Art business and time management

Either you have a shop or an art gallery and you display your work of arts in there, you spend lots of time with customers. You may spend an hour with a customer and sell them nothing, and on the meantime, a customer who arrived to your store to buy something may just go, because no one said her/him “welcome! may I help you”.

For not having this kind of problem here are some tips on how to make a time management:

About spending time with your customers:

Time is money. Here is my calculation:

The daily total time you can spend for your customers is from
morning 10:00 am untill12:00 – morning total = 2 hours
and afternoon 13:00 untill 17:00 – afternoon total = 3 hours

daily total hours spend on your art gallery is:
2+3 = 5 hours

The total time you can spend with each customer to sell:
if you have 20 visitors daily
so 5 hours / 20 visitors = 15 minutes per customer.

If you say hey 15 minutes is just ridiculous for selling a work of art to a customer, then you have to get a salesperson, preferrably an art student, getting a percentage on each sale realisation.

So let`s suppose you get a 2 salesperson, and still you have 20 customers daily:
daily total 5 hours of work time
20 visitors / 2 sales person = 10 visitors per salesperson
5 hours / 10 vsitors = 30 minutes per customer per salesperson

Hey this makes more sense isn`t it?

Other detail, if you pay the art students in percentage be careful on some business tricks they can do, For example they can sell 1 thing at 5000$ and tell you “hey I sold this at 4000$” this is a nasty trick! They will get the 1000$ in their pocket and more on that they will get a percentage on the 4000$ , so at the end you`ll get fewer money then expected.

To avoid this you have many options:

Have a price list with fixed and reasonable price on it , then you will not need to make any bargains.

You can make a fixed discount on wholesale pricing: for example the customer can get a discount of 5% if she/he buys 5 art works, 10% for 6 to 10 artworks etc..

Last option is: once the customer decides to buy, the customer and the salesperson can refer to you to make the last deal.

These advices are from my past experiences. They may be unsufficient or some parts may not be suitable in all cases. I strongly recommend that you read books written by academicians or professionals , or get advanced courses for having a full knowledge.

All the best to you all

Alorya Art