Doing $5 Million A Year With Three Employees: FineArtAmerica CEO Sean Broihier (Part 6)

Sramana: What accounts for the success of some artists and the lack of success of others on FineArtAmerica?

Sean Broihier: There is a disproportionate distribution of wealth because we do not have a huge bulk of buyers relative to artists. There are some artists who are making an enormous amount of money and some who are making relatively little money. It all comes down to how the artists take advantage of the tools we give them and how they market themselves. The artists who are making $5,000 to $10,000 a month are putting in the required time and energy to generate their own sales. They are doing email campaigns, they are going to art fairs, making TV appearances, and attending trade shows. We are just doing fulfillment orders for those types of artists.

We are a marketplace that gives you tools to be successful. With so many artists on the site, we cannot provide them all with individualized sales and marketing attention. All we can do is give them tools to help them be successful. People who sit around and take the wait-and-see approach will have one or two sales a year. As for anything in life, you will not be successful unless you put effort into it.

Sramana: From your business point of view, you are expecting to go from $5 million to $15 million of revenue in a year. What are the levers of that threefold growth?

Sean Broihier: We have been on a threefold growth curve for years now, and it shows no signs of stopping. It has been a very predictable curve where we peak in October, November, and December. Based solely on the trajectory that we have been on for the past three years, I expect to hit $13 million to $15 million of revenue this year.

When 99% of the general population thinks about buying artwork online, there is no company that comes to mind. There is no dominant brand. They don’t know where to buy artwork. When they decide they want to buy a New York [City] print, they just go to Google and search for it. I take steps to make sure that I am the top search result naturally and paid. On top of that, I have a bunch of programs in place to brand FineArtAmerica to buy artwork online. When you think of buying books, you go to Amazon first. When you think of buying art, I want you to think of FineArtAmerica first.

I have a bunch of plans in place. We have marketing efforts in place to focus on branding the business. We have great growth in artists, great growth in buyers and great growth in traffic. I now want to see great growth in the brand.

Sramana: It sounds like you are expanding your search engine marketing beyond just SEO and are now doing pay-per-click. It also sounds like you are adding in branding efforts and TV commercials to establish yourself as the place to buy art online. Where are you going to run these TV commercials?

Sean Broihier: They run all over the place right now. We have them running on Bravo, HGTV, and other places.

Sramana: That’s expensive.

Sean Broihier: It is pretty expensive. It is hard to gauge and correlate that an ad ran at 8 p.m. on Thursday to any defined number of orders. When you see a Coca-Cola ad on TV, you are not immediately running to their website to buy a Coke. After weeks and months, when you have seen enough ads on TV, you will start to think about Coke when you are thirsty.

Sramana: I am not convinced that this is a good idea. I think you are going to spend a lot of money with limited returns.

Sean Broihier: What if I told you it was not that expensive?

Sramana: Running ads on Bravo is expensive.

Sean Broihier: For us it is not as expensive as you might think.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Doing $5 Million A Year With Three Employees: FineArtAmerica CEO Sean Broihier
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