We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Peter Marin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Peter, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

When I started my business, I was airbrushing all types of artwork. I was the guy you’d go to if you needed something airbrushed. I airbrushed anything; from body art to murals, motorcycles, to t-shirts. I even ran a couple of airbrush stores early in my career.

I made the switch to events when someone approached me at a kiosk in the mall where I was airbrushing. He asked if I would be interested in airbrushing at his son’s bar mitzvah. Intrigued, I said yes. And that was my very first event. I had to figure out pretty quickly how I was going to do it.

That first event was difficult because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was bringing a lot of extra equipment and painting a lot of complicated designs. I didn’t have my process or system in place on how to manage a crowd. At private events, it can be intense and fast-paced. So I had to learn through trial and error. I remember some of my first events being very difficult. And I would ask myself, “are events worth it”?

But eventually, I learned to scale back on the designs and make them simpler. The designs had to be universally appealing whether it was for an adult or child. So basically, a name design.

I discovered that choosing what designs to airbrush at events was tricky. I wasn’t going to airbrush pictures because if you offer pictures, say it’s a basketball, they will ask for a baseball. And if they ask for a baseball, well then can you do a race car? And it goes on.

So if you stick with name designs, they’ll still try to change it, but they are only changing stuff like colors, which doesn’t add any extra time. Obviously, they would want to put their name on it, that’s expected. So there’s no problem there either. It doesn’t increase the amount of time.

I learned to bring only what is needed as far as equipment is concerned. And I discovered that I had to build my own equipment because there was nothing in the market that was portable with an easy set-up system for a private event. I even had to test different air compressors cause I wanted the smallest and lightest one possible, but still strong enough to provide the air pressure and performance that I needed for a four or five-hour event.

Over the years, I started building different prototypes of equipment that would eventually become what I’m using today. Now, because of social media, I’m finding a lot of airbrush companies and other airbrush artists are seeing my equipment and want to buy it. But I can’t make them affordable for the mass public because it’s not mass-produced. They are custom one-off builds. So they’re pretty expensive.

So that was probably the biggest thing, changing the samples and the equipment. But eventually, I got too busy to do everything on my own. It would be nice if I had an event, every day that I could do myself, but scheduling never works out that way. You might have days of no events. And then any given Saturday, you’ll have four or five different events. I couldn’t do them all. So it became pretty clear that I had to grow a team.

At first, I was a little nervous about sharing my trade secrets. Teaching everything I knew to another artist and letting go a little because I felt that that business model was a very small niche. And I could be creating my competition. But in retrospect, it was the best thing I ever did because I was able to let go some while also helping others make money doing something they love.

So first, it was nailing down the designs and equipment to use for events, and secondly was building a team to do events with me. I currently have 7 airbrush artists working with me at events.

The thing that made my business take off is when I chose to specialize in events only and stop doing retail. I came to that decision when my wife and I decided to move to downtown St. Pete, Florida.

I had to give up my big home, where I converted the garage into a workshop for all my side work. But I knew when I moved into a small apartment in downtown St Pete, I would have to give up the workshop. So I decided at that point that I was going to make the bold move and jump solely into events. So when people ask me what was the biggest change in my business, I would say it would be specializing in events.

It was scary at first, going from my various streams of income to just one but I’m so glad I did it. It didn’t take long for that one stream to make up for and exceed the income I was making from all the other different airbrush avenues.

The next step that helped me scale up was building small teams for marketing and administration so I didn’t have to wear all the hats. I got the payback from the marketing efforts right away, which was amazing. It could have been good timing in the market or the marketing efforts, I’m not quite sure. But hiring a marketing team helped grow my business while freeing up my time.

But as things go, as my business was leveling up so was the complication factor. I had to get improve, for my business to get better. I mean this in a way that maybe most people wouldn’t understand, it’s not just about learning business or processes or specific business skills. It’s a lot of toughening myself up. I started working hard on personal development. And I think if I didn’t do that, I would crumble because the pressure would get to me.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

I’m the owner of Airbrush Events. We are a group of airbrush artists who come to your event, whether it be a corporate event, a bar/bat mitzvah, brand activations, company parties, weddings, or school events, we do all events.

We provide event guests with airbrush swag (t-shirts, hats, bags, etc.) that we’ll customize with colors and text, right there in front of them. It takes approximately 5 minutes and the guest will have a custom piece of apparel that they can wear right away.

Airbrush apparel is always in style and guests enjoy having a hand in the design process.

Although we are based in Florida, we have and do travel to all 50 states for events.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I never really had any capital to start a business. It was from my bootstraps. There was no capital involved. The truth is I never finished college, so it was either working minimum wage jobs or learning to carve my own path. Because I started airbrushing when I was 20, that was the thing I had the most experience and knowledge about. And truthfully, it’s a cheap business to start, you can start it with almost nothing.

I have to give credit to the owners of the first airbrush shop I worked in. It was a busy shop in New Hampshire. When the owners decided to sell, they offered a co-worker and me an attractive deal to buy the shop. Because we had been working for them for many years, they allowed us to make payments on the shop while we worked. I don’t think he even made us put a deposit down. After one busy year, we were able to pay off the shop. Not long after that, I sold my half to the other partner. But I didn’t use that money to start my business, I used that money to move to Florida and buy a condo.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I couldn’t tell you how many events I had scheduled for 2020. Maybe 30-40 events lined up when the pandemic hit.

I remember the first call I got was from a corporate gig. He said, “we’re going to have to cancel this due to COVID”. I knew that that was the beginning of what would end up being a rush of phone calls, everyone canceling.

It was so much work just to cancel all those contracts. I remember working for weeks, just undoing everything. And to be honest, there was a moment of despair where I thought maybe my calling was something else. And I would have to look outside of my business to make money, but I didn’t waste any time. That’s for sure.

I think I only spent a few days thinking about what I wanted to do before my agent for college events called me. She told me that some of her other acts had switched to virtual events. “Do you think you can do that with Airbrush Events?” she asked.

I didn’t know how, but I told her I’d think about it and see what I could come up with. After about two or three weeks, I worked out a system that involved using Zoom. I set up a little workspace inside my tiny apartment, complete with a microphone, webcam, and even a little exhaust fan. Although I didn’t have as many corporate or private events as I normally would, virtual college events kept me busy throughout the pandemic.

I didn’t make as much revenue as the year prior, but my expenses were low. I wasn’t traveling so there no gas money or airfare was needed. Everything was kept to a bare minimum. And since there were only enough events for me, I didn’t have any paychecks to pay out to other airbrush artists and even the marketing team was put on hold. I pared down all the expenses and just focused on doing virtual events and I did very well because my expenses were so low. But now since the pandemic has slowed down and people are out again, I’m not doing many virtual events.

So that saved my butt. Just thinking outside the box with some help and inspiration from others who have done it, not necessarily airbrush artists, but other types of acts and vendors. I honestly wish I had started virtual events sooner.

Contact Info:

• Website: airbrushevents.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/airbrushevents/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/airbrushevents
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbrush-events/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AirbrushEvents