Thinking About Starting A Stained Glass Business

I got an email the other day. It was from a fellow who was laid off and thought he might start a stained glass business. He was asking for advice and wondered if we ever gave free stained glass classes. It was hard to answer his email because it seemed so silly, having never even built a stained glass panel, he's considering starting a business in stained glass. Do people look at stained glass and think, "That looks like a pretty easy thing to do?" or do they see us at the farmers market each week with our displays and thousands of dollars invested in labor and glass items and think, "Well if they can do that, I could too?" My answer to him follows:
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We charge for our stained glass classes because it costs us to teach. There are supplies and materials that we use up during a class. The cost for a class session is $150 and that includes over $50 worth of supplies and materials including a glass cutter ($20) safety glasses ($4) copper foil ($15) sharpie pen ($2) flux brush ($1) fid ($3) zinc outer bar ($6) 1 lb solder ($18)and then most of the glass for a first panel measuring 12 x 12. We also let you use our equipment, grinders, tables, soldering irons, etc. Plus there are cleaners and chemicals that we furnish. We also have to buy extra insurance in case someone gets hurt and we have to heat and cool the place.

So, while it's true that we make a small fee after the cost of class, it's not much. We used to charge less for classes, but found that we were losing money and even though we enjoy teaching, we just have to make a profit or at least break even. You can read about our classes at
http://www.gommstudios.com/aboutus/classes.htm

We do have many lessons at
http://www.betterstainedglass.com/index.htm
Visiting there and reading all the articles will teach you a lot about stained glass. And finally, we sell a video at
http://www.betterstainedglass.com/Videos/Stained%20Glass%20Videos.htm
which will teach you the basics. We worked with several other folks for five years on the beginning video and share the profits with them, so even that video can't be free.

Make sure and read the article at
http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/stainedglassbus.htm
and start in business slowly. Stained glass is one of the hardest businesses you can try and last year we only made $5000 for the year. That's $5000 for two people working full time so $2500 for me and $2500 for my wife. That works out to $1.20 per hour. I'm not exaggerating. You should consider stained glass work as a hobby, under no circumstance will it make you a decent living without years of trial and error. Ask yourself some hard questions..is no one doing stained glass in Tooele because it's not appreciated there or is it because it's hard to make it as an artist. LDS employment offers free business advice. They will help you with a business plan and it's free to anyone who wants their help, you don't have to be LDS for the help. They will help you to get realistic about planning a business.
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People don't believe you when you give advice on business matters, articles I've written on business are as follows:

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/clientfromhell.htm
I tell the story of how a difficult client robbed us of joy for some time.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/neversweat.htm
I explain some of the happy stress of running a business

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/dont%20be%20milo.htm
I tell of the student who broke me and caused me to give up stained glass completely for over a year.

http://www.betterstainedglass.com/Newsletter/Archives/5-12-2005Dec-marketing/marketing.htm
I give some ideas on how one may market stained glass.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/tradeorcash.htm
I discuss pros and cons of bartering in business.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/howcanImakeit.htm
I discuss in detail the "eyes open approach" to entering a stained glass business.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/overcomeadversity.htm
I discuss dealing with the adversity and discouragement of running a business.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/nocompetition.htm
I explain my philosophy that competition doesn't really exist.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/whenenoughisenough.htm
How long should I bend over backwards to satisfy a client?

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/thebusinessdream.htm
I tell of the feeling of having a good day in business.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/appreciatingstained.htm
I explain that the majority of folks just don't appreciate stained glass.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/artisticgoals.htm
What are worthy artistic goals?

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/problemteaching.htm
I complain about teaching classes.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/runningbiz.htm
I express how little we know about running a stained glass business.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/stainedglassbus.htm
I answer the question Should I Start My Own Stained Glass Business.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/Howdidthathappen.htm
I tell of a mistake we made.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/Salmons.htm
I explain about fighting to stay alive in economic tough times..this was before the bubble burst..we were struggling during the BOOM, ha.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/twokindsofpeople.htm
I explain our open about art philosophy.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/diabetes.htm
How health is important to us.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/pricing.htm
I give our formulas for pricing stained glass.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/internetseek.htm
How the Internet keeps changing on us.

http://www.betterstainedglass.com/Newsletter/Archives/9-09-2009Sept-SurviveWStyle/SurvivalGuide.htm
This article is another installment on how to market stained glass.

http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/teachstainedglass.htm
I teach because it can lead to happiness.
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After all that, people still look at you with disbelief when you tell them that it's a struggle to run your own business. They are sure that you're lying to them, trying to keep them out of the game. They don't see the fact that you've been late on your house payment over half the months of the last year. They don't believe that you often only made $15 a week at the farmers market and that was all you made for the entire week and that the end of the summer you had to pay sales tax on it. They won't believe the despair you've felt as artist friends and gallery owners gave up and took menial jobs to get back on their feet. They don't believe or even imagine the number of times you've almost thrown in the towel and given up. And they especially don't believe us when we write articles and give lectures and we are positive about today and tomorrow..because it's told to us that we must be constantly positive and surround ourselves with positive affirmations to draw good things towards us. They believe our PR and won't/can't believe our reality.

Running A Stained Glass Business In Provo, Utah

I have to confess that I don't know everything! This comes as quite a shock to myself, since I thought I knew everything for such a long time. I still have an opinion about everything; such is my confidence in my own ideas and judgments. But I just don't know everything!

I sometimes struggle with who to vote for like everyone else. And I stand amazed at the choices that some of my children make. Wow, I really never saw some of those things coming! But when it comes to stained glass, I feel pretty comfortable with my knowledge.

I can cut glass and design glass and solder panels, I have experience that spans several decades and in all that time I've picked up a substantial body of knowledge, but I still don't know everything. And that's a good thing! It's fun to learn and explore new techniques, it's exciting to try something new, that we've never done before, like sandblasting on both sides of a piece of glass that we just tried last week.

But what I really don't know is the minds of other people. Why don't they have the same intense love of stained glass that we do? What is missing in their lives that they don't feel inspired by really great images in glass?

Now that we've been located in Provo, Utah for eight years, we ought to be getting pretty good as to how our business needs to function in Provo. But we're just starting to scratch the surface. A few developers, architects and builders know who we are, but certainly not all. It's an extremely fun part of building and running a business to get to know new people in the industry who introduce us to new projects and opportunities. And it's gratifying when someone we've worked with in the past searches us out and presents work to us that is challenging. We love that part of the business.

What I really wish for is that others in the stained glass business would share their experience and knowledge with us so that we might all be able to help and lift one another. I think there is an unlimited supply of opportunity for any stained glass artist who wants it. I believe that the world is full of the need for more beauty and inspiration and that as stained glass artists we (as a community) have only touched the surface. Who doesn't need more beauty and inspiration in their life?

For more articles on stained glass visit http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/articles.htm

When Is Enough Enough?

There are times when I really wonder what I should do. Like the time that a window was broken by a friend who installed it as a favor to a customer. Do I have a responsibility because I knew them? Where does my involvement start and end? I mean, I want to be a good guy, but I'm also in business to make a profit, not to lose money.

To resolve the issue in my own mind, I think about the way that Randy Meitler, a metal artist reacts when things go wrong. (www.meitlermetalworks.com) Randy bends over backwards to satisfy the client. He often goes and does work for a client when he had little or nothing to do with a problem. I have seen him lose money time after time, fixing problems that others caused. When he installed a gate according to the instructions that the firm who hired him gave him, it didn't work right. Those guys didn't engineer the project properly. Really, Randy wasn't at fault, but he came out and re hung different hinges which had less friction in them and the gate worked fine. By rights, he should have been able to charge for the extra work, since it was the other guys fault, but he didn't. When I asked him about it, he explained that he would rather feel good about the job than to haggle over right and wrong and have the client have bad feelings.

He believes that what you do, comes back in some form. If you give good service, you'll get repeat business. If you give poor service, people will know.

There was a mechanic in the town where we lived in Missouri. He was an excellent mechanic, but he always had to cut himself a little better deal. When you took your car in for a tune-up or inspection, he always recommended that you get a new starter because that old one was going bad. If you happened to need a new starter, he was sure to find that your battery was bad as well. He padded every job with as much as he could and as a result, over the years, folks quit coming to him. He was still an excellent mechanic, but he had milked so many jobs that his reputation caught up with him and he lost more business that he gained.

So what am I going to do when asked to make good on a deal that has already cost me dearly? I'm going to remember what my son told me in a recent conversation. "It's not that the customer is always right, they're wrong as often as not, but we treat them with the same respect and care as IF THEY WERE RIGHT."

For more articles on stained glass visit http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/articles.htm

Competition Is Only An Illusion

It's important that we as stained glass artists realize that we are not in competition with each other. There is a tendency to see someone else’s success and feel jealous. “I should have gotten that commission, I could have done better.” We see artists in all mediums belittling their colleagues work. What’s wrong with us? Are we working from an attitude of scarcity or abundance? Those who have a view of life that there exists abundance become much more open and able to feel joy for the success of others. They are able to be inspired by the work of others instead of feeling jealous.

When I started in stained glass in 1983, I wasn't making enough to support us by only doing glass. Somehow, I stumbled onto video rentals and soon I had three video rental stores in three different towns. What's interesting is that in one town, another person opened a video rental store right behind ours on the same block. We thought we were really going to be in fierce competition.

The other store lasted a year and then the owner relocated to another town. During that year, the store located in the town with the “competitor” did about $1200 in rentals each week, so did the store in a nearby town that had no competition. After the other store closed down, our revenues went up for a week or so, but leveled back to about $1200 a week. If that other guy was so much competition, shouldn’t the stores’ revenues have doubled when he closed? Hmmm.

Later, three other video stores opened in the town where there was no competition. Guess what? There was very little change in that stores receipts. There was a slight dip in the stores revenues, but not anywhere near enough to hurt us. Huh, that just didn’t seem right.

A couple of years ago, a major stained glass studio in Salt Lake City, Utah closed their doors. We sell stained glass in Salt Lake through a couple of decorators and are located about 50 miles south of there. If it were true that we were in competition with each other, my business would have gone up. But it didn’t, what another store does has very little effect on us. Except that if someone starts a heavy advertising campaign, interest in stained glass goes up and it’s almost as if their campaign was one of our own. So having people around in the same business only SEEMS like you’re in competition. Their marketing efforts help me!

Recently, our studio worked with two other “competitors” on a project. We were contacted to build some large windows to go in doors in an office building. They would have to be insulated between tempered glass and rather than use the local big glass guys who routinely make mistakes and even damage windows, we approached our nearest competitors, a stained glass shop who have been in business for many years. They turned out to be very friendly and helpful and even though the price for their work was 50% higher than that other glass shop, the value was there because they treated our work as if it was their own.

When I asked if they could install the glass, they were too busy, but they recommended another glass company who specializes in installations. The install went so well, that we’ve asked for other help from that third company.

So instead of being “competitors”, by using each others talents and strengths, it’s almost like we’re partners. The glass shop that did the insulated units doesn’t teach classes, so they give out our business cards to people who ask about classes and they send folks to us when they don’t have a specific piece of glass in stock.

Your natural instinct may be that if my students go buy tools from a different glass studio, I’m losing money, but don’t forget that the folks at the other studio are coming to you and making purchases. It’s a win-win situation. You and your neighbor studio sell more to each others students because they visit and everything in your studio looks new, because they haven’t been there before. The students win, because they get to see the same things in a different setting and it breathes new life into their hobby.

What if they start building windows for their friends and become competitors? Then treat them like partners, like long lost friends. Their circle of influence is completely different than yours and so it doesn’t matter if they are selling to others, they were never going to be your customers anyhow. And besides that, the more people who learn about stained glass in your area, the more popular it will become. And the more educated the community is about glass, the more valued it will become.

Have you ever wondered why all the car lots seem to cluster together? They all seen to locate on a single road, rows of them. Because they know that there is power in numbers. That they aren’t really in competition with one another. By locating closely to each other, they create a synergy where the two separate lots might have sold a number of cars by themselves, but by being near each other, they’ll each sell more than they would have.

Get over the jealousy and you can really enjoy your business. The other store owners will become your best friends instead of your enemies. Sounds good? Try it.

For more articles on stained glass visit http://www.gommstudios.com/stained-glass-articles/articles.htm

April-Studio Chemicals

After covering repair techniques over the last few newsletters, I thought it might be helpful to go over the chemicals we use in the studio and their uses.

We use many chemicals in the stained glass studio. It's sometimes helpful to review how they are best used and when they should be used. This helps us achieve better (and safer) results.

Read the whole article with pictures by clicking the title above.