Pursuing Investors

os200725  Pursuing Investors: Stamps as artistscrip

  His business plan includes financing schemes. The sales of products and services in the context of the current economy depends on both past performance and the prospects of future performance. The production, research, practice, and service plan is chief.

1202 Words

Artistamp as artistscrip offering

If I offer a stamp, what do I promise in return? This offering must profit both the buyer and me, the seller/developer of Emeralda Works, LLC.

Teacher’s dreams

Teachers dream. Teachers have nightmares. Some teachers’ jobs are living nightmares. I wish I could help them, but I do not have the power. My teaching job had elements of both a dream job and a nightmare. Fortunately, it was mostly a dream job.

Even though I resigned before the usual number of years one gives to college teaching – forty – I still have teaching dreams. There was one dream, however, that I sacrificed when I resigned. That was what I call the Mr. Chips dream.

Mr. Chips was a nickname which students gave their teacher in the film, Goodbye Mr. Chips. Peter O’Toole played the role of the teacher. He was strict, but he was good. When he got old, his students sometimes came back to say hello. Some grandchildren came back as students!

That was my dream – that I would turn out to be such a good teacher that my former students would encourage their children to come to the UW, like they did, and to take a class from me. Or, even better, their grandchildren. How fun that would have been!

My teaching would have been so outstanding that the school would be a different school by the time my former students had been out for ten years, or a generation or more so that their children – coming home from my class – would describe a course of study their parents would not recognize!

These dreams came when I had a job at the UW. My extreme dream then was that the courses or workshops I would pioneer would be worth my former students’ time and expense to sign up. The offerings would be similar to continuing education, but without the accreditation and academic accoutrements we have seen in the past.

For example – although I couldn’t have thought of this forty years ago – a workshop in Artist’s Asset Management and Legacy Transfer would be useful to former students who had developed a career and a valuable accumulation of works – both tangible and intangible.

I am lucky

The teacher’s Mr. Chips’ story was set in old England and things are different all over. I am lucky because not only have I lived into the future my former students say Hello. Not their children, however, at least not for a long time. Those few who do contact me do not come to visit – with rare exceptions – they use the Internet email or social networks.

Many of my former students were topnotch and developed good careers in the arts. When new technologies came out, they were early adopters, in part because I exposed them to ways telephone, photography, film, video, and computer graphics might be useful in the traditional fine arts. Luckily, I am able to see this. Seeing this justifies the extra effort it took me.

More than lucky

Lately I have been working on another one of my dreams – distance learning or what I might call growing knowledge. As the pandemic has shut down most educational institutions and initiatives, distance learning is big news. Educators, most of them who never thought they’d have to use these systems, are rushing to adapt. Therefore, one might call it the Next Big Thing.

Art, and printmaking in particular, are especially hard-hit because the physical, face-to-face human factors in the arts are important. In addition, artists and teachers are rare who gave technology much thought either in their education or their day-to-day studio practice.

I am an exception. I thought about technology all my college life both as student and as a college teacher. In 1980 I made my first proposal to the UW to teach woodcut remotely. They denied me the chance, but I never let it go. Today, as they are beginning to respond to the COVID-19 mandates, printmaking teachers are trying distance learning.

Skirting the topic

This essay was inspired by the challenge I am facing. I can have a company to do what I dreamed of in 1980. I have all the concepts in place. To develop any one of the concepts, however, will require help. I require money to pay people to carry out my plans – to help me.

Under the name of a sole proprietorship, Emeralda Works, I researched and tested plans dating back over twenty years. Now I am upgrading it to the Limited Liability Company status. This I am doing this to sell the business. I am 78, so it is time to think about my exit plan.

For example, financing the business will build on my old teacher’s dream of continuing education, but not in the way I thought about it forty years ago. In 1980, not only was I thinking of ways to teach woodcut printmaking remotely, I was thinking about a post-graduate school for my former students.

The two can comingle. I don’t mean my former students can do post-graduate study in woodcut printmaking, but they can participate in a novel way. In this novel scheme of mine they can buy shares in the company, Emeralda Works LLC, that will produce the online printmaking (or knowledge-growing) offering. Money they put in as investments will pay the helpers.

In some instances, these friends and former students will be the helpers!

I thought of several of my former students and I wondered, “What can I do for them now?” They are mature – some of them in their ‘seventies and ‘eighties – therefore they do not need art lessons.[1] What they need and want is experiences that give them hope. I can create something that ignites their anticipation. Anticipation is the key to hope.

“A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope,” said Rosabeth Moss-Kanter. The structure can be a company, Emeralda Works LLC. The microcosm of it is stamps – hundreds or thousands of stamps known as artistamps and thousands of artworks available as artistscrip.

Dutch auction

When Google went public, they did not know what people would pay for shares in the IPO stage, so they proposed a Dutch Auction. The price floated according to the buyers’ risk tolerance.

When Carl Chew designed the Art Action in 1977, it had a similar birth – the price went down and tested the bidders’ risk not that they would have to pay more but that could pay less if they held out long enough for the price to descend from the initial price.

Conclusion

I feel the pressure building to make my idea clear, but all I can do is suggest that an artistamp goes to a potential investor who has sent money to Patreon to help me make this clearer. Nellie, our manager, maintains the database as it grows – similar to the way we ran the essay contest.

Another option is eBay.

Still another is the home-grown auction platforms.

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[1] Pat Austin is a notable exception – she paid $100 for tutorials on using Kindle Direct Publishing, which gave me the funds to upgrade Camtasia and build a ten-part video series to put on YouTube, free.