Artist Teaches How to Turn a Passion Into a Business

You may remember a recent article I wrote about toy and game inventor Mary Ellroy. Though Ellroy is a self-employed freelancer, one of the secrets of her success has been collaborating with other entrepreneurs though Mastermind groups, in which businesspeople get together, pool their brainpower, and try to come up with solutions for each others' challenges. In particular, Ellroy raved about one collaborative group in which she participates, which is composed entirely of women artists and makers of craft objects. They get together regularly, not to discuss aesthetics, but to ponder the art of making a living from their creative passions.

The artists' group is run by Jane Pollak, a certified professional coach who's followed an intriguingly serendipitous path to success in not just one but two careers, and who provides an interesting model for how to take that odd, quirky thing that fascinates you and turn it into a business. Beyond that, she's also an example of how your first passion eventually can lead to something else completely different if you simply free your mind to apply your creative talents in a new way. Pollak is pretty busy these days, between leading Mastermind groups and doing individual coaching. But I managed to catch up with her to get a few of her insights. "Anything you do that you feel passionate about, you can turn into a business," she says.

After briefly teaching high school art in the early 1970s, Pollak (right) set out to be a professional artist, working in one of the most arcane of genres: intricately painted Ukrainian-style Easter eggs, which can be treated with epoxy and turned into permanent objets d'art. At first, she worked in the traditional Ukrainian themes -- birds, trees and other nature symbols -- but then she let her imagination go and started creating eggs that incorporated American quilting patterns and motifs borrowed from Egyptian and Japanese art. Eventually, her exotic creations garnered the attention of The New York Times and The Today Show. She was invited to make a special egg for the White House Easter Egg Roll in 1983, and her contribution ended up in the Smithsonian Institution's collection.

Over her 30-year art career, Pollak managed to build her quirky, whimsical metier from a curiosity into a viable business that brought in as much as $90,000 a year. She accomplished this in part by continuing to expand her original vision and applying it to tap into new markets -- fashioning painted eggshells into jewelry and other collectibles, for example. But Pollak's real secret was that she had enough nerve to envision her passion as a real, sustainable job, and enough humility to know that she had to buckle down and learn how to be a serious businessperson. She listened to motivational tapes by Zig Ziglar and hired a designer to create an unorthodox horseshoe-shaped workspace so that she could move efficiently between simultaneous projects. She learned how to delegate tasks -- no easy feat for an artist with exacting standards -- and how to manage a small staff.

She got good enough at all these things that pretty soon, people at art shows were asking her for advice on how to develop their own artistic ambitions into careers. That, in turn, gave Pollak an idea for yet another sideline. She put together a speech with a central theme: If she could turn egg-painting into a career, anyone else could turn his or her passion, no matter how unlikely of a money-making proposition it might seem, into a viable enterprise.

As she ventured into this new area, however, Pollak stayed true to another of the principles behind her artistic success. If you're going to entice people to pay for something, you need to put in the time and effort to learn to do that thing at a professional level. Pollak joined Toastmasters International , a group that gives novice speakers a chance to practice their oration skills upon one another, and the National Speakers Association, another professional organization. She also took courses in business coaching and got a certification in that field.

By the early 2000s, Pollak was successful in her new field as well, and starting to realize that she was more excited about helping other people to achieve their dreams than she was about dreaming up new designs for eggs. About six years ago, she took a bold step and shut down her art business so that she could concentrate on coaching and speaking. Today, she's got a diversified coaching business, which includes running several Mastermind groups, organizing and promoting seminars in which entrepreneurs break into small groups to work on solving business problems, and one-on-one coaching.

Pollak says she's never regretted the switch. "Business is my art now," she explains. "I find it so incredibly creative and stimulating."

In her new endeavor, Pollak discovered another useful secret for people who want to turn their artistic avocations into second-act vocations: Artistic skills have crossover value in solving business problems. Instead of talking through a client's problem, Pollak may draw a visual diagram that helps inspire a solution. "Being able to envision things is a really important part of business," she says. "We think in pictures and feel ideas and insights before we can express them verbally."

One important point that Pollak imparts to her clients is that we are not our jobs. Instead, a career -- or careers -- is really an artistic medium, a painter's canvas (or in Pollak's case, an eggshell) that we can use to express the essence of who we are. But that also means that as a person pursues passions and evolves over time, the job may evolve, too. One of Pollak's clients, for example, started out working in the financial services industry, and gave that up to pursue a second career as a fashion designer. But after doing that for a while, she realized that she had yet another passion -- yoga -- and she went off to study to become a professional yogini.

"Essentially, we're all something," she says. "Deep down, I'm a teacher, but I needed to go through 30 years of making art and having a business to get back to that. But I'm there now."

Here's a 2003 article from the Fairfield County Business Journal on Pollak's art business and the start of her transition into coaching. She also is the subject of this 2007 CNN story on how to start and sustain a home-based business. She also has written a book, Soul Proprietor: 101 Lessons from a Lifestyle Entrepreneur. Finally, here's a link to Pollak's blog, which provides advice and highlights the second-act career arcs of entrepreneurs.

Read more: Five Creativity Exercises to Find Your Passion