We were lucky to catch up with Joshua Cicerone recently and have shared our conversation below.
Joshua, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
The idea to open an art gallery came only after the accidental success of the small production & design agency that I co-founded in 2005. My business partner and I had always maintained a hands-on approach to running the agency, which paid off to the effect that we never stopped working. Eventually, I proposed a spiritual side hustle to offset the corporate grind that paid our bills. An art gallery would carry relatively low financial risk, while allowing us to be both altruistic and weird. It would be a labor of love, an investment in our community, and I would do all of the work! He was easily convinced. For two decades we had spent a wealth of artistic energy producing high-stakes corporate spectacles, and while I couldn’t be more grateful for those golden handcuffs, it wasn’t the direction I had expected my life to go.
Starting off, my goal was simply to avoid becoming a starving artist. Why would anyone pursue a career in the arts? I had a natural gift: the ability to draw, an urge that has been with me as long as I can remember. I also had a zeal for both creative and academic writing. In high school I taught myself guitar and drums, joined a band, published a ‘zine, wrote the first of many screenplays, recorded VHS tapes of my friends skateboarding and discovered my passion for painting. My creative potential was easier to recognize than a potential career path (it would be several years until I even learned what a Creative Director was), but luckily I had plenty of energy and ambition.
My teenage summers were spent on the Jersey Shore, where I first discovered that I could work for myself. I made agreements with a handful of restaurant owners that allowed me to draw portraits of customers for tips; I made my own schedule and decent money. I moved to NYC on a scholarship to study film and philosophy at SVA. I graduated in 1997 and landed a very part-time job writing film reviews for the Village Voice, a lucky break that left freedom for side hustles. I taught graffiti classes at 5Pointz, made experimental music videos for nightclub DJs and formed a small business producing rave visuals. I was barely a step above starving artist when the September 11th attacks happened and everything changed.
In February 2002, I was struggling to find work when a friend gave me a number to call. He told me that Robert DeNiro was launching a film festival to help revitalize lower Manhattan and they were looking for help. Two weeks later I found myself recruited onto a small, scrappy team tasked with devising, designing and executing the first Tribeca Film Festival. They put me in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies; this is how I learned what an “event producer” was. Eight weeks later I was shaking hands with DeNiro, Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela. It was the most manic, intense and satisfying experience I had ever known. I had hustled hard and hit it off with the right people.
The next year, the festival returned and I was named Creative Director for Special Events. My first assignment was to find and hire a Production Director, so I posted an ad on Craigslist. This is how I met Jared Seigel. Jared was a graduate of Yale University’s prestigious theatrical production program with experience gigging on music festivals and touring with Cirque du Soleil. We liked all the same bands. It did not take long for us to recognize that we shared a highly compatible working chemistry, like two halves of a brain. It would mark the start of a partnership that has lasted more than two decades to this day.
The Tribeca Film Festival’s annual “special events” required us to hire and manage multiple teams to work across different venues, on overlapping schedules, at a grueling pace. We produced parties, panels, music concerts, awards shows, brand activations, free public events and dozens of celebrity soaked red carpets. Looking back, it seems unhinged. After the first few years we had developed a blueprint not only for Tribeca, but also for how to create a nimble, hands-on production agency. And that’s exactly what we did.
We started Good Sense & Company – a 50/50 partnership offering creative and production services for live events – out of a spare room in my Brooklyn apartment. We had no office, no capital, no full-time staff. What we did have was one very impressive flagship client in the Tribeca Film Festival. By this time Jared had won over various city officials, NYPD liaisons and labor union heads, while I schmoozed film studio publicists and sponsorship strategists. We hustled for work. To say that the business stumbled into success would discredit the incredible number of hours and backbreaking energy we put into it, but we grew quickly.
In 2012, we won a golden opportunity to develop YouTube’s first ever upfront-style presentation to advertisers: a variety-show called Brandcast. It would become an annual, multimillion dollar event designed to lure in billions of dollars in ad revenue. We have been producing that show for nearly 13 years now. In hindsight, one of our biggest strengths was being able to turn a lucky break into success. We kept adding global brands to our client list: BMW, Coca Cola, Universal Music Group, the NBA. Our business was on a steady growth path right up until 2020 when Covid-19 hit and everything changed again.
A disease-driven lockdown is not good for the live events industry. We kept our entire staff employed through the pandemic because we were small and adaptive. We pushed our content department to the frontlines and developed a model for virtual events that kept our corporate business flowing. Most importantly, New York State would enlist us to produce the NY PopsUp festival, a revitalization effort spanning 300 free public performances over six months. We put a lot of people to work and helped develop safe event protocols that would eventually allow Broadway theatres to reopen. This surreal chapter could have easily destroyed our business, but again we hustled and got lucky… and survived.
Art helped me through these strange times. I gave my kids art lessons by day, and spent long nights painting, filling my home with canvases. I created an Instagram account to post my work and quickly connected with a whole community of equally prolific and traumatized weirdos. I rode my bike around Brooklyn and witnessed fresh street art popping up across deserted neighborhoods. I spied gatherings of masked artists at ersatz galleries in weed stores and sandwich shops, and sensed a new art scene slowly emerging from the quiet of Covid.
In 2022, Jared and I moved the agency’s office out of Dumbo in search of cheaper real estate. We found a ground floor space in a quirky part of Fort Green, and our new landlord presented us with the option to take over a small, adjacent storefront. Gears turned quickly. Back in 2005, one of our first clients was Deitch Projects, the groundbreaking Soho art gallery, and we witnessed how Jeffery Deitch turned the space into a nesting ground for emerging artists. Now that our core business was relatively stable, the idea of an artsy and altruistic side business was surprisingly appealing. We would tap into our existing infrastructure and resources to open an art gallery.
In March 2023, Arty Goodness hosted its first exhibit, and the opening night was packed. “By weirdos, for weirdos!” We announced ourselves like insurgents, with a loud visual identity and a profit model that favors artists, which is not how most galleries operate. Our opening and closing receptions have become highly anticipated parties, with crowds spilling out onto the sidewalks. We’ll keep it going as long as we can; as far as side hustles go, it’s quite fun. We’re selling art, but not even close to turning a profit, and the gallery can only exist under the wing of our corporate-serving events agency.
Good Sense & Company turns 20 years old this year. Jared and I still put in long hours managing staff and clients, and the art gallery on top of that. It’s a labor of love; the spoils of luck, energy and ambition. For a lot of business owners, success probably means having to work less. In this case, the success story of our small business means getting to work more.
Joshua, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
GOOD SENSE & COMPANY provides creative direction and production management for live events. Our client list includes some of the biggest brands in the world: Google, YouTube, Samsung, Walmart and the NBA. We have worked with some of the biggest names in music and entertainment in some of the most iconic venues in the world. We’re all about big ideas, collaboration and creating events that tell stories.
Based in Brooklyn, we are independently owned, with fewer than 30 full time employees and roughly twice as many freelancers operating at any given moment. The “company” in our name refers to this network of specialized talent, from stage managers to lighting designers to motion graphics animators. Our success depends on their chemistry and experience. Our corporate culture is passionate and energetic; our team is filled with reliable perfectionists who love the work they do.
The business started in 2005 as a two-man collaboration – I was the creative guy and my business partner, Jared Siegel, was the production guy – but we scaled up quickly. We refined our craft over 20 years working on high-stakes, high-profile events: upfronts, award shows, executive summits, concerts and festivals. We continue to oversee our respective teams; the addition of a COO, CFO and client accounts team helps keep us both in line.
ARTY GOODNESS is our beloved side project, an art gallery that celebrates New York’s contemporary art scene. Our mission is to provide a platform for emerging artists, and to promote diverse artistic voices that may be underrepresented at mainstream galleries. We showcase academic artists alongside street, comic and tattoo artists – a wild variety of styles and mediums – and we offer talks and workshops with local street artists to help foster a vibrant and supportive community around the arts. Since opening in 2023, the gallery has become a hub for young artists to connect and collaborate – a safe, radical outpost fostering dialogue and inspiring action through art. We host approximately 6 exhibits and 12-20 events annually.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
One thing that has bolstered our reputation in this industry is our long-term partnerships. It feels great to tell a prospective client that we’ve produced YouTube’s multimillion dollar upfront since 2012, or that we produced the Tribeca Film Festival’s special events for 18 consecutive years. It is typical for big brands like YouTube to shake things up every few years by bringing on new agencies with fresh perspectives, so we’re especially proud of the multiple projects they bring us back for annually. Why do they keep bringing us back? Financial transparency and accountability plays a big part; we come in on budget and on schedule. Creative innovation is another factor. We stay on top of technology and trends, and push ourselves to keep topping our last big idea.
Ten years ago, YouTube was hiring dozens of different “boutique” agencies like ours to handle their smaller marketing events, while assigning their 6-8 giant tentpole events to a handful of global event firms. Today, they have consolidated their business to a few reliable partners, and our small agency oversees multiple large-scale events on par with our global competition.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
I recently read an article about how some people may be genetically predisposed to need less sleep than the average person. I rarely sleep more than five hours a night. Yet I am one of those never-sit-still people: high-achieving and manically productive. I already had a very full time job, but this helps explain how the art gallery became my full time side hustle.
Over the years my business partner and I had explored different ways to parlay the agency’s resources into more creative endeavors. When relocating our Brooklyn HQ in 2022, we found ourselves adjacent to a small retail space that felt like destiny calling. I was a painter, and my secret dream to retire and open an art gallery was no secret at all. Luckily our new landlord was an eccentric fellow who supported our vision with a gift of deferred rent. Now we would use our agency’s staff, vendors and production resources to make it happen.
We called the gallery Arty Goodness and developed a stylized visual identity. The austerity of mainstream galleries was a turn-off. We would be something else: “by weirdos, for weirdos and independent AF.” We enlisted our network of young creatives to court a community on Instagram; meanwhile, I spent hours documenting street art and tagging artists, gaining curious engagement and followers before announcing our first show.
When it came to curating we also started with personal connections – friends and artists that we’d worked with over the years. I reached out to a short list of coveted “name brand” street artists and a longer list of lesser known ones. I checked out other galleries and art school expos and the walls of restaurants and bars looking bona fide young masters. At first, artists were wary. No other gallery offers artists 70% of sales. But we put together a killer line up true to the vision.
There was no way I could have expected the success of the first show, but it proved the community was hungry for what we were serving. The crowds spilled out onto the streets. The vibe was inspired. The street art community came out to support their own, and the connections we made that first night would be exponentially valuable. Two years later, many of our wishlist artists have not only exhibited art on our walls – they are regulars, friends, anchors of a community centered around our monthly events.
Financially speaking, we have sold beautiful art and helped artists pay their rent, but not turned a profit, not even close. We set out to create a hub for this community, a place that seized and celebrated New York’s rising arts culture. In that regard the gallery is a success, but it will remain a side hustle and labor of love. For now, the agency and my sleepless nights will subsidize the dream.
Contact Info:
- Website: goodsense.nyc artygoodness.com
- Instagram: @goodsensenyc @artygoodness
Image Credits
All images courtesy of Good Sense & Co., LLC