Christmas is officially the time to indulge in even more creative DIY than usual. The trouble is, I'm out of inspiration. I turned to the online craft community to find out how they are tackling the demands of this year's Crimbo.

 "I’ve become aware that my handful characters are moving through an empty landscape."

Sarah looks at how to flesh out her cast of secondary characters.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.