Founder & CEO, Young Rembrandts
www.youngrembrandts.com

Do something nice for yourself each day - that’s a best practice Ladies Who Launch often encourages as part of the launching process. “Something nice” could be anything from buying a new lotion to lighting a candle. Or here’s a different idea…

How about escaping for a moment from your dilemmas du jour and exercising your creative side by doing a little drawing? Just pick up a pencil, select an object and start sketching.

According to Bette Fetter, founder of Young Rembrandts drawing program for children, learning to draw can improve cognitive abilities and impart valuable life lessons. Bette ought to know - she’s been teaching children to draw since 1988 when she started leading classes around her kitchen table.

Today Young Rembrandts teaches about 30,000 students each week through nearly 60 franchise locations in 27 states. Classes for students ranging in age from 3 to 12 are offered at locations like pre-schools, elementary schools and community centers and cost about $8 to $9 per one-hour class.

Bette talks below about what drawing brings to the table, and how she grew her one-woman-show into an international franchise.

Four Little Children Led Her to Launch

Bette: “I started Young Rembrandts with no plan in mind, instead it was driven out of my life circumstances and desire to raise my children. I went to college and my degree is in studio arts and I had no idea what to do with that, but I love doing art. I had four small children, each about two and a half years apart. I became very involved in their education, specifically the Montessori method. I immersed myself in that, and worked at a Montessori school, and immersed myself in pre-school and everything elementary.”

Developing a Method for Teaching Children to Draw

“A friend asked me to teach her child to draw. I just started teaching children in the neighborhood - I did one afternoon a week at my house around my kitchen table with about eight children. They were gaining skills, and the word spread. My friend from the Montessori school said, ‘You’re onto something very unique.’ I started to teach pre-school students at the Montessori school, which led me to develop our unique method for teaching kids to draw.”

It’s Not “Here Are Some Markers, Now Go Be Creative”

“Learning specifically how to draw is not usually part of pre-school and elementary school curriculum. When we draw with pre-schoolers, we introduce them to new concepts every week. We say, ‘We’re going to draw a birdhouse, so I’m going to show you a birdhouse and tell you about birdhouses.’ When we draw it, they learn to visually deconstruct it, recognize size and shape relationships, put that down on paper and learn how to handle pencils and materials. When they learn to analyze things and draw them that way… it has a huge impact for the child’s application to future academics.”

How Art Helps with Other Academics

“When you participate in art, you become a more visual person, you become a more whole-brain person. If you develop your visual skills, when you are reading, you read better, you can visualize the material more. You’re better at math because you can see sequences and patterns and rhythms. You must build those neuron connections or you lose them.”

The Trouble with the Way Art Is Often Taught Today

“When we teach every other subject matter, we give very foundational teaching. When we master the basic skills in the subject matter, then we can go on to do more with the subject. It’s become culturally accepted that art is a talent you do or don’t have. It is the only thing where we say, ‘Kind of play with some paints… and if you don’t figure it out yourself, you’re not an artist.’ We would never say, ‘Here’s a calculator. See how that numbers thing goes for you, and then maybe you don’t have to do math.’”

From Teacher to Entrepreneur

“My primary goal in all of this… I was doing this because I wanted to be a very available parent. Young Rembrandts exists because it fit around that goal. I did want to have some more revenue. I loved being a mom, but it’s nice when you’re a full-time mom to still have other things of your own and have a challenge for yourself professionally.

“I literally started to teach 200 students per week. I would teach at all these preschools in the morning, pick my children up from pre-school and then race home for when my older children got out of school. After about a year of teaching 200 students myself, I had the brainstorm that more of me equals more students, so I started to hire staff.”

Husband Says Goodbye Business Trips, Hello Home Office

“Eventually my husband, Bill, left his job - he was in corporate sales. He felt the same thing, that he never got to see his children because he traveled all the time. He joined me as we started to sell to other accounts and expanded our offerings. We worked it as a family business. We worked it out of our house, so it was even more conducive to being parents.”

Being Rejected by Banks

“When I first got my park district accounts and knew it was going to be 60 days between the time I had to do payroll and the time when I got paid, I wanted a line of credit to help during cash flows. I went to four or five different banks that laughed at me, that said my business would never work, that it was not a viable business. I got a little emotional afterwards and I would say, ‘But I’m doing it already!’

Finding the Right Bank

“Some people don’t have vision and they don’t see what’s possible if you’re doing something out of the box. Find a bank whose mission is to serve the kind of business that you are. Some banks really target helping small businesses grow. After all my rejections, I did find a bank with a female lender - the bank just started an initiative to help small businesses get off the ground.”

How She Started Franchising

“We taught all through the Northwest suburbs of Chicago and grew the business to teaching about 2500 children a week. We kind of kept it at that size because I still just wanted to be available as a mom. When I decided to franchise the business, was when my first child graduated high school.

“We found a consulting firm that helped us think through our franchising framework - what was our royalty going to be, what were our terms? When you start franchising, you have to have a tidy package of what you do and hand over your business system to someone else, bookkeeping systems, sales manuals, marketing, all that. The other part is having great legal representation and getting by a good franchise attorney.”

What She Looks for in a Franchisee

“We look for candidates who have business experience. We do not necessarily look for art experience. We have a lot of candidates who have come out of the corporate world and have young families, who now want to control their own schedule and destiny, but at the same time use the skills they have gained and developed in the corporate world. Our key candidate is good at managing and has great people skills. You have to be a sales and marketing person when you buy a franchise, because you’re selling your business.”

Warning about Franchising

“Because there are some people who make up a business model on paper and sell franchises, look for how long the company has been in business before it started franchising.”

Greatest Challenge

“Growing a franchise system is pretty challenging. You need to keep your product at its peak. But when you’re franchising, you’re in a whole second business at the same time. You’re developing relationships with franchise brokers, supporting franchisees by helping them to become successful for the long term.”

Words of Advice on Marketing

“My advice would be to know who you are and what you do well. Know your product and how to tell your story. We recently changed our logo and changed our tagline because we needed to be more direct and aggressive to make sure we were speaking to the value we’re delivering. We do a lot of training with franchisees to make sure that when we deliver new marketing materials… they become subject matter experts in the relaying that message.”

Recommended Reading

“Good to Great.” by Jim Collins; “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done,: by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck

“Ten Lessons the Arts Teach,” by Elliot Eisner (http://http://www.naea-reston.org/tenlessons.html)

(For children) “Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists,” series by Mike Venezia

How to Help Kids Draw at Home

“Libraries have how-to-draw books. There are wonderful art history books written for children, exposing children to those images. I used to go to the library and check out a couple of different artists a month… thumbing through them, giving children that exposure to art. Having materials available, that’s important. Making sure there’s always markers, there’s always paints, there’s always chalk in an appropriate area where your child can access the materials on his or her own.”