Episode #737 - Resilience In Entrepreneurship with Mark Weiss, Owner of The Weiss Gallery

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Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Hello, everyone. I'm talking with Mark Weiss from London, England, where it's chilly and cold. Is that right?

Autumn's. Autumn's come.

Autumn has come. And so the proms are over. The fall weather has. Has arrived. So I've got a little surprise I didn't mention when we were getting acquainted as we were coming into this, and that is I used to have a. A place there right at Economus Plaza.

Oh, wow. Well, you just literally right away.

Yeah. And so I was up and down German street all the time. And so I'll be sure to look you up next time.

You're more than welcome. Yeah, be waiting for.

That's, That's a very familiar area for me. And you know, that's, that's quite a fine for you to have that location. That wasn't by accident, was it? How did that, how did you get to that location?

Let's start right at the beginning, shall we?

Let's. Let's go back to Montgomery, Alabama.

You'll see behind me there's a photograph of my parents who met at art school just after the war. In the first couple of years after the war, they got married. And my father's brother had been an air force pilot, and the American Air Force invited him to come to Maxwell Air Base in Montgomery to teach the Americans how to fly fighter jets. And he met a very nice Jewish lady there. My father's family were Jewish. They originally came from Romania. And so my uncle settled down there. And my parents having just got married, I think in 48 or 49. London at that time was still a dreadful place in terms of, you know, a lot of destruction. There was still rationing. You allowed one egg a week. I think it was six ounces of meat a week. So it was tough. It was tough. One forgets these things even in 48, huh? Yeah. So my uncle said to or wrote to my father because they didn't have mobile phones or the Internet in those days, Right? Yeah. And said, look, why don't you gu. Come and start a new life in Montgomery. You can have steak every day. The sun shines every day. And so they had nothing to lose. They had nothing. So they headed off out there and in order to, to try and make a living, they opened up an art school.

An art school in Montgomery. Alabama after the war.

And in fact I just, I just found some old material of that just today. And one of the things that was quite amazing about it was, and I got a photograph, it was multiracial. They, they were very liberal people. And in fact, famously my mother was once described as being one step from a card carrying member of the Communist party, which perhaps a little bit extreme, but they were truly very liberal people. And so they didn't really enjoy the atmosphere in Montgomery. But I was born there and my brother was born there. And bearing in mind that they had no money, literally no money, my father actually would make the furniture that they had in the house. He made pottery, he made the table mats and stuff. Anyway, to cut to the chase after, when I was about sort of four years old, in around 50, what would that be? About 57, right. They, they came back to England and initially my father had had a profession as an art teacher in a school. And then one day a local lady said to him, we were then living in a small seaside former fishing town called Brightling Sea, very close to Colchester, which is the oldest, first town ever established in Britain by the Romans on the east coast in the county of Essex. And a local lady came to my father and said, look, you must know something about art, you're an art teacher. I've got a painting I want to sell. So my father, you know, quite quick wittedly says, well of course I can help you. So all he did was drive three miles out of town to a local antique dealer and he managed to broker a cell and earned more on that one transaction than he earned as a month's salary as being an art teacher. So that started the germ of the idea of becoming an art dealer. And that gradually gelled. And we lived in a small house in this small little town. And very quickly he became quite successful. And in fact I found their first or probably the second year of accounts they had in 1962. And I think they made something like £3,000 profit, which was a huge amount of money in those days. Well, I don't know, not a huge. But by their, they had nothing. So and they very quickly became quite successful. And then we moved to the local town, Colchester, bought one of the largest private residences in Colchester, very close to where I went to school, which was partly why they bought it. And very soon they'd opened up a dedicated art gallery in the town with its own framing shop, upstairs on the first floor, big restoration studio. They employed about 10 or 12 people, more than I've ever employed in my life. So I was by this time at the local grammar school. And, you know, I like to think I'm an intelligent man and a boy as I would have been in that day. And certainly you, you, you had to be, you had to pass exams to get to the grammar school. So I was in the sort of top echelons in, in terms of intelligence at that point. And it was only later in life that I discovered that I clearly, and I still do suffer from attention, some sort of intense intention deficit disorder. So I struggled to read books. I dip in and out of them, but I can't remember the last time I read a book from page one to the last page, right. I just can't keep my concentration to that level. And in fact, in this journey, as I was saying about finding photographs and old memorabilia, I actually found some old school reports. If one had interpreted them correctly, you would have seen that I had a problem. So I never did very well at school, but all I ever wanted to do was join my parents as an art dealer. And another little story. So my parents were having a. Some sort of cocktail reception in the house and had very. The local wealthy clients, friends around. And one of them said to me, so, you know, young boy, what, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I would have been probably about 15 years old at that point. And I said, well, I want to be an art dealer like my father. And I didn't know my father was standing close behind me at the time. And he sort of immediately said, well, he only sees the good things.

Yeah.

Little did my father know what I have been through in my life to reach where I am today.

Did they ever talk about what they went through the United States in Montgomery, Alabama, and the people. Because my grandparents, I grew up going to South Georgia. It's almost on a direct latitude longitude type line over from Montgomery, but over in South Georgia. And so I'm very familiar with the gnats, the heat, the farming.

There was no air conditioning in those, no air conditioning.

And it's, you know, the, the idea of culture.

My, my, my parents, I think, and again, I found some cuttings. They were like minor celebrities as being interested in the arts. You know, that was, you know, just something completely unheard of. You know, whoever, whoever talked about the arts in Montgomery, Alabama, they were considered celebrities in terms of being, you know, sort of talented artists. Well, not so much my mother, who was always a bit shy than my father. You know, my father, as you will gather, also like myself, I've Got more his genes than my mother's. I think he knew how to engage with people. And I think that if one's talking about as we will be going on to skill sets to be an art dealer, I think that is one of the most fundamental strengths as far as my skill sets are concerned, is my capacity to engage with people and be interested in people and find out what it is that they're looking for that maybe I can help them with.

Usually people move because of people stay where they are unless things motivate them. And did your parents really ever talk about, was there any trauma they went through there? You know, I think they just outgrew it.

I did go back, I did go back to Montgomery, as I say, in 75, and obviously 75, it was a lot better than it was in, in the late 40s, early 50s.

Right.

But we're talking small town and I just found it too claustrophobic. And you know, that's still a big issue. And maybe, you know, we won't necessarily go there today, but you know, this is a big issue in America that it is made up of a lot of small towns and small places that have no real contact.

Well, also, it was not a real, There was more segregation than integration back then. I can see that that would create all kind of problems.

This was the height of, of, of, of, of the civil rights. And you know, the fact, you know, I'll just give you another little story. You know, the fact that, you know, my parents actually had black local people that they would teach in the class. You know, it didn't, it wasn't a white day and a black day.

Right, right.

We had, I remember I had a big, I had a big, well built black mama called Mary who would come and help in the house. My father would drive her home after work and the, you know, the local, you know, her friends and what are you doing driving a black lady?

Right.

Well, you know, it's the right thing to do.

Right? Yeah, it. And there's still a lot of that goes on today, as we know. And so they thought the, the UK I guess the, you know, the UK had rebounded quite a bit.

I think it was as much also. And that's been instilled in me, you know, very much family. So they wanted to get back, you know, my mother's sister was in London. My, my brother's, my father's sisters were in London. And you know, they wanted to get back to more to the family. And also, I think it was, it was also is as much to do with our education that my brother, my younger brother at that stage, I've subsequently got a.

Well, let's, let's just get into the mind of running a gallery and you know, when did the pace pick up? I mean, a gallery, gallery owners, altruistic, they don't care about money, they just try and help the poor artists or, you know, how, how much, how much of a business person is a gallery owner? And what have you learned over the years?

You have to differentiate. There are two, in my mind, there are two actually quite distinctive worlds. There's a world of contemporary art and then there's the world of masters. And within contemporary, I would include the, you know, what they call modern art as well.

Yeah.

And they're two very distinctive worlds and they're becoming ever more distinctive. The contemporary market is, you know, potentially is, well, is, is a much more lively and vibrant and deeper market. The old master market, you know, has just, due to the lack of supply and also the diminution of demand is, you know, is a much, much, much smaller pool. So, you know, the, the potential liver activity is much slower. But that said, you know, we, we've been incredibly busy over the last couple.

Of months and so just to kind of clarify for everybody, your gallery specializes in grand old master portraiture, is that correct?

Yes.

Explain what that would be for people, for people who are not in the.

Art world since, since the early 80s. By 1985 when I launched the business as it is today, I have dedicated myself to a very. What is a relatively. Well, it is not relatively. It is a very niche market. I've dedicated myself to primarily 16th and up to the mid 17th century English and North European portraiture. And that is what I'm renowned for, my specialist knowledge.

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