’s say they are in April, and they’ve booked three shows for July at 300 bucks each; for that week they would have $900 of bookings of booked gigs in dollars value.

Then the next stat is the “money in” ($). The “money in” is basically how much did you receive in actual money this week? So how many clients did pay you for your services during that week? And that’s about it.

I don’t want to complicate it as we can calculate a lot of different stats, like the amount of money per calls, the number of different clients that you booked, etc.

You can calculate tons and tons of stats, but we want to stay not too complicated so that every week we can understand what’s happening.

It’s funny because, and that’s my fault, but I always calculate stats weekly with my clients and I never really tell them why we do so before a couple of months; I don’t know why I do this. Eventually I show them a graphic, like a graph in an Excel spreadsheet that is really easy to use when you use basic knowledge about this software. When I show them a graph of their stats compared to their phone calls or their emails, because you will see that if you are consistent in time and that you promote regularly every week, you will see a very close correlation with your number of booked gigs, your money value ($) of booked gigs compared to your number of calls to potential clients.

I’m not talking about the calls that you do to the same client 10 times in the same week, because you are organizing a gig. Make sure to only calculate the number of calls to POTENTIAL clients that have not booked yet, right?

The fun thing, when I showed them the graph and I showed them the comparison with the booked gigs and the number of calls, every single time my clients are like: “Holy cow, it’s so closely related!”

They finally discover why calculating stats is so important, right?

So, until you understand something, you will never really put much importance on it, right? When you understand how it can help you to actually predict the future, then you’ll start to use it more and be happier to use it!

So that’s about it for today. I will do more detailed podcasts about stats (statistics) in the future. That was mainly this: to show you that statistics help you to predict the future because you can calculate the money on average you make per calls, money you make every week compared to emails and calls. Then you can see as well that when you make less calls, what happens to your booked gigs, etc.

Calculate stats every week, take out of a little piece of paper and calculate them and you’ll be amazed at how much you can now be more certain of the future because of this.

So, stay creative, keep pushing my friends, you’re amazing artists and you are really important people on this planet and you’re part of an amazing group. I believe in you and you can send me an email if you have any question or would like to work with me, so I can help you get to become a fulltime artist. You an send me an email at: elie@livingfromyourart.com

Talk to you soon guys.

Art Business Coach
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