Meet Nancy Glowinski | Business Consultant and Strategist, Writer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Nancy Glowinski and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Nancy, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Both of my parents were risk takers so I’d say it’s in my DNA. My dad lied about his age to enlist in the Navy and escape a suffocating home life in Hartford, CT. He ended up stationed in Japan in the late 1950s where he met my mom. Marrying her certainly was a risk because interracial marriages were not tolerated back then. My mom took a huge risk by leaving her family in Japan to venture into the unknown – a life in America. I’m an only child, unsuccessful at finding a mate and creating my own family, so I think that independence gave me the freedom to take chances all of my life. I moved to New York when I was 18 to go to art school. For the next four decades many risks were taken – both personal and professional. Some worked and some didn’t. But possibly the biggest risk for me, however calculated, was in 2019 when I came to the painful realization that it was time to leave New York. So I moved to Los Angeles to work on a reinvention of myself at age 60 hoping be ready to bolt out of the gate the following year. Except that it didn’t quite happen because a global pandemic put everything on pause. But that pause turned out to be the gift of time to figure things out. During the lull of the pandemic, I did two things: launched a small consulting business and I started writing.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?

Having the experience of running a multi-million dollar business unit within a global news organization combined with a foundational background in fine art gives me a very unique set of skills. Rather than be faced with ageism by looking for work at my age – in a new city at that, I took inventory of the skills that I had. What I had been doing as an employee – revenue generation and business strategy, combined with visual literacy and a knowledge of the creative process – could be scaled down to my own consultancy business. I launched Tadpole Salon in 2021, its aim to help artists, photographers, and other creatives manage their business, cash flow, and operations.

While I could practice what I preach and be more aggressive with my own marketing and outreach, most of my clients are received passively via word of mouth (although a few have come from reading the articles). This allows for a nice balance of time which can be used for writing. But because of the writing, I am also offering editorial services (copy editing and writing) at Tadpole Salon. Sometimes all it takes is another set of eyes to make a client’s message stand out.

It was hard to find pictures to illustrate what I do now so I include a picture of me early in the morning – when I usually write, a few doodles, and some images from my former corporate life. News photos do look better with googly eyes.
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Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
That depends on who was visiting. If it was someone a bit more conventional and maybe not familiar with Los Angeles, I would patiently drive around and show them the classic landmarks. However, if my visitor was up for a real adventure, I would map out things to do – based on geography since this city is so big! Naturally, I would look up all the art events happening and flag everything from shows not to be missed to the more obscure (and in my opinion often the more interesting). In that same vein, we would eat at at least one over-the-top LA restaurant but then spend time sampling every kind of cuisine, preferably from hole-in-the-wall type places far away from tourists. But not to let this person go back home without experiencing the natural beauty of Southern California, we would have to spend at least one day at the beach – somewhere in Malibu – and one day hiking. I might also take them to Erewhon (any or all of them) for people watching.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My professional career in the business of news photography and photojournalism, was first encouraged and nurtured by Michel Bernard, my boss at the French photojournalism agency, Gamma Liaison, in the early 1990s. I had come from the world of licensing stock photography but he saw that I was bored with those kinds of photographs and gave me the opportunity to work with a different kind of photography. I already had an eye and aesthetic sense from art school (I had studied painting) and I had contacts with art directors at advertising agencies. I was able to carve a very nice niche in that business thanks to his belief and trust in my abilities to uncover opportunities that were not always obvious.

During the isolation of the pandemic, I thought I might go back to making visual art – something that I had put on hold for 40 years. But instead I began to write and the words became the paint. Last year I had 3 articles published in the LA Times so needless to say, I am beyond grateful to them for taking a chance – a risk – on an unknown writer. Whenever I have those days of doubt, I simply look to the framed articles on the wall and keep going. I am working on my first novel.

Website: https://www.tadpolesalon.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nancyglowinski/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancy-glowinski/

Image Credits
All images and photos: Nancy Glowinski