Transition Stories: Dominique Luster

Dominique and I first met in the middle of 2023 via two connections. The first is our mutual taxonomist-friend Sharon Mizota, who told me that Dominique had, “managed to build an amazing business in a very short period of time” and was someone I just had to meet. The second is my sister, who worked at Carnegie Museum of Art with her, and said “She is INSANELY passionate, an amazing activist and archivist, and just a truly awesome person.”

And woah, were they right!

Dominique Luster is a renowned speaker and archivist who has worked with museums, universities, and libraries to provide the necessary context and storytelling for their exhibits. I loved this conversation with her in which we covered everything from her transition from in-house archivist to running her own for-profit business to how Teenie Harris inspired her to take an independent leap.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity by the wonderful Samantha Cooper.

SAM:
We’ll just jump in. To start, could you tell me what [the] Luster Company is and where you’ve landed? Or [what] the current state of your transition is and what you do?

DOMINIQUE:
The Luster Company is an archival consulting firm that specializes in African American history and culture. We believe in Black storytelling. We believe in the power of Black voice. I believe that more histories are better than specified histories. I think that the world is a bigger, brighter, [and more] beautiful place when we operate from a space of abundance. I think that The Luster Company really tries to chart a pathway in which narrativity isn’t exclusive, it’s abundant. And so, we try to work with cultural heritage organizations who have archival materials that tell those stories. [The work] can look like a lot of things so long as the client or the partner believes in the power of Black narrativity just as much as I do.

In terms of my journey [of] this transition into this work—I founded the company on Juneteenth of 2021. So, we’re almost two and a half years old. And, I would say I feel like the business is in the space for the first time where things are settling. Working on a business vs working in a business—it takes a really long time to learn to do that. And there are no shortcuts. I think now, I’ve just now gotten to that space.

And that feels good.

SAM:
For the most part, do you know what to outsource vs. what to do?

DOMINIQUE:
For the most part. I think I’ve taken some hard lessons in the past couple of years of even what client work we won’t do. I think there is a lot of grace and flexibility in the W-2 world because you’re working within a corporation usually. At the end of the day, if you make a mistake, there is someone above you or another department that can swoop in. Things can be solvable.

When it is just you and only you, and you do not have all these other supportive components that you are accustomed to in the W-2 environment, it’s rough. It can be really hard.

SAM:
When you’re the firefighter for the fire that’s coming towards you…there’s no firefighters around, you have to figure this out.

DOMINIQUE:
I’ll even take that analogy one step further. When you are the firefighter, low-key, for the fire you started. [laughs] There’s a fire coming at you and you have to fight it off but you started the fire in the first place, that’s kind of what the first two years of being a business owner felt like.

But now, I’ve learned some things to outsource. I’ve learned to outsource emails or am trying to outsource emails; I’m not that good at it. But calendaring I am committed to outsourcing because that is wild. I will overbook myself in a minute. You learn small things to outsource. But also, on a big scale, you learn what projects are just not for you. You learn what kinds of clients aren’t for you. You learn to not chase money.

SAM:
That’s an important one.

DOMINIQUE:
You learn to go where you feel pulled. Not where you feel pushed. Or forced. From an abundance mindset, money can always be regenerated. Burning bridges with clients…you can’t. That cannot be rendered fixable sometimes. So, you just learn what you can and cannot do.

SAM:
Taking a step back even further, tell me about the journey that you had from employee to employer, to entrepreneur.

DOMINIQUE:
I’d call myself an entrepreneur. And I never thought that I would. I didn’t feel entrepreneurial. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a business person. I’m an archivist who likes history. Who loves African American history. And I knew that.

It was actually my partner who first encouraged me to consider working for myself. And I said “no” probably like the first four or five times. Because it just didn’t feel like me. And I wouldn’t say I had a lot of examples growing up of Black community members, Black family members running multimillion-dollar businesses.

SAM:
Sure.

DOMINIQUE:
I knew if I was going to leave the security of a retirement plan and a health insurance plan, I wanted to see examples of it. And I didn’t. I actually took this leap in the middle of a pandemic and moved to a different state to do it. And had no idea what I was doing and had no examples.

So, it was just this person who was an archivist, who had worked in museums for years, who had no idea what she was doing, but a hope and a lot of prayer and a very supportive environment where I had built up a nice runway for myself. And I was financially supported by a partner. And I know that that’s not everybody’s story.

SAM:
[But] even with a partner, it isn’t necessarily going to happen.

DOMINIQUE:
I probably put a whole year’s salary aside. Before I left my W-2 job.

SAM:
Do you mind me asking how much of that you had to dig into to make this happen?

DOMINIQUE:
Every. single, penny. [laughs]

SAM:
It’s all gone. [laughs]

DOMINIQUE:
It’s all gone. If the truth is helpful for anybody else, I probably saved up the equivalent of a whole year’s salary. Because then I could give myself six months to try. If it really wasn’t working…which I didn’t think it would be but, just in case it was up-in-flames, I had six months to find a job.

SAM:
You gave yourself that structure, that you were comfortable with, to make those decisions.

DOMINIQUE:
Mmhmm. I would make this move and I would fully throw my whole self into it, no matter what, for 12 months. But, if at the sixth month mark, it was just the Titanic taking on water, I was like, “I’ll shift my energy. I have six more months of savings and I’ll spend that six months finding a job.”

I did end up getting another job. Just because, I burned through everything. I think that’s the reality that most people don’t talk about, is that even as an early career entrepreneur, you might have to get a job. It’s not a full transition.

SAM:
And when you got that job, was it part-time or full-time?

DOMINIQUE:
It’s full-time.

SAM:
When you say you are doing these in parallel…and are you still doing the full-time?

DOMINIQUE:
Yeah.

SAM:
So, truly, everything all at once. [laughs]

DOMINIQUE:
But it was… you know, as a spiritual and religious person, I’m like, “Man, God was really looking out for me” because it was the kind of job that really leaned into my strengths but also gave me the freedom to do whatever I needed to do. So, I work from home. It didn’t hinder me from continuing to build what I needed to build. And it leaned into the work that I am building with The Luster Company. So, it all worked out. For the good.

SAM:
When you left your previous full-time job, and then decided that you were gonna start The Luster Company, was there a final push to make that happen? What was that tipping point for you?

DOMINIQUE:
In a nutshell, it was the pandemic. I had been toying with the idea of starting my own thing and right as I had gotten the gumption to leave my W-2 job, the pandemic started. And, there was no way that I was walking away from a job in the middle of a global pandemic. This was when we first started. Do you remember that feeling of, like, going outside could kill you? No one went outside. The airports were empty. Countries were closed. We did not have a vaccine at that time. we had nothing. We didn’t even know what it was!

SAM:
It was dystopian. It was wild.

DOMINIQUE:
It was terrifying. My employer, sometime around March [2020] sent us home and we were told to take about two weeks-worth of the work with us that we could do from home through our VPNs. Two years later, we were just now figuring this out. And, it took about two years for them to start to bring people back to work.

You know, growing up my Aunt said, “Your house, your home should be your favorite safe space.” And for me, it is. I do not like working outside. So, when we were coming in once a week, I was like, “Okay.” But then in early 2021, they were like, “The pandemic’s over. Everybody come back to work.” Then there was a resurgence. It was just like, “No no no no no. Pandemic is not over.” I just didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel good about coming back into museums.

But I love museums. I was just in a place where, if the choice was to come back into a museum or to go out on my own, I wanted to go out on my own.

SAM:
It was kind of a final shove that you needed to make that happen.

DOMINIQUE:
It was like, “Alright, starting June 1, everybody has to come back into work five days a week full-time.” I was like, “Well, May 1 will be my last day.” [laughs]

SAM:
And you did a local TED Talk.

DOMINIQUE:
I did.

SAM:
When was that in relation to all of this and how did that factor in?

DOMINIQUE:
It was about two years before the pandemic. It plays into this work because, personally, I’ve always felt how I felt. I’ve not switched up my views on Black history, Black storytelling. I think it’s one of the greatest receipts for my work. And I’m so glad it was earlier because it, like I said, it just feels like the greatest receipt to say, “Hey, no no no no no. I have been talking about reparative archival work.”

I will say, I was invited to do that TED Talk. Which means—theoretically—that someone was so aware of my work for the previous few years, that it had gained enough local recognition to be invited to do that TED Talk.

SAM:
There was an awareness. It was making its way outside of those [museum] walls. And that’s years before George Floyd was killed. Your receipt is a longstanding receipt and you’ve already been doing this work for a very long time.

DOMINIQUE:
That’s exactly true. I hadn’t thought of it that way.

The TED Talk was actually the end of some research that we had been doing at the museum for a few years. We had gotten some grants in the years that I was there to do some work regarding African American history and archival metadata. And so, we had completed our grant. We were presenting on the findings of this work at national conferences that we’d been invited to [and] different other museums to teach them how we were doing this work. We were talking about this all over the country. At least in the libraries, galleries, archives, museums world. And, like I said, we had completed all the work by the time the TED Talk came around.

SAM:
I’m glad you have that receipt, for yourself and for the world. [laughs]

How did the transition affect your relationships with your colleagues and other archivists?

DOMINIQUE:
I think the jury’s still out on that one. So, two things, I think there’s a really strong interest in archivists who are self-employed and who have built businesses. I think there’s a strong respect in just going out on your own. Oftentimes, archivists and librarians work within universities. Which can be tenerable. If you know anything about academia, the idea of having a tenerable faculty position means that from 35-65, your career is set. You have financial and professional security for the rest of your working career. You have health insurance. Good health insurance. You don’t have to worry about retirement because, most likely, you have either a pension or some sort of retirement plan through your employer with a match. Your kids are taken care of. The idea of going outside of that space is terrifying and I think there’s a lot of respect for someone who takes that leap.

On the other hand, there can be some confusion around what a consultant is and how to work with a consultant as an archivist. I think there can be a lot of frustration internally with management because, oftentimes, memory workers aren’t acknowledged or receive the credit that they deserve for the work that they do. And then you bring in this outside consultant, who you pay a bajillion dollars and they say, “Bada bada bing.” And the administration goes, “Oh! Brilliant!”

I get it! I’ve been there. It can be this, like, push-and-pull of, like, “That’s really cool but, don’t take my job.”

Honey…I don’t want it. [laughs]

SAM:
This is why I’m doing my own thing.

DOMINIQUE:
We’re not even on the same book, honey. I mean that in the most honoring way. I see what my colleagues go through and the battles that they face and the battles that they fight. I see how collectively they form a force that can move things forward, that can move libraries forward, that can move a national movement around how we do information and security and government records. I see the work that they do and how it changes the country for the better.

And that is not me. So, I think, my relationships have just changed. I hope that they’ve changed for the better. One of the things that I try to say about working with me is that I really don’t mind being the bad guy. I don’t care. If you have a cause that matters to you and matters to your library, your repository that I can help with, I’m an outside person. Tell me what you need and let me write a report about it. Let me be the bad guy.

I think my colleagues have so much on their shoulders of fighting the world…let me do it.

SAM:
Obviously, you are working in the Black history space. You also are a Black woman. Do you think that there’s anything about you being a Black woman that has shaped your experience in a way that you want to share with people for visibility or understanding?

DOMINIQUE:
Absolutely. But you know what—yes, and—because a lot of how I think about my work comes from this perspective of, honestly, a Black man from the 30s. Teenie Harris is really where a lot of my foundational feelings, beliefs, and philosophy around history, Black history, and archives comes from.

Teenie was a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier. He photographed every day Black life in Pittsburgh for about 45 years or so. These photos went all over the country when Pittsburgh Courier was circulated all over the country. It [the photos] just highlighted Black life in a new and different way, even than what we see now.

Up until that point—I mean, you’re talking the pre-war era—Black life in any major metropolitan area or any major urban area looked a certain way. It wasn’t great for a lot of people but particularly for Black and Brown Americans, for women, for the LGBT community. It was just…bad.

SAM:
It was good for a very specific subset of people and it was not most people.

DOMINIQUE:
Exactly.

When I worked at his [Teenie’s] archive, it was the only collection I worked with at the time. So, I had this focused energy on only his material. And, you start to learn people. You start to learn the way that the world was shaping for these people. And they become very real to you. I learned the personality and the perspective and the joy, and the community values that Teenie had for the Hill District of Pittsburg and Black Pittsburgh in general.

And I learned more about his work ethic. I learned about the challenges that he faced being a Black male in the 50s and 60s. Or in the 30s and 40s. I just tried to learn who he was as a person and that taught me a lot about what I believed and really didn’t believe. Or what I was willing to stand for and what I was not at all willing to stand for.

It kind of walked in parallel with my personal lived experiences. Not just as a Black woman. But, to be honest, as a Black woman from, kind of low-key, Appalachian Kentucky. Which, Kentucky is its own place. And a beautiful place. But also has its challenges when it comes to Black and Brown communities.

Paralleling all those things with the opportunity to get this graduate level time to deep dive into my beliefs and who I was as taught by this man who really only left lessons through his photographs. Those kind of formed this person where I believe in Black storytelling. Full stop. I believe that Black stories are beautiful and that we just need more of them.

So, it was just this like hand-in-hand thing.

SAM:
That’s awesome. That you, kind of, brought that forward into your existence and your story now.

DOMINIQUE:
For sure. I’d absolutely say that.

SAM:
I’m curious what advice you have for someone that’s still in that full-time job and considering that leap.

DOMINIQUE:
I would say get the LLC.*

I say that for two reasons. One: at least in the state that I’m in, it does not take a lot to have an LLC. It takes about $100 and about ten minutes of your time. You can’t do anything in this business without an LLC. No one says that you have to leave your full-time job just because you have an LLC. I think what’s really important is that there is a way to stagger-step it that doesn’t feel like “I have to do this thing for six months and all of my eggs are in one basket.” As a Black woman in America, I am never going to advocate for someone putting all their eggs in a basket. You remember how expensive eggs got? I would never do that! [laughs]

But, I do think the advice that I would have is just to get the LLC. [But] do not pay someone else to register it for you. You can do it on the state website for yourself for whatever the state minimum fee is.

Also, [get the LLC] because you will always be able to say “established then.” The longer you wait, the longer that won’t be a choice. Even if you had the idea in 2020, technically [without the LLC], you didn’t start until 2024, when you actually acted on your ideas. Just act on them. You have this thing in your heart… Just start. I think it gives you the snowball approach of a small act. Just start. Because if you can just get the LLC, then I think the next thing is to just file for the EIN number. That’s another piece of the snowball. And then, hold that name on Instagram. You don’t have to launch an account. Just hold it. All these small things will add up eventually.

SAM:
Don’t let it be bigger than it needs to be. Do those small steps to get there.

DOMINIQUE:
There’s a lot [of small businesses]. And not all of them have all the things from day one. Yours doesn’t have to be the one that does a million dollars in the first year. I think it’s really important to just start.

SAM:
Totally agree. You’ve had this company for two and a half years now? And you’re a for-profit company?

DOMINIQUE:
Yes.

SAM:
This is a type of work that tends to be done in a non-profit way. So, my question for you is, is it profitable? Are you liking this approach?

DOMINIQUE:
Yes. I do love it. Also, yes, it is profitable. Not to say that we’re, like, buying yachts because, you know, groceries are still…eggs are still really high. But we’re doing fine. I’m able to provide what I can for myself and what I can for those who support me.

To go back to the previous question, this ties very deeply to where I think the confusion with my colleagues lies. Almost all exclusively work in these non-profit spaces. It can be confusing or just a little cloudy of how this works in the for-profit space and be ethical. I actually think that’s a lot of where the confusion is.

SAM:
Just because you’re a non-profit doesn’t mean you’re ethical. It’s a business filing. It is not a stance in the world. You know?

DOMINIQUE:
I agree with that. It’s changing the mindset a little bit.

SAM:
Well, is there anything else you wanna share that I haven’t asked you, about transitions, about yourself?

DOMINIQUE:
I will say, in my opinion, one of the big things that holds people back is fear of the unknowns. And then I think, is fear of all the things that have to be done in order to seem or deem or feel successful at this transition. I think people get very overwhelmed.

SAM:
It’s hard to know where to start.

DOMINIQUE:
It’s hard to know where to start and that’s why I wanted to say, I think the start is just to get that LLC. And then do the next step. Because otherwise, you’ll never start if you are constantly being—in my opinion—being bombarded with all the fear and concerns.

SAM:
To your point about the LLCs and, and getting it going, I totally agree. I think each city is slightly different. The actually getting of the EIN, anybody can do that. It takes two minutes.

DOMINIQUE:
And, quick tip to anybody, paying your taxes [as an LLC] to the federal government is actually pretty easy. I don’t know about other people but, it’s one of those things that feels very scary in theory. And the check hurts when it comes out of your bank account.

SAM:
Even if you’ve planned for it, it still hurts. Because you’d love to keep it. But you know it has to happen.

DOMINIQUE:
Make those estimated tax payments.

*The process of starting an LLC is state-specific. Visit this website to determine the steps in your state.