Ever since I started teaching airbrushing more than 20 years ago, people have been asking for my help on how to make money from their airbrushing in simple and effective ways.  I have helped numerous people in a wide range of applications and have come to a clear understanding of what are the common features of all successful airbrush enterprises. 

 There is a lot to making airbrushing commercially successful, and rather than offering just “tips and tricks” I have decided to sit down and develop a detailed study of it and create something that will make a real difference to our student community.    

 There are lots of resources available that help people to build small businesses but they are all generic, trying to help everyone and in so doing not able to be highly specific.  This course will be extremely specific to commercial airbrushing and therefore much more effective.  I can go beyond just general advice and offer highly specialised advice. I think this course has been needed for a long time and I hope that it makes a real difference.                               

                                                                                                                                                                   Tony Vowles
 

For the first three years of my involvement in commercial airbrushing in the mid 1980’s, I was a sales rep. for the major art materials chain in my city . . . and as part of my job, I had to visit all the illustrators, photo retouchers, painters and decorators, signwriters, set painters, porcelain restorers, animators, cake decorators, model makers . . . every commercial airbrush user we could find in the city.

 I look back on those formative years as being the best education I could ever have wanted, into how to commercialise airbrushing.  I enjoyed my job and got to know hundreds of these people quite well.  I now look back and think that the most important thing to get right, at the very start, is the business “model”.

 • Being a one person business means “being the business” (the worker) and “managing the business” (the manager) all at the same time, wearing all the different hats and managing the process of each and the time allotted to each.  It is complicated and difficult but if you have a model with everything laid out, it makes it much easier and reduces the problems and mistakes. 

Developing a good model is central to successfully building a part time commercial airbrush business.

 • I will not help people to build a full time business.  If people maintain a primary source of steady income, then they will avoid the pressures of the single BIGGEST hurdle of full time commercial airbrushing . . . creating a steady cash flow.  If this issue can be eliminated at the start, then I will have done more to protect my community than all the other info in this course.

 Once people have been successfully running a part time business for 5 years or so and can show on paper, a steady cash flow from their part time business model, then they will finally be in a position to multiply the business model from, for example, a 10 - 20 hour model to a 50 - 60 hour model.

 Building a part time commercial airbrush business that is steady and sustainable is hard enough, but making the transition to a full time business model will be the hardest chapter in any commercial airbrush artists history.  Even the process of “transition” must be modelled, since “growth” must be considered very costly in both time and money and the single greatest cause of all business failures.

 • When you think of model cars or buildings, as being scaled down versions of the full size objects, this course is about creating highly successful scaled down versions of full time, sustainable, commercial airbrush business models.

 • This entire course is about developing your own unique airbrush business model and giving yourself the best possible chance of success.

• The course is broken into 6 units:

1. The main concepts of commercial airbrushing

2. Developing your products and services

3. Marketing your products and services

4. Managing your customer relationships

5. Managing your enterprise

6. Developing a two year plan of action

 In all there are 40 modules to the course at this early stage and further modules will be added as I develop the course over the coming years.  One of the biggest challenges you face in this course, is not only understanding each module individually but also how it relates to the others.  At the end of each module is a summary of how that piece of the jigsaw fits into the larger 40 piece finished picture.

 • The Main Concepts of Commercial Airbrushing:

1. What is it like to be in business with an airbrush?

2. Overview of the history of commercial airbrushing

3. Creating your model’s basics according to your interests

4. Production versus Commission based airbrushing

5. Nondiscretionary versus Discretionary spending

6. “Build it and they will come”

7. Packaging airbrush products and services

8. Distributing airbrush products and services

9. The research and development process

 • Developing Your Products and Services:

10. Balancing the “three arm scales” for the perfect product

11. Developing your methods and materials

12. Pricing your airbrushing

13. Developing your actual products and services

14. Building the infrastructure of your business

• Marketing Your Products and Services:

15. Overview of “marketing”

16. Creating your business identity

17. Developing your sales tools (eg photo albums, brochures)

18. Getting your work “out there”

19. Print / Radio / Television marketing

20. Internet marketing

21. Public marketing / educating your customers

 • Managing Your Customer Relationships:

22. Controlling the expectations of your customers

23. How to understand your customers needs

24. Exceeding your customers expectations

25. What can go wrong with customer relationships

26. Learning to say “No” and avoiding having to say it at all

27. Quoting, contracts, debt collecting

28. Maintaining customer relationships after the sale / job

29. Repairing damaged customer relationships

 • Managing Your Enterprise:

30. Time management

31. Financial management

32. Customer data base management

33. Transitional business models - controlling expansion

34. Managing debts, accounting and taxation compliance

35. Legal issues, including copyright

 • Developing a 2 Year Plan of Action:

36. Building a model manual

37. Filling in the blanks in the manual

38. Taking the first steps

39. Assessment and planning

40. Recording the journey

Start the
journey
now, in a
controlled
and structured
way . . .

 with this course.

This is an online course.  When you enrol, you will be given a User ID and Password to a specific web site and you will simply log in and do your training module by module at home.  You will have email support for any questions you may have at any time.

 There are two major benefits of doing this course online.

1. By running the course online, enormous resources can be supplied that cannot normally be supplied in the classroom or by normal printed notes alone, without the costs being extremely high.  The huge reduction in costs means that the course can be made much more affordable.

 2. Online is also the most convenient and cost effective way for you to do this course.  You do not face any vehicle expenses, or the lost time travelling to and from class.

 3. Online training works for this subject matter.  It is not like airbrushing which is all physical and visual.  Learning to commercialise your airbrushing is not something that you want to do in a group session.  Your ideas will be used by others and it is best to keep your ideas and hard work to yourself.

 Computer needs:
• You will need a Quicktime player installed. This is freely available from the Apple Website.

 • You will need access to broadband if you wish to be able to watch the quicktime files that are supplied with the course notes.  Dial up will make the process extremely slow.

Course Fees:
• The course costs $360.00.  This will pay for the immense time and effort that has gone into the preparation of each module of the course.  At 40 modules, this equates to only $9.00 each. 

I can guarantee that if you questioned the value of each module you would happily pay only $9.00 for each.

 There are 4 types of resources supplied for each module:

1. Full colour notes hosted on the web site.

2. B&W notes stored as a pdf you can download and print off

3. Video footage that you can view as quicktime files

4. Email advice and problem solving

 All 40 modules will have a full colour presentation hosted on the web site, with comprehensive photographic resources, coupled with short quicktime footage when something requires an audio visual explanation and finally a pdf of the written content of the unit.  In the event that you need any clarification you will be able to email me questions. 

Note about the email support: I will not do your model for you and I will not tell you what is right for you.  You will have to find your own answers, you will have to do the “hard yards”.

Permanent Access:
Once you have paid your fees you will have permanent access to the site and can visit it as often as you like, for as long as you like.  As you evolve you business you can revisit your model development over and over.  Also, as I improve this course you will have access to these developments on an ongoing basis.