Ok, here’s the deal: how you perceive yourself and how your community perceives you will constitute the level of your success as the leader of an Emerging Arts Organization.

Your new business venture, an arts organization of your own, is an exciting prospect that comes with a significant responsibility to: your staff, your sponsors, your audience and to you. The vision within you that is now about to become a reality was inspired by two very different factors: your driving desire to create something no one else could provide; and the need within your community for your vision to become an actuality.

These two factors are co-dependant (one cannot exist without the other). Yet together they create a yet a third element that in itself can guarantee you will achieve your goals: your drive to successfully satisfy your community’s needs. After all, you are not expending all your time and effort on a lark; you fully expect to realize your purpose. But, how do you best meet or exceed your expectations without compromising artistic vision or exerting an overwhelming stress on the limited resources of the organization? The answer is as simple to describe as it is difficult to apply. It is the purpose of this article to illustrate this process, and hopefully provide you with the answers to both questions.

Yours is a service organization. Emerging Arts organizations are usually created to satisfy a need within their community. Under your leadership the company provides arts education or an arts experience (or both) to a specific yet ever-growing population. So as I stated earlier, it is obvious that the level of success you ultimately achieve will be determined by the acceptance and support you can gather from local citizenry. To do this, all you must do is to provide everyone with everything that they require, right?

If we were in a class, that statement would be labeled FALSE in capital letters. Successful organizations discover, early on, how to satisfy needs by providing a particular focus and level of artistic experience and excellence in a way that is desirable and pleasing to their audience. Arts Organizations cannot be all things to all people, not can you satisfy all the needs of your community on your own. Later we will discuss the ever-growing notion of partnerships and developing multi-disciplinary events and venues to better handle the diversity of the average community, but here we are concerned with what you and your organization can and must do. The answer is one of focus and restraint. These should not be difficult concepts for a dancer to embrace. It just happens that when any artist starts their own company, the pressures to appease and please seem to get in the way of what they know to be true and relevant.

The business plan you prepare before taking this leap of faith (you did create a plan, right?) to engineer and spearhead your own creation should clearly outline your mission and purpose. This is not simply a formality, a task that must be ‘dealt with’ before the next level is made available. The mission is perhaps the most critical document that an organization produces. That very concise statement and its accompanying focus statement provide the corner stone for all that follows: what and where you teach, where, why and with whom you perform, who and how reach out to and so, so much more.

If the mission and purpose do not embrace and answer a need within the community, the organization's expected life span will be greatly minimized. At the same time, if the mission and purpose are such that they respond to all the needs within a community, the organization’s demise will be short in coming. It is a common flaw in the human thought process when establishing something new to try to either set one’s self completely apart from the rest or to try and be all things to all people – neither succeeds.

The concept here is to establish how far (realistically) in any direction the organization can go and how fast it can progress beyond the initial plan and then stick to it by focusing on:

• constructing an honest and original plan that complements members abilities, artistic vision, and community needs
• the organization's resources and develop plans to use them wisely!
• the original vision/inspiration for the organization and its projected impact on the community!
• the needs within the community that are a good fit for the organization!
• the identity of the association as outlined in the mission and statement of purpose!
• five to six projects per year or per yearly plan (maximum).

There are no new groups that I know of that can initially take on more than five projects, perhaps six at the most, and achieve the level of excellence that is expected of them. The shotgun method of operation serves only to provide a short-term superficial ego boost, while in actuality it begins the process of long-term disaster.

The organization’s leadership must be very careful to restrain themselves from:

• accepting more than five to six projects per yearly or multi-yearly plan.
• re-inventing the organization or its focus for every potential funder that is unearthed.
• deviating from the original plan, regardless how good the new idea appears.

In short, you must decide:

• what it is the community needs and which of those needs you can satisfy.
• the purpose and mission (who, what, how, where and why) of the organization.
• how to a develop a plan to achieve that mission in one, three and five year increments.
• to protect and develop the organization’s reputation and identity, avoiding all extraneous projects that are not the best fit.
• To choose projects wisely, taking on what can be achieved and produced with excellence.

This is much easier for me to write than for you to execute. I know that. I have been both successful and unsuccessful with the process. I will admit that I was much happier with the outcome when I succeeded. I believe the members of the organization and of the surrounding community were also. This process requires focus and accepting your limitations. You must a plan the process and become intractable. It’s very easy to be distracted, but it was very easy to be distracted the first times you crossed center too, wasn’t it? The same discipline developed in the studio and on the stage will serve very well in the Arts Business!

NEXT: A Plan for Success