You might think Say Yes is an obvious name for a business. Or you might think it's a curious one. It's really simple. When my daughter was little and really wanted something, she'd repeat "say yes, say yes, say yes" until I said yes. (Not every time. I'm not a pushover.) But you get the idea. When I needed an LLC name in a hurry, that's what came out. It stuck. Then it turned into something better: my whole job is getting audiences to say yes to my clients.
My first client was my dad, an artist who paints bluegrass musicians. The obvious move was to market him to the art world. We didn't. We took his work straight to the bluegrass world, the audience that already existed for it. That led to a commission from the International Bluegrass Music Association and a feature in The Wall Street Journal. Other artists started asking for the same kind of help, so I built an Artist Bootcamp to teach it. That work is what eventually led me to arts organizations and small businesses: the same audience-first thinking, just at a bigger scale.
