Today I met with Donna and a lawyer friend, Jim, to discuss our business plan for the *Artists’ Essentials* series of instructional art DVDs we are going to produce. I drafted a 15 page business plan packed with details on our market and the competition, marketing and sales approaches, distribution plans, a summary of our project and a complete financial breakdown. It took me a long time to do that, but let me tell you it is a *huge* help to focus your plans and be forced to put everything down on paper. And it’s just the professional thing to do.

I get more and more excited every time we meet — this project has a really good vibe to it. Case in point: Jim is a published author and has lots of experience producing and marketing educational products. He came fully prepared to poke holes in our plan and play devil’s advocate. He was surprised, however, that we really knew what we were talking about and had thought it through so well. He turned from skeptic to cheerleader over the course of just a few hours.

Donna treated us to lunch at Applebee’s to finish off the discussion. We have finally settled on the aforementioned name for the series. Donna and I are forming an LLC, which gives us personal legal protection in case the whole thing goes bust and we owe a bunch of money. Plus, we can claim our losses on our own personal income tax. We agreed to split the expenses and the profits 50/50, which is just easier in the long run.

What concerned me most is not the actual production of the video — I know that’s going to go well and I have confidence in our combined abilities — but how we are going to *sell* these DVDs. Amazingly, Donna has incredible relationships with both national and international art supply distributors. Once again, we’re tapping our network and pooling resources to do amazing things.

First things first, though. We registered a domain name (“artistsessentials.com”:http://www.artistsessentials.com ), which will soon have promotional information about the upcoming series. Keep watching this space!