The creative business

• Module 2: You’re creative – but so are they!

  By David Parrish

  ... Dealing with competition, understanding your competitive advantage in relation to rivals in the marketplace

  In one of my business development workshops for creative entrepreneurs, there were artists, musicians, advertising professionals etc; by coincidence there happened to be three designers in the room. It was interesting to watch their reaction as people in the group introduced themselves. The designers’ reactions were defensive because they each perceived the others as competitors. However, by the end of the day they were good friends, swapping business cards and promising to send customers to each other.
  

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• Module 3: Not all customers are good customers

  By David Parrish

  Choosing customers – finding the right customers to fit with your creativity, ambitions and values.

  What should you do if your performance, product or service doesn’t sell? Change the offering or change the audience? This question takes us straight to the problem creative people often have with marketing - the fear that a marketing approach will lead to a market-led enterprise, an appeal to the ‘lowest common denominator’ in order to maximise sales, and a ‘dumbing down’ of the product or service. In other words, it will lead to ‘selling out’ our creative principles.
  

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• Module 4: Precision marketing

  By David Parrish

  ... Advertising and publicity – communicating your key messages to customers

  After choosing the right kind of customers to target, you will need to communicate your key messages to them.

  ‘Precision Marketing’ is all about getting the right messages to the right people in the most effective way possible. The ‘3Ms of Marketing’ technique helps to achieve that precision. The three Ms are: Market, Message, Medium – and it’s important to deal with them in that order. This technique invites us to think things through in a rational way, dealing with each market segment (or ‘customer type’) in turn.

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• Module 5: Structuring your enterprise

  By David Parrish

  Businesses and organisations in the creative and cultural sector are set up with different legal structures; we need to be aware of the options available and the consequences of each.

  A creative entrepreneur can operate as a self-employed ‘sole trader’, in a partnership, or set up a separate legal entity such as a company for the purposes of running a business. Self-employment, a commercial company, a partnership, a ‘not-for-profit’ company, a social enterprise or a charity are all possible and there are many examples of creative businesses and organisations set up in each of these ways.
  

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• Module 6: Make money while you sleep!

  By David Parrish

  Creativity is all about ideas and creative enterprise is about making money from those ideas. The main assets of most creative businesses are intangible – ideas and know-how in the form of intellectual property (IP).

  So creative entrepreneurs need to know how to protect their IP and use it to generate income streams.

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• Module 7: Creative collaborations and other essential C-words

  Creative collaborations – working in partnership with other individuals and businesses in the creative or other sectors.

  It can be stimulating and inspiring to work with other creative people on new projects, so it’s worth thinking about what makes creative collaborations work well.
  

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• Module 8: Raising and managing money

  By David Parrish

  Financial Management - getting the right financial result by managing your income and expenditure

  Many creative entrepreneurs tell me that finance is not their forte; they are driven by a creative passion and find financial management boring or confusing – or both.

  Creative people are often not primarily motivated by money, yet financial management is an essential part of any enterprise, creative or not. So an understanding of financial matters can quickly pay dividends..
  

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• Module 9: Customers as partners

  It’s easier – and cheaper – to keep an existing customer than find a new one. This marketing maxim is common sense, yet most marketing effort seems to go into the more glamorous pursuit of winning new customers.

  So let’s think about how we can make the most of our existing customers (the good ones!), by listening to them, understanding their points of view, and then doing more business with them.

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• Module 10: Reassuringly expensive

  Pricing policy has both an immediate and long-term impact on a creative business and has an impact not only on the economics of the enterprise but also on the perception of its products and/or services.

  Prices can be derived from costs and this is a useful exercise to do, though it’s not the only way to decide how much to charge. All the direct costs must be included of course, including the cost of labour.
  

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• Module 11: Focusing your enterprise

  By David Parrish

  Being creative gives rise to lots of ideas about how to develop an enterprise, but in a sense this is a problem too, because we end up with more ideas than resources to actually implement them.

  So how do we select priorities as opportunities arise? We need to make astute choices: creative choices and business choices.
  

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• Module 12: Growing your business

  By David Parrish

  As enterprises develop, more opportunities emerge, so it seems that the logical thing to do is to ‘grow the business’. But what does growth mean, exactly?

  Usually people mean that sales increase and consequently the number of people employed grows too. But what about profit? It doesn’t automatically follow that more sales means more profit, because expenditure may be growing even faster.

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