CERF+’s Top 5 Prep Tips
1. Know Your Risks
What assets are critical to your artistic career? What can you least afford to lose? What’s most important to you in your artistic practice? What kinds of emergencies are you vulnerable to based on your geography, the materials you use, or the space where you make your work? How would those emergencies impact your assets and cause potential losses? These will be the risks that you want to address in advance to start building resilience in your career.
2. Documentation Is Your Friend
Think about how you have been storing images of your work, records of your sales, documentation of your career, inventories and more. Are files in a mixture of the cloud, hard copy, and old hard drives? Do you have vital images or documents that only live in one, fragile format? For example: do you have contracts or records that are only in hard copy? Now’s a great time to back up documents and there are really easy, approachable ways to start taking on that task. Take photos of hard copies and back them up to the cloud. You can upload them to a Google Drive, for example. Where this comes in handy: What if we were experiencing an emergency that’s the opposite situation of now and instead of having to be in your home, you had to evacuate with little notice? What would you lose access to? What provisions could you put in place now? Having vital information at your fingertips can support you in establishing losses and values for insurance claims and disaster assistance. If you need to start or revamp your inventory practices for your work and studio contents, we have tools that can help you.
3. Have a Plan B
We have been creating our own Plan B’s in real time over the past year, so now is a great time to stop and reflect on what worked well and what didn’t. What provisions could you put in place to solve a problem you encountered this past year?
4. Get Business Insurance
Think of business insurance as a tool you can use to transfer unacceptable risks to an insurance company. The cost of business insurance is not prohibitive; however, replacing your studio and not being able to work are. CERF+ has seen too many businesses unable to bounce back after an uninsured emergency. Remind yourself that having good coverage is one of the costs of doing business and part of your responsibility to yourself, your business and others who depend on you. The rates for coverage will vary depending on where you live and which underwriter you work with. A basic business owner’s policy will often cost between $400 and $1,000 annually.
5. Take Care of Yourself
You are your most important asset! Look at the way you physically create your work: are you caring for your body in the process? Making changes to how you hold your body and move now can prevent repetitive strain and injury down the road. Think, too, about your studio. Are you safely handling any hazardous materials you use in your practice? Do you work in a shared space where other peoples’ practices could impact you?
Need tools and resources to help you build your career resilience? Visit cerfplus.org/studio-protector/.