I Don’t Do It Alone, Part II

Besides Gary, there’s one other crit­i­cal per­son asso­ci­ated with my busi­ness — my occa­sional busi­ness part­ner Andrea, of Four Tails Lam­p­work. Although we have sep­a­rate online busi­nesses, we team up to do shows, and that works out VERY well for us.

One rea­son is that our styles of work are com­pli­men­tary but not copy-​cat; she works mostly in soft glass and I work mostly in boro, and we both exploit the char­ac­ter­is­tics of our cho­sen glass as much as possible.

Hav­ing a sec­ond per­son there to “share the load,” so to speak, makes doing shows when both of you have a full-​time Sort-​of-​Day Job pos­si­ble. At our last show, Andrea’s job actu­ally got seri­ously in the way to the point that on both Fri­day and Sat­ur­day she couldn’t get to the show until mid-​afternoon. With­out the part­ner­ship she would have had to can­cel, but with two of us I could han­dle things (with help, of course, from Gary) until she got there. In return, I got to sleep in a bit on Sun­day, which I muchly needed! It also makes it pos­si­ble to make a bath­room run with­out wor­ry­ing, or to take a walk around to peruse and schmooze the other vendors.

We also have com­pli­men­tary strengths and weak­nesses. She’s bet­ter than I am at the schmooz­ing; I’m bet­ter with the num­bers. So Andrea does the bulk of the meet-​and-​greet and I han­dle the account­ing, and we’re both happy.

Of course, we get along very well! If we didn’t, none of the above would mat­ter at all because we wouldn’t be able to work together!