We recently connected with Rachel Pru and Brooke Nelson N/A and have shared our conversation below.
Rachel Pru and Brooke Nelson, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
We both left our stable jobs to start our very own company, an art company at that — there was definitely not a class offered in “how to start an art company” in college. We call ourselves “calculated risk takers”, and we started planning for this transition over a year before we did it. We started with weekly meetings with action items and due dates. We each assigned ourselves just 1-2 simple tasks per week and focused on a few things instead of the huge list. We’d meet in Rachel’s small SF apartment in our sweats, and started with a website and contacting SF City Hall to obtain our business license. We started with a general partnership and then switched to a LLC once we saw we had a viable business that could pay for the $800 fee. From there, we also continued to each save a “nest egg” that would help us float through our first year — this meant going out to eat less, riding the bus more, and stopping all spending on clothing. We’d go to birthday dinners out in the city, and we’d be the only ones ordering water to keep to our strict budgets — it felt hard at the time, and now we can barely remember that type of sacrifice, and it was so worth it. We also worked on building the business and pipeline before we both left our full tie jobs. We took a risk, but we prepared a year before we took the leap, and it was well worth it!
Rachel Pru and Brooke Nelson, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Brooke has over a decade in art manufacturing and design, starting in celebrity homes in LA, and moving to hospitality and healthcare. She’s worked on modest to multi-million dollar budgets, and had a background in top galleries, magazines, and briefly worked at American Idol! Her fine-art taste reflects her extensive world travel. Complimentary, Rachel started her career over a decade ago in finance at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a financial-statement auditor, where she audited multi-billion-dollar firms and assisted on hundred-million-dollar acquisitions. Rachel became a data analyst at One Kings Lane and also Salesforce, where she lead the project for equal pay for gender and race.
They combined their skill sets to provide not only beautiful, high quality artwork, but detailed cost-analysis and project management based in a financial background. As a certified-women-owned company, they also show diverse artists in every art package — they specialize in local and custom options. They also provide cost savings through their fantastic vendor relationships and lean operations. The company provides sustainable materials, plants trees for all projects, and is carbon-neutral.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
We had to unlearn applying for many grants! In our early 20s, we applied for many scholarships for college, and as we started our company, we researched grant after grant. A mentor taught us the concept that instead of spending valuable time on grants, we should devote that amount of energy on landing clients, who had the potential to give our company streams of income, which would probably be worth more than the grants. The mentor called it “eliminating distractions”. It’s easy to be distracted by many “shiny” things in business, and we’ve learned that the most important focus is gaining income through quality clients and how to provide the best product to do that.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
We started our company thinking we would sell artwork to start-up companies in the SF Bay Area. Turns out that start-up companies don’t have expendable income for art! Our sales cycle can take over a year, and we learned this after 6months of selling to start-up companies. We re-started our sales’ efforts towards our target clients that we use today. After C19, we also learned that its best to sell into a few industries for diversification — a lot of our clients are in hospitality, and at that time, we wanted to sell to only hospitality. However, we did have other clients in banking, government, and healthcare, and we learned to keep our book of business diverse in industries as some events affect some industries more than others. It was a great lesson to learn early in our career!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.curateartgroup.com/
- Instagram: curateartgroup
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/curate-art-group/?viewAsMember=true