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Your Recipe for Entrepreneurial Success: Creativity, Beliefs and Purpose Artists Taylor Hanson and Kevin McCoy talk about artistry and entrepreneurship.

By Jared Keller

This story appears in the February 2016 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Bobby Fisher
Kevin McCoy

How can every business be creative? Taylor Hanson, who found fame as a musician in the '90s, and Kevin McCoy, a lifelong visual artist who recently launched a media licensing startup called Monegraph, offer their best advice.

Kevin: People have asked me over this past year and a half, "What about your studio practice? Are you afraid of losing that?" I take refuge that I'm confident in my identity as an artist. I'm not worried about what particular thing I'm doing -- making a photo, a painting, a company. I know that it's all part of the same process. You have to be creatively open to these possibilities and not be hung up on, "I should be doing this, I should be doing that." Everybody makes their own path. You're thinking about following your own voice, and you're always trying to identify who your audience is, and how to reach them and what to say to them. For me, for this particular set of ideas, it seemed like making a company called Monegraph and trying to make a platform was the way to do it.

Taylor: Absolutely. An artist's life is essentially crystalizing what you believe and finding a way to refine that and continuing to share it over and over and over. That's the same as building a brand. Apple, BMW, go through the list of incredible companies: They have a powerful sense of themselves. And being a performer, writing songs, collaborating with others -- your whole life is that way. You're constantly pushed back to, who are you? What is it that makes you special or different and how do you amplify that?