Speaker 1 (00:10):
So my name is Ivette and my company name is Ive & Co. like you see above. I'm located in Huson outside of Missoula, and I offer fine art and fine lifestyle design. Essentially, I create art, refine spaces and elevate lifestyles. What inspired me to start my business? Well, I've always been an artist. So I can't say I was inspired. It's something I've been doing since I was little. And also designing places or just making spaces beautiful. I have to say it's something that came through me, expanded from art to spaces, but my interest in spaces is more about, I mean, it's beauty of course, but also the energy and the psychology of the space and how it affects the person living there. So that's why I don't offer coaching or interior design. It's, I call it fine lifestyle design, which is a combination of fine as in beauty, fine art spaces and lifestyle design, which is basically intentionally designing your life the way you want to live it.
(01:31):
It's just something that came out of the art and just wanting to follow my dreams and empower other women to live the same way and know that it is possible. I have to say that the skills and traits that I possess that make me good at being an entrepreneur is actually, it wasn't that obvious because I come from the art business and I have to say that now after evolving into this offering, I realized that that wasn't really an entrepreneurial business. I just created art and expected people to either show up or I did art shows where somebody else had the vision and brought the clients. So it's more a creator mode than entrepreneur where it involves actually, at least for me, explaining your services and finding the clients was definitely, definitely a whole new beast, and it's taken me the last four years to understand it and adapt it to who I am and what I want to offer.
(02:49):
I think just learning while I was doing it helped me a lot and helped me develop this unique offering of fine lifestyle design that I'm offering - which is more than an offering, it's just a way of being - that essentially helps you transform from the inside out and the outside in where it's both inner and outer work. Inner work and outer beauty and the outer beauty in itself transforms. So my skills are in art, design, but also having gone through that personal development process myself, which I think most entrepreneurs, once they start a business, they go through this personal development process where they're learning their skills and not settling and not compromising and trying to birth something from within is exactly what makes them good at what they do, especially if it's born out of passion and not just like, oh, wouldn it be fun to drop ship,
(03:54):
I don't know, potatoes on Amazon. So community in my business is interesting because I work alone at home. However, every part of the evolution of my business, it's first through art. So I was very active or engaged in the art community in Missoula. I would show at Art Fairs, First Fridays. And just having artists and people doing the same as me was very supportive, very, it's just like your own little world. And then moving into offering interior design services, I connected with a lot of designers and learned the business that way. And there it was even more important because one thing is to get a certificate in design or just be naturally good at it. But the other thing is to actually run the business side of it where basically we're all clueless and we're all learning from each other. So it's a lot of online communities.
(05:00):
And the last piece of my business that made it click was the personal development part, and in particular, human design, which is the lens through which I offer the inner transformation. I mean, it's a lot based on my intuitive work and my knowledge in psychology and spirituality and personal development, but it's really anchored in human design. And even that I learned from others and just online communities. So basically I could not do this by myself, and that's the company part of my name, where my fine art was just me. This business, it's all about collaborations, learning from others, helping others. So I would have to say huge. And again, refer to my name. That's the company part. So the main challenges I had to overcome in birthing his business was that I am a visionary, and the idea was visionary. And it wasn't clear from the beginning even to me what I was doing.
(06:12):
It was just something that was coming through me, if that makes sense. It's the way I see the world. To other people, it just didn't make sense. And even when working with coaches or people trying to help me, or even just trying to communicate my idea out in the public and networking, people could not understand why I insist on merging fine art, interior design and coaching. And there was even one coach that told me, I can help you with someone with interior design. I can help you with someone with coaching. You can't do both people told me you can't do both. And I wasn't far along in my own evolution to understand that I was offering something new. So of course it didn't make sense to people, but I let that affect my confidence in what I was doing. So I think that's why it took me so much longer.
(07:08):
And the more I did the own work on myself, and particularly human design, which for me was life-changing, the more I understood that I am here to bring something new that didn't exist, and I don't need to make sense to people. And especially most of what I do is visual, so it's not even something I can explain. It's like I was trying to explain a painting through closed captioning. It's like when you look at a painting, you get a feeling, you get an experience. And I was just trying to explain something that's meant to be experienced. And I think now I'm in a place that I recognize that it's something that wasn't done before. I'm offering a way of being. But until I was through with my own evolution, yeah, it was impossible. My business went through 50 iterations where I was really always saying the same, but I thought maybe if I say it this way, people will get it.
(08:04):
And maybe if I say it this way, people will get it until it hit me. People don't need to get it. They just need to, something I say needs to resonate with people enough for them to get the energy of what I'm saying and then decide, okay, I don't know what it is that you're saying, but I feel it and I want it. So an experience that has affected me most in this business is trying to create something that wasn't there before, where before I was selling art and it was pretty obvious. And obviously I don't express myself so wel verbally. I write really well and I paint really well, but when I'm trying to speak, it's like all the ideas come together at once. But trying to create something that wasn't there before, where before I was selling a painting and it was obvious people saw what the product was and they either liked it or not.
(09:00):
And I think my business is not very different from my art. My art is abstract realism, and my business is, it's rooted in science and my own lived experience and other people's, but also there's a part of it that's abstract. And I think trying to explain that and where inside I understand that how life-changing it is. But when I try to talk to people maybe explaining something a little abstract and they didn't just immediately drop all their money, it was really difficult for me. So every time I went from vision to action and people didn't go, wow, it made me doubt myself and go back and work more on my inner self, which ended up being amazing. Now I have the confidence to know and own what I'm creating or what I have created that is something unique. It's a new way of being where you get to have it all, and you don't settle for creativity or money or freedom or ease, or you understand that once I guide you to work through those blocks, you really can do and have anything you want. And I will say again, I think the most life-changing thing I've learned in this process of running this business is human design. And that's the part I can't wait to share with my clients and even doing something that I don't know that anyone has done before is integrating human design in art and in interiors, which is basically you're living your own alignment. You're doing life as art. I think the fact that it just didn't go easy from the get go was probably the biggest gift I received.
