Location Spotlight: The Skillery

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." - Albert Einstein

If you’re looking for a space and creative group of people to help awaken and cultivate the creative expression in you, the folks at The Skillery are on your side. We at CMNSH are truly fortunate to call The Skillery ambassadors for our global conversation. We also find ourselves very lucky to hold our team meetings out of their amazing office spaces!

Not only is The Skillery one of our favorite places to meet and create but we can now call them a great Location partner as well! In September, we all visited The Skillery and Stoke.d Studio for our event on COLOR. Take a look below as Matt Dudley, Managing Director, tells us more about one of Nashville’s best places to create & learn:

1. Tell us a little about The Skillery and what sparked you to create it?

• The Skillery began in 2011 as an open marketplace for local, offline classes. I started the business because I was (and still am) inspired by what happens when you put an expert in a room with a bunch of people who are inspired to learn. Over the last few years, The Skillery has evolved into a more focused resource for the community that naturally grew up around us in Nashville: creative entrepreneurs, freelancers and independent professionals. We’ve launched in-depth programming for entrepreneurs (including a nine-week business development program, CO.STARTERS at The Skillery) and a flexible coworking space in Germantown, and we maintain a robust schedule of classes and workshops to help creative professionals broaden their abilities and grow their businesses, while highlighting the work they do and the brands they’re building. Our mission is to be the premier resource to help Nashville’s creative entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses.

2. The Skillery recently opened a physical space in Germantown to not only house some of the classes it offers, but to be used as a co working space for the creative community. If you were to take a step back and see what all you have created thus far, what is most exciting to you?

• Without question, the part of The Skillery that excites me most is the community of smart, talented and supportive people that have sprung up around it. Every day, we see Skillery members and non-members reaching out and responding to other members of the community to ask and answer questions, engage in paid work and lend a hand where needed. The coworking space and classes and workshops facilitate that by giving like-minded folks an easily accessible place and/or reason to connect…. but the spirit of community that fuels the collaboration between creative Nashvillians is profound and palpable.

3. The Skillery seems to be a big supporter of the “creative entrepreneur.” How exactly would you define that person?

• From where we stand, the definition is really broad, but it tends to encompass the types of entreprepreneurs who engage with and thrive at The Skillery. Part of it is the types of work they do — from writing to design or jewelry making to building products that serve musicians and writers and artists. But beyond that it’s their approach: They’re passion-driven, innately creative, and building something without an immediate or overall focus on scaling. That’s not to say that the people in our community are building businesses that can’t scale, it’s just not generally their primary concern, which is why we don’t offer classes or services related to investment. Instead, we focus on helping those folks answer some of the early-stage questions, like how (and whether) to turn a passion or a hobby into a business, or how to grow that business into something that can replace a 9-to-5 job.

4. What do you feel are some of the needs of the creative entrepreneur community in Nashville and what can The Skillery help provide these folks?

• We’ve been very intentional about listening to that community, and we hear several needs on a regular basis: 1) both broad and topic-specific entrepreneurial education, 2) opportunities to connect with local experts in the community for feedback and consultation, 3) a low-cost way to test the market for a given product or service, and 4) opportunities to connect and collaborate with a supportive community of like-minded creatives. We built our coworking space at The Skillery with the intent of facilitating all four of those needs. Down the road, we’d love to expand the way we can serve creative entrepreneurs by offering things like micro-funding, in-house legal and accounting services, and permanent work space for companies that want to serve our community of entrepreneurs.

5. What was your introduction to Creative Mornings? What are your thoughts on it? (good ones we hope!)

• Love it! I attended Nashville’s first Creative Mornings event back in the Spring, and was moved by Ruthie Lindsey’s inspiring story of survival and success. Any opportunity to come together with local creatives and to celebrate one of our own… I’m in!

6  If you were to speak at Creative Mornings, what would you talk about?

• I’d talk about what I’ve learned along my entrepreneurial path…. a path that has included an attempt to land work as a Ghostbuster, an ill-advised stint at The Jerry Springer Show, and a gig at Saturday Night Live…. as well as an explanation of why I turned down those (and other) opportunities to teach middle-school math, and how that has made all the difference.

  
  

  Looks like we have another future speaker in the running! Follow Matt & his team along online at theskillery.com + twitter + instagram + facebook

  If you want to show even more love, The Skillery is a part of the Mission Main St. Grants this month to help support their journey in our creative community! If you have an extra minute send over a vote!