Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brian Raitman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Brian, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

Being a business owner was probably my destiny. Growing up, I was always one of those people that had an extremely difficult time working for someone else.

I quit my very first “real” job after three days. I was working at Baskin Robbins and had become friends with another kid that was hired the same day as me. I told my boss in the interview process that I could not and would not work on July 4th, as I had plans. Sam was going to work that shift so we were all good. Sam was fired because he stepped outside to call his mom so she could pick him up from work at the end of his shift. We were explicitly told not to go outside when we were working. I thought that rule was ridiculous, it made me mad that Sam was fired for breaking it out of necessity and when I was asked to cover his July 4th shift I just quit.

Later, still as a teenager and into my early 20’s, I got into arguments with bosses at each of my jobs except for one. Working for the Portland Trail Blazers was the only time I was truly happy working for someone else. That job was fun and for once I didn’t see my young, arrogant self as being smarter than my bosses.

I had another job when I was young that I absolutely adored and I will miss until the day I die. I was in a punk rock band and we were fairly well-known throughout the world. We ran our band similar to a business even though we made a measly amount of money from it. From there, I started a music distribution company and record label. I was working for myself and everything happened on my own terms, As a teenager, it was empowering. It was addicting. It taught me from an early age that I was too much of a rebel to fall in line at a big company. The ethos of that music scene also taught me to find meaning in my work.

Even today, fourteen plus years into running a business I love, I do think about what it would be like to have a regular job. When I am packing shipments at two in the morning it would be impossible not to have that thought. There were years where I would have loved to make more money and to believe I would have the stability that came with working for someone else. I know better though. I’ve spent my life working against the structure that corporate America sees too many people succumb to. Even in the darkest days of self-employment, I am addicted to the fact that we succeed or we fail on my terms. I know too well the results of hard work, the joys that come from seeing my ingenuity pay off, the thrill that comes from seeing the happiness my business brings to other people and so much more.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We opened our galleries right after I graduated college. Art was a departure from what I studied in school, as that was advertising. I had this epiphany flying from Colorado back to Philadelphia shortly after I graduated. I realized I did not want to do work that encouraged mass consumption of any kind. I wanted to do something beautiful for the world, something that would have a minimal impact on our environment and encourage people to cherish this beautiful planet. I wanted to make people smile through my efforts at work. My parents had been kicking around the idea of opening an art gallery and after I graduated we ran with it.

I believe that art should be fun. Art should be uplifting. Art shall tell our stories. Above all, the art we collect should make us smile. That premise has guided our business for almost 15 years now. We primarily focus on contemporary landscape and wildlife paintings and sculptures in a wide array of styles and mediums. We derive a lot of pride from the collection we’ve built, as the artists we are blessed to work with are incredible at what they do. They spend their time adding beauty to the world and we spend ours connecting their visions with people who will cherish their art for a lifetime, then pass it on to future generations of their family.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We opened Thanksgiving weekend of 2007. “The Great Recession” started the following week. We sell art. Art is a luxury. Ouch!

Fortunately, I was fresh out of college. I was new to living in a ski town. As far as I was concerned, and still am, this is paradise. It is really living the dream. So I faked it until we made it.

I remember how frequently people would ask how our business was doing when we were first getting going. It didn’t matter to me if we hadn’t sold anything for a while and we were barely scraping by. My answer was always that we are doing great. That is a key to success. Honestly, we were in most aspects of life so it wasn’t a lie. I was having fun and I answered to no one outside of the wonderful clients who bought art from us. It was exciting and there was so much unrealized potential. Failure simply was not an option.

Loving what you do is key. I love this business enough to have lived with my parents after college. It was awkward obviously. Fortunately, they were game to have me in the house and to help with the business. Family dinners were endless business meetings. Their kitchen counter was our shipping table after dinner. Looking back, I would do it all over again every time. I would open at the outset of one of the biggest economic earthquakes this country ever experienced again too.

Why? You learn how to fake it until you make it. You learn how to run a really lean operation. You learn how to adapt. Out of necessity, you learn how to run every aspect of your business. You learn that people don’t want to support a business that grumbles and complains its way through the day. They want to share in your success. I can’t tell you how many times people would buy a small piece simply because they knew it contributed to my dream.

Any advice for managing a team?

It took us six years to hire our first employee. Right off the bat, here’s a good way to keep your team encouraged…don’t call them employees. It’s a dirty word in my mind. No one works for me. We all work together.

Our first co-worker ever is named Sam. She came in off the street about twenty minutes after someone was supposed to show up for an internship and didn’t show up as planned. Sam, who happened to be well-versed in the art world, mentioned how cool it would be to work in an art gallery. I straight up asked her if she would like to do so. Sometimes the world sends you an angel!

We quickly moved Sam from an internship into a full-time sales and administrative role when we opened our second location. Sam worked here for a year before she moved back to the east coast to take care of her boyfriend’s ailing mom. Her mother-in-law is doing good now. Yep, she and her boyfriend got married. Sam was away for six years. She moved back to work with us a year ago. Few things have been more flattering in my career.

When Sam reached out to us via Indeed last year I was blown away. It said the world to me about our company’s culture.

We foster an environment based on equality and respect. We have no managers. Everyone that works here is responsible for building this business.

Work should be liberating, empowering and fun. We all spend far too much time at work for it to not be exactly that. Work should be a place where people come together for the common good, not simply for the good of the boss. We all spend too much time at our jobs to feel like the job exists simply to make someone else money. Work should be a place where we are encouraged to be ourselves, where we can dress, act, think and operate like we are independent and self-controlled parts of a greater good. We should trade our time for money because that is how capitalism works, but we should only do so because we are bettering our lives in far more ways than simply monetarily. We share knowledge freely and without pretense. We empower everyone to make decisions. We should not only feel valued at work, we should be valued. We should be friends at work and outside of it. Work should give us the opportunity to control our own incomes, at least to a certain extent. Being in the art world, commission is a big part of the pay at our business and our culture encourages cooperation on every sale, so at the end of the day we compete with our competitors; not each other. In the end, it is our clients who win because we all have fun at work and we work together to ensure each other’s success and our client’s happiness.

Contact Info:

• Website: RaitmanArt.com
• Instagram: @RaitmanArtGalleries
• Facebook: facebook.com/raitmanart