We were lucky to catch up with Leighton Bryant recently and have shared our conversation below.
Leighton, so great to have you on the platform and excited to have you share your wisdom with our community today. Communication skills often play a powerful role in our ability to be effective and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your communication skills.
As sisters, communication can be unbelievably easy yet at other times amazingly challenging. Since our vision for the business began and remains to provide artmaking the way we grew up experiencing it at home (structured tools or projects with open-ended imagination and play), we generally can come to the same conclusions for what we want Little Art House to be though how we execute this has varied over the years.
We realized early on that our styles of communication are basically the opposite, Leighton being more inclined to talk through problem solving and Emma being more visual, needing to read and sit with information to process it. It also became clear early on that since we are sisters and best friends with the same friend groups, that it was incredibly easy to blend our personal lives with the business which presented a whole nother set of challenges.
Like our students and many of us, we thrive when we have clear roles, expectations, and structures to communicate. In the first couple of years, we realized we needed help in defining these roles, expectations, and structures since we process information so differently and decided to see a therapist together that works with various partners including business partners. She helped us develop the skills we have today that help us keep our personal relationship separate from our business relationship. She also helped us identify our strengths and weaknesses within our business so we could determine specific lanes for each of us to thrive in so we could really lean into our individual roles.
We reassess our roles annually knowing it is an ebb and flow to make sure we’re still happy with what we’re doing and how the other is doing with their roles. This allows us to trust each other in making day to day decisions so we can take the time to make the bigger decisions together less frequently. While we have daily morning checkins, even if they are brief, we try to maintain a weekly standing meeting when we are both mentally available to focus on the tasks at hand so we can keep the pressure low for making decisions and each of us can prepare for the discussion as needed beforehand.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Growing up in a small southern town in Tennessee, the arts offerings were fairly limited. Luckily our mom was incredibly creative so before she started teaching art in our public school system, she curated special classes for us, our brother, friends and family when we were young. In these classes, we’d build huge paper mache flowers or funky mixed media pieces filled with color and our memories are filled with FUN and the feeling of joy.
As we embarked on our own art teaching journeys, we wanted to create these feelings in our students but over time felt stifled by the school systems regulations and expectations. We realized we could take our experience in our mom’s classes and bring them to our community which is what we did.
We started very small by offering some summer camps at a local school and took that income to turn a one room space in a building into our first studio. After six months, we realized we needed to be more visible and that took us to the neighborhood we still have a studio in now, Hillsboro Village. We were able to secure a tiny space that was already outfitted with a ton of cabinets since it was the showroom for the condos above and we absolutely adored it. Since then, we’ve moved down the street to a bigger space, opened a second studio, and have some long standing partnerships with satellite locations. We also launched The Little Art House Foundation as a way for us to give back to our community through visual art opportunities.
While we are currently focused on maintaining our studios and growing our Foundation intentionally, we also completed all of the leg work to franchise. We feel strongly that our model would do well in cities similar to Nashville and that there are entrepreneurs (or future entrepreneurs) out there who would excel in opening and building a similar creative space and community. We are planning to be incredibly hands-on in the process of finding, training and preparing franchisees while also allowing a future each one flexibility in decision making that may not be typical in other franchises. We want any future Little Art Houses to feel like a part of the community they are established in and to reflect the needs of the area. It’s a wild and exciting time!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Partnership, curiosity and continued learning
Having a partner who is skilled and adept at in areas that you are not is incredibly useful and powerful. We didn’t even realize we had such opposite skill sets at first but it’s proven to be such an amazing asset. Having a partner who always has your back and the same vision is crucial as well. While having opposite skills is so powerful in a partnership, it can also be challenging with communication. With that, curiosity is a helpful approach when handling any disagreements or challenges as it allows more space for problem solving and solutions without any blame as well as getting to a compromise potentially quicker with everyone feeling heard and valued. Naturally as teachers, we thrive in connection and learning but it’s surprisingly beneficial to keeping our business structure, policies and processes fresh and pertinent. We’re constantly assessing what we’re doing, how it’s working (or not working anymore) and if there’s any room for improvement. Oftentimes, we end up seeking out more skills, technology or areas we haven’t thought of before to learn more and better serve our clients and community. For anyone starting on their entrepreneurship journey, we would encourage you to pick partner/s wisely and have the adequate paperwork prepared in case plans change or diverge along the way, to look at challenges with curiosity rather than defeat or frustration to find solutions or areas for growth, and to lean into solutions that provide opportunities for continued learning!
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
Absolutely. As we mentioned, we are primed and ready to franchise and we’re looking for the right person/people who genuinely believe in what we do and who are passionate about bringing services like ours to their area. We intend to grow slowly and intentionally so we can be as hands on as possible in their development. Our goal is success of course but also that they love what they do as much as we do. Whether it’s a former teacher like us, a business person looking to do something with more connection to others, a mother ready to reenter the workforce and run her own show, or someone else we are here for it!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.littlearthousestudios.com
- Instagram: Little Art House Nashville
- Facebook: Little Art House Nashville
- Youtube: Little Art House
- Yelp: Little Art House Nashville
Image Credits
Kelli Faith Photography
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
