Risk is a topic that comes up a lot in our conversations with entrepreneurs and creatives, but a related topic is investments. Investments come in many forms – investing your time, money, heart and soul, etc. So, with that broad definition of investment in mind, we asked rising stars in the community to tell us the stories of the best or worst investments they’ve made.

Allison Johnston

Probably the best investment I’ve ever made would have to be my Epson wide format photo printer. Since I make a lot of my illustrations into greeting cards and art prints, it’s incredibly nice to be able to print everything in-house. I still have to outsource some of my products (enamel pins, vinyl stickers, and silkscreen apparel just to name a few), but in the long run doing my own printing has saved me a lot of time and money. Read more>>

Mia Mormino

The worst investment I’ve ever made with my music career has to be fake playlisting. When I first started making music I was pretty much alone and knew absolutely nothing in regards to music marketing, business, etc. As a naive young artist when some “professional” individual sends you a fancy-looking email saying they can get hundreds of thousands of people to listen to your brand new single, you think “Oh my god, this is my moment. I’m going to be a popstar. I never knew it was this easy”. Read more>>

Mindful Murals

We both (Thao & Kolten) can agree that the best investment we have ever made, is the investment we made in ourselves to leave our full time jobs to take a chance and start our own business. We faced such a difficult decision. We were both making livable wages but were beyond miserable working for someone else, constructing our days around someone else’s agenda. It ate at us day and night. In 2018, we made the decision to leave our jobs, bet on ourselves and that was the start of something beautiful! Now we were in control again. Read more>>

Tommye Jordan

The absolute best decision I made as a small business owner was hiring my long time friend, Kera Hartman. Kera and I worked together about 16 years ago. We had always stayed in contact over the years and she periodically helped me out with the business – digital marketing, form creation. In 2020, I had to adjust my business model due to COVID going more digital with our CPR classes. I hired Kera on as a CPR Instructor to assist with teaching as we had to limit our class sizes and offer more classes to accommodate for social distancing, safety and smaller student to manikin ratios. Read more>>

Anna D and Adam

The best investment that we have made is to learn about money. For the first 14 years of our relationship, we thought we were doing money “right”. We had a 401k, Roth IRAs, life insurance and had a financial advisor. And for those 14 years we were constantly in debt (non-house related). In 2020 we were fed up and really took the time to learn about money. There had to be a better way than being $36,000 in the hole. Read more>>

Braveaux

The best investment I made was investing into craft. I’m a recording artist so during Covid, studios were shut down and I couldn’t record . During this time I built my own home studio and studied what I like to call YouTube university. I spend hours each day watching videos on how to record myself and how to mix records the right way. This was one of the best investments I made for many reasons such as I can record at my own pace and I don’t have to worry about how much time left in the session, Read more>>

Layla Luna

The best investment I’ve made is taking the time to do one thing every single day to feed my studio practice. That one thing doesn’t have to be an intense 8-hour painting session, it can be as small as researching an artist, placing a supply order, or visiting an exhibition. Over time, the act of dedicating a portion of my day to being creative has become a habit and ingrained a sense of deep value in making work. Read more>>

Brandy Searcy

As a solopreneur, it’s really hard to figure out all the things. I’m a scientist, so while I’ve got the formulation and manufacturing on lock, sales, marketing, and SEO (search engine optimization) are Greek to me. SEO felt like the hardest one of these to tackle on my own because to be honest, I had no clue where to begin (and finding a legit starter’s course in SEO felt impossible at the time… this was back before the brand launched, and I was hoping to get a head start on building interest in the brand). So, I outsourced SEO to a management company complete with a 6 month contract. Read more>>