1: All of us are likely familiar with Andy Warhol‘s Campbell Soup pictures or his Marilyn Monroe prints.
What we might not realize is that Andy’s name is attached to eighty-five thousand pieces of art (!) and over five hundred films.
“In 2014, his artwork accounted for about 15 percent of the entire world’s art trade,” Â Dan Martell writes in his book Buy Back Your Time.
“Think about that,” Dan notes, “out of all art traded in the entire world, about one-sixth of the money was paid for work that came from one name.”
2: One name? Yes. One man? No.
“Perhaps Andy Warhol’s truest art was as a businessman,” Dan observes. “He found a way to continually reproduce his own ideas. He developed a cult following around his own brand, inviting people to his aptly named studio, the Factory. . .
“He developed his own method of putting photographs through a silk screen, letting the ink drip through, creating a very ‘produced’ feel for the final product. He wanted to create art that had what he called ‘an assembly-line effect.'”
The assembly line wasn’t just an effect. It was his reality.
“Not just in the way his artwork felt, but in reality: Other people did much of the work for his art.”
Andy once said, “The reason I’m painting this way is [because] I want to be a machine.”
The Guggenheim wrote at the time: “The medium of silkscreen, which he began to employ in 1962, enabled Andy Warhol and his studio assistants to create a prodigious amount of painting and sculpture in a fashion that simulated a factory assembly line. Through this mechanized means of production he capsized existing notions of authenticity and the value of the artist’s hand.”
Not only did Andy employ assistants, the subject matter of his artwork also featured photographs that were already in the public domain, and thus not subject to copyright.
Which allowed him to create reproducible pieces of art which he sold for thousands of dollars.
“He also used others to write for him,” Dan adds. “He tape-recorded himself, then paid some young men to produce his book.”
Andy “had managed to create a replicable process around what’s arguably one of the hardest things to reproduce systematically—creative art,” Dan notes. “Again, he wasn’t doing all the work himself. He was obsessed with commercialization, and, in turn, he commercialized art itself. . .
“His lasting legacy is not that he has a few pieces of artwork that he hand-produced,” he writes. “It’s that he built the machine that produced eighty-five thousand pieces of quality artwork scattered across the globe.
“Andy Warhol didn’t just turn art into a business. His art was business.”
3: So, as entrepreneurs and leaders, what can we learn from Andy Warhol?
Quite a bit, Dan believes: “When it comes to art—like sculpting, painting, drawing—it’s easy to understand why people get upset about Andy Warhol—he didn’t really create all of that art by himself.
“But in business, no one thinks that Eddie Bauer is hand-sewing every piece of leather onto jackets or that Tommy Hilfiger is hand-stitching all the jackets with his name on them.
“While [Andy’s] methods were controversial in art, they’re not in the business world.
“As entrepreneurs, we can take the principles and leave the controversy,” Dan suggests. “Replacing oneself as Andy Warhol did isn’t that complicated. We simply need a path to getting there.”
Yesterday, we focused on delegating or eliminating the low-value work we often do. Â
Delegating provides “quick wins,” Dan writes, “typically, simple tasks that can be outsourced to any number of people on our teams or outside our companies. Without much thought, or even a process, we can probably determine how to eliminate a majority of [these] tasks.”
The lesson we can learn from Andy takes it up a level. We want to find the right people to take on key responsibilities within our companies so that we can focus on what makes us money and energizes us.
However, finding the right people to take on more high-value tasks requires a specific approach. Andy “needed processes for his business, and we do, too,” Dan explains.
“Still, billionaires struggle, trying to figure out which tasks to hire out, who to hire, and how to efficiently manage everything.”
Hiring others to take on different areas of responsibility is simple to understand. But it’s also a process we can misunderstand.
“That’s exactly why I developed the Replacement Ladder,” Dan writes, “a time-tested system for what business operations to transfer at each stage of your company. It works for every business, at any level, in any industry.
Dan outlines five “rungs.”
Rung 1: Administration
Rung 2: Delivery
Rung 3: Marketing
Rung 4: Sales
Rung 5: Leadership
“Importantly, this isn’t an organization chart,” he writes, “it’s a path to follow, like stepping-stones. It shows us what to transfer next so that we continue to buy back our time.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I building systems and empowering others so I can focus on my highest-value work, or am I still trying to do it all myself?
Action: Review my current responsibilities and identify one key area where I can create a process and delegate ownership to someone else, freeing my time for what energizes and grows my business.
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