How to Start, Manage and Profit from your Creative Business

1. Welcome!: We all dream big when we're kids and perhaps some others go on to pursue entirely different careers than those we dreamed about. While others might end up paying the astronauts, they always thought that they would be. If you work in the creative industries, like me, you might be living the dream. But maybe you right now you are working for a company as a creative and a new dream arises. Being independent. Becoming a freelancer or setting up your own business can be a daunting process. They can also be a rewarding one. Seeking for creative freedom through setting up your own enterprise can be a wonderful journey of self-discovery that at the same time can reward you with a profitable and sustainable business. In this class, I will take you through the quest of creating and managing of profit business from the idea stage due to the point where you can begin to reap the benefits of your hard work. I will talk to you about my own journey with my business co-founder Anna and our company black Goblin. And we'll share all the lessons on entrepreneurship, resilience, and creativity that we have learned along the way to help you afford unwanted details and mistakes in your path towards independence. You will learn answers to the core question of why you're setting up your business. Finally, engage with their customers, build a product or service, do storytelling, and gather your first team. For the class project, we will walk you through a series of full exercises that will help you plan and kickstart your new idea. So at the end of the cost, you have a clear and defined plan which can then be used to explain your business to others. Opening doors for funding and partnership opportunities. This class is the first in our series of how to start managing profit from your creative business. But we will cover all the aspects that you need to know in order to drive a successful company. So whatever your dream business, you can start today. Thanks for watching and I'll see you soon. 2. The 'Why?': A place where we have free to create and think about all the ways in which we can use sound to explore new ideas. A place where employees feel that they are part of a real team, family. A place where creativity and out-of-the-box thinking is not only allowed but encouraged. That was the dream, honor and I had over five years ago when we decided to create our own business. Over time, we realized that this dream is one that we shared with marsh created in our industry. The rise of the independent sector in the film industry meant a lot of opportunities opened up, but also a lot of uncertainty for those of us that dedicated our passion to creating film in one way or another. Autonomy seems to bring with itself financial instability. And at the intersection between our dream and our need, we met who would become our customers? Independent filmmakers, everyday struggle with the technicalities of creating sound design. And sound designers struggled with the financial issues caused by the fear of independent filmmakers towards the whole sound design process. We needed to fix this by firstly making sure we could connect filmmakers with the sound design process in an artistic with through online educational content. And then by creating tools that fostered collaboration between these filmmakers. Who if we've done our work right, we're now excited about sound and the sound professionals that had been waiting for fantastic projects to work on. The y was initially burst on our own story as creators. And it then became the flag that represented what others were going throughout their awesomely, the y allowed us to find the how we were going to solve the issue that played others in our industry. When it comes to starting your own business, it's very important to understand why you want to create it. What is your story and why do you want to revolutionize the world with their ideas? The way can be as simple or as complex as you want, but they should always be an answer to this question. Understanding why you want to create your business can help you understand your market better. Or it can even help you find the market if you're not quite sure what it is yet. So what is it that you want to achieve and why is it important to you? And just like that, believe it or not, we have defined the core aspect of a successful brand. Indeed, knowing the y will help you build your brand grounded in purpose, allowing you to connect with others on much different levels. Beyond selling a product, you'll be sharing your story with others and hopefully making the world a better place with along with your customers. Whether this is through rendering services for them or creating new products and offers which allow them to be created to. Now we've talked about why a new idea is important for you, which is great, but the harsh reality is not every great idea or dream becomes a successful business. So it's time to flip it and change the why it matters to you into the white matters to others. So before fully committing to your new enterprise, have you asked yourself, are you providing something that is needed or wanted in the market that you are aiming for. Putting together a clear picture of why you want to do something and why it is important for your potential customer, will not only help you about the status of your business, but will also guide you as time passes by. It will help you keep on track and never forget those that you have created your business for. So now that we know how important it is to find it, Let's go together and find your way. 3. Finding The 'Why?': You've decided to start a new business. Perhaps you are a graphic designer with amazing talent that has now decided to go solo as a freelancer or a filmmaker who has now partnered with others to create a brand new production house. Why? We discovered the y in a very simple fashion by following the next structure. First, ask yourself what it is that you want to do. For example, your answer to this question might be, I want to become a freelance graphic designer. Then ask yourself, why? Perhaps you wish to gain independence and work for yourself. But why would you want to do that? Maybe it's the ability to pick and choose which projects that you work on. Why would you want to pick and choose which projects that you work on? Well, perhaps because the most important thing for you is to make sure you can work every day on projects that you love and feel committed to. Otherwise you lose motivation. You cannot choose when you work for other people, but you can when you are the boss. So setting up your own business means that you can not only pick and choose, but you can also support special causes, smaller companies, rather than big businesses and charities, et cetera. This might be your ultimate way, but you can always dig a little deeper until you discover what your ultimate way is. Don't worry, this exercise med tech, various attempts before you can actually find out what your ultimate way is. But the fun part is, you will discover so much about yourself just by asking yourself this question over and over until, bam, there it is the reason you never dare to say out loud before. We're often embarked on the day to day that we don't allow ourselves to dream much. We shut down this part of our lives in favor of getting work done and moving on to the next task. This can be quite discouraging, particularly if you work in the creative industries and wanting to start your own entrepreneurial journey in the creative industries. So take the time to do this exercise with a cup of tea or coffee. There is another way to do this too. You can help yourself discovered the wire through this very useful template. If you are great artists, you can draw a little scenes in this template. Or if drawing is not in your veins like me, you can also do a collage or make notes. This dream bar that you have created helps you think about the future and ask yourself questions about where you envision yourself. The answers are different for everyone, but creating a little seed for each of these bonds will help you dig a little deeper and find out your why. So let's start with where you are right now, it is important to figure out where you are in life, to identify the things that you'd like and those you wish to improve by creating your new business. Think about both the positives and the things that you have in your current work situation and also about those opportunity areas and start populating the day to day. For my board, I will share with you one on one I created over five years ago. Our situation was unique in that we were massive students and we will work in as freelancers on the side. So pear wasn't great and time was scarce. We saw ourselves overworked and underpaid and being a bit stuck in small budget projects. So we have this on this side of the board and we have written exactly those words onto here. On the positive side, we've got to network with a lot of early stage career filmmakers. I've got to work on really interesting projects that are co-workers were doing because they were interesting and not because they had to do them. Which would have been the case, working for a company with a clear portfolio on fixed agenda. So that goes into our positives. We wanted to preserve that. Then we have the h2 slash. What kind of people you interact with every day. Here we had filming game design students, early-stage career filmmakers. And we wanted to keep that for sure, but we also wanted to expand to bigger partners and we wanted to diversify our portfolio with interesting out of the ordinary partnerships. So to represent the downside here, we've put a little emitted industry collaborations sign. The last part is what does success look like for you? At that point, success for us was in the number of projects that we took on. We will all about collaborating as much as possible, grown our expertise, set of skills and experience. So budget and profitability wasn't at the forefront. We have put here that number and variety of projects was success for us at the time. On the negative side, it was also a lot of work with not a lot of peer yet again. So the financial stability wasn't the best. Now comes the interesting part. We will fill the samples with our vision towards the future. Imagine five years have passed and you've successfully created and managed your company open till this point. How does that look for you? What is your day-to-day like for us? It was coming to work every day in a lovely office, our studio and having worked lined up for us or being somewhere outdoors doing some field work. Here's another me doing just that. Developing new technologies and coming up with new ideas for filmmakers and some professionals to use having a fully formed team of creatives who we consider a secondary family. This was our aspiration. To you. This might be working at three or four day week schedule or maybe working from home or having your shop set of online. Or if you are a content creator, you might see yourself filming exciting content every day, are traveling and gathering this content. Then we have our h2 slash. What kind of people you interact with every day. For us at now aspirations, we wanted to maintain interactions with creative people every day, but also wanted to interact with people from different sectors. One of our aspirations collectively was to be able to share our work with members of the scientific community and with members of other artistic and cultural organizations to build bridges between them and ourselves. But also, I'll film and TV and games customers. We've put that there for you. If you have, for example, a social enterprise, it might be that you wish to be in touch with the communities that your company is directly helping, all with artists or with members of the public appreciate your work. Lastly, but not least, what does success look like for you? For us, it was accolades and recognition for our work, but many smiles on people's faces, creatives having the perfect day to day, thanks to all of us being able to create a successful career and be competitive because they were using our tools. For you. It might be accolades, but it might not be that. You might also want to improve the living conditions for a specific sector. Either way, we all try and change the world hopefully for the better. What does that look like for you? Place that here. Once you have done this, look at these three very important aspects. The day-to-day symbolizes your personal life, the milestones you want to achieve, and how you want your business to be part of you. Whether that is by giving you a steady income, a better work-life balance. This is part of your y. The second one is telling you about who you are reaching out to, who you want to help, and who you want to interact with. The third, what are your milestones and goals? So first, if we put this together, it might sound something like this. We want to create black Goblin and audio services and technology company to design diverse and out-of-the-box solutions for creatives and ourselves to thrive creating sound. We want to make sure they all have a fair chance to compete against the biggest production houses. And we want to be recognized as one of the most innovative all your companies in the world that encompasses what we aspire to do day-to-day. Who we want to help with our idea and what our success looks like, our ultimate way. Now this has morphed and changed a bit over the last five years. But the good news is you can always come back and tweak ever-so-slightly your board. And five years after you can hopefully swap your two deer for what was your aspiration all those years ago and go for even more. Once you have your wide down and fully understood. Next, you can look at your potential market and start to figure out where you fit in. 4. Finding The 'Who?': Welcome back. So now that you've understood why we're starting a business, we should also understand who we are doing this for. Yes, one possible answer is that you're doing it for yourself. But what I actually mean is who needs what you are offering? Also, you might not actually be doing this only for yourself. Your idea might be for a social enterprise. So you already have gained terrain and discovering who already, if that's the case, in any case, the biggest obstacle and the reason why so many incredible ideas don't follow on to become a successful business. Because ultimately they fail to address a real life problem that needs solving. This doesn't mean that the idea is not cool or innovative, but in order to turn it into a sustainable business, there needs to be someone in the world that really needs what you do. So think about it, who will benefit from your product or service? Initially, the answer to this question might be that several groups of people will benefit from it. To give you an example, a new compute the standard that ensures optimum positioning of laptops to avoid strain on your neck and shoulders will benefit any person that uses a laptop, but also the retailer that will resell it to those people. So unless you decide to sell the stand through your own distribution channel, your website, you need to appeal to both the end-user and the shops. Do you want to partner with to sell the product? From a profit standpoint, the more there is an existing need for a service or product, the easier and soon it will be for your business to be profitable. Some problems we, as consumers know, we have immediately going back to the standard, for example, say you have pain in your neck every day after work because your laptop position is not very good. And he needed where to position the laptop in a way that doesn't hurt anymore. This is not only what you would call a burning problem, but also one that customer would be well aware of and for which you already thought of a solution. Meaning all you need to do is put the product in front of them, and that's it. Unfortunately, not all problems are like this. Particularly for the creative industries. Your target customer might be having huge problem that they don't know they have or they do know they have, but they're not sure what the solution might look like. Marketing a product or service this way is harder because there needs to be a process of educating the customer in a clear, concise, and non condescending manner. This goes to show that although you do need to focus on what your customer needs, this doesn't always look the same. So how would you find out if someone needs what you were offering them? Research, research, research. Most of us starting don't have a huge budget to invest in market research. Again, particularly in the creative industries. What we do have is great industry knowledge as most creative businesses are founded by experts in those areas. For example, a graphic design studio, founded by a graphic designer with years of experience. So this is something that sets our industry is asides from others. However, research into your market is always needed. We always start with an assumption, and this assumption very simply answers the question, who are your customers? Spend some time creating a profile or the type of customer you would expect to sell to. What age range are there? What kind of work do they do? What kind of interests would they have? What similar products or services do they use? All by what gender are there, if applicable? Does geographical location play a part? Creating this customer profile will allow you to focus your attention on these types of people when marketing and branding your product or service, you want to be as appealing to them as possible. And understanding all these different aspects will help you target them much more efficiently. 5. So, Who are your customers again?: My co-founder, Anna, has acted as a Entrepreneurship mentor for some time now. And the answer she gets the most often when asking the question, who are your customers? Is everyone? It is really common to think that your product can benefit everyone. Going back to the example of the laptop stand, a typical answer to the question, who would buy this could be everyone who uses a laptop. Unfortunately, I'm from experience, we know that this is very unlikely that this is true. Not everyone that has a laptop will be on the market for an orthopedic stand. So who is the most viable customer, the most achievable one. In fact, a great way to depict your ideal customer is by the process of creating a buyer persona. Which starts really by asking the questions I was telling you about some moments ago. But rather than making it a general query, we imagine a specific person. It doesn't have to be someone real. Although if you have done some other form of research yourself already, like one-to-one interviews or focus groups. You could identify who is the most likely buyer for your product and base this on a specific person you talk to or even a combination of people you've spoken to. However, you can start again from speculation. If I were going to do this exercise of creating a buyer persona for the laptop stands. I could say something like my ideal customer is called Susan. She is 35 years old and works as a software developer for a startup company. She spends a lot of time on her computer at work and also has a monitor setup for her work. However, she likes to use her laptop as a sides second screen to use for resources and information. She suffers from back and neck pain every day after work, and it has now started to affect her to the point where she needs to visit a chiropractor every month just to get by. Susan has a very clear need. She knows what is causing her health problems. So you all stand would be great for her. Another potential persona could be mic is 32 years old and works in administration for a legal firm. They spend a lot of time on the go from meeting to meeting, where they must take notes and move from room to room across the building. They suffer from acute neck pain, from having to use their laptop in weird positions and always looking down at their small screen. Mike is from a completely different sector and industry, but has a similar story to Susan. They have both gotten to the point where their relationship with their laptop is affecting their health and they must seek medical help. You can right away see the commonalities that are really apparent. Both buyer persona's are professionals who work with their computers daily. Both have health issues derived from bad positions with their laptops and both have sought medical help. This is a very brief example and we will get into the magic of building and reaching your ideal customer in another class on customer focus. But for now, start doing this exercise and think about two or three ideal people who buy or engage in services you provide and write down the common characteristics. Then think, what does this mean for me? In our example, we can see that perhaps there is a commonality between the edges. People working in their thirties, working in offices. And we can also see that perhaps they've sought medical advice. So reaching out to them through channels such as medical consultants or chiropractors might be a good idea. Perhaps you could think about partnering with a big medical centers and offering the standard to be solved through their pharmacies. That will inform how you further develop your product, how you market it, and how you distributed. In other words, your route to market. Another question you need to answer is, what makes you unique to similar businesses? Unless you were extremely niche in your offering, it is likely that you'll be sharing the market with a few are a lot of competitors and that is completely normal. However, one thing you should try to do is distinguish yourself. What makes your offering better than those of your competitors. Once you have that figured out, you can then make sure that your uniqueness is clearly articulated through your brand and marketing. This uniqueness is called the unique selling point or USP. An integral part of this journey is that of mapping your competitors and an initial stage. You can start by looking at their social media and the content that they release. Make notes on anything that works well or not so well, and see how it fits into the market. It is important to remember that this study is not meant for you to copy directly what other businesses are doing, but you can absolutely use it as inspiration to create your own unique content that fits your brand and values. You may also want to look at how your competitor prices their products or services. That will give you a better idea of what your customers are used to and willing to pay. Observed pricing differences between these current offers. And see why there are differences, if any. For example, do you have a competitor that sells a similar product at a really high price point and another at a really low one. What are the differences? Is it the quality of the product itself? Is it the level of support they offer post-purchase? Knowing these things can allow you to price yourself accurately according to what you are willing to offer your customers. Average is okay to a certain extent, but be careful not to fall into the comfortable middle just for the sake of it. Justify your pricing and if it is a higher price than the current price point, make a case for it. Your product really should be a premium product and not an average one disguised as a premium. Most importantly, make sure that your product or service finds its own niche in the existing market. As creative entrepreneurs, we are different. We creatives thrive on collaboration and a robust industry where everyone has a chance and does well is good for everyone. So while competition is a fact of life, you will see that creative businesses will support each other. So if in doubt, reach out to other more established businesses. Perhaps not in direct competition with yourself, but maybe businesses that can complement what you do. Ask for tips on how their prospects, their customers, and how they react to them effectively. And also ask about how they further develop their products to fit and niche in the market, which is what we will talk about to you in the next lesson. 6. The 'What?': So here we are. We started with an idea. We were motivated by the wind, our lives, and now we've thought about who our idea will benefit. This short lesson, we'll now focus on revisiting your product or service proposition and redefining it. Now that you've found your ideal customers, perhaps there are aspects that needs some updating right off the bat. You might have already identified some aspects of your original offer that might not be a 100% suitable for your buyer persona. It is time to adjust and it's also time to go out and talk to people. Take our laptop stand example for instance, in our last lesson, we concluded that a good way to reach our potential customers would be by getting in touch with chiropractors in your region. And this might be an amazing way, not only to confirm whether your assumptions of Susan and Mike were correct, but also speaking to medical professionals can give you ideas on how to design your product. Imagine for this example, you are an expert on product design. So you know how to build interesting physical objects that can be functional and sustainable. However, due to them not having a background in medicine at all, getting in touch with a chiropractor is the next best thing in design your product. While learn more about what your potential Susan and Mike need. Likewise, you want it to be then talk into your real life susan, the mic, and ask them what they need. Let them explain the problem to you. Don't guide that answers with questions that might prompt a given result. Believe it or not, we tend to be pleases. So the slight suggestion in a specific direction of the person you're talking to will unconsciously or sometimes consciously give you the answer. They instinctively know that you want to hear. This is not conducive to real research and it is one of the most common mistakes we've all done when we start research in our market in early stages. For example, rather than asking, do you think an orthopedic laptop standard would solve your neck and back chronic pain as the following. I'm interested in talking to you because you have expressed that you suffer from chronic neck and back pain. What do you think is causing the issue? Then you can follow up with, do you have a solution in mind for your issue, or what do you think would help resolve the issue? This is a very general example, but follow this approach and keep your questions open-ended, allowing for your research subjects to give you more realistic answers, even if it's an answer that you don't particularly want to hear. This is crucial to ensure that you are tailoring your offer to them and potentially saving you time and resources spent design a product or service that maybe no one wants. Now, if you do your homework and follow this approach when researching your market, then it is time to refine your offer further. You have much more information to go on. I imagine that after speaking to the chiropractor, we confirm that most of their visitors are indeed office professionals with neck and back pain grid. It means we're on the right track. After engaging with the chiropractic into collaborating with us, they managed to get a small group with their patients to agree to talk to us. And we find most of them are actually working on the office setup, which allows for a good position for the monitors, but not their laptops. They actually would like something that allows them to have both their monitor on that laptop screen side-by-side, one in front of the other. But all configurations that have tried for achieving this haven't been optimum to this point. These people don't know that you've been working on a laptop stand and based on what they're telling you, this might not cut it and you might have to redesign your product in order for it to be able to fit not only laptops, but also monitors of different sizes and other devices. You need to change your approach as there is no current solution. It might seem like a failure and like you were wrong, but quite the opposite. This is a success. You've found a real niche in your potential market and all you have to do now is pivot your product. Pivoting is a real part of the business and product service development process. And it's a good thing. It means that you learn from your mistake and assumptions as soon as possible and change direction. Sometimes just a little bit and sometimes a bit more to fit the market needs. You really don't want to waste a lot of your time and energy on branding and marketing, something that will just never sell. So before I dive in and just spend some time doing some research and find exactly what you can fit into the market. And equally important, refine your product and test the idea with their customers over and over again. This is called The Lean Approach. Develop a concept and offer our products in small batches and test each small batch to see how it is received and then repeat. You will see yourself doing this over and over again, even after you launch a product officially, as part of our creative entrepreneurship series, we will be releasing the class focused around the concept of offer development. And we will delve deeper into the lean approach. 7. The Beginning of your Legacy: Deciding on your brand can be both one of the most enjoyable parts of your startup and the most confusing and frustrating. You may get stuck in the mindset of wanting to be perfect first time around. That probably won't be the case and your brand will develop as you progress. The most important thing to outline as your company values and goals. These things are even more important when you are working with multiple people. Having these in place allows everyone to work towards the same goal he needed to decide and how you will come across to potential customers. What will be your business style and what type of voice will your company have on social media channels? For example, do you speak in first-person and referred to yourself personally or in third person using the company name when referring to yourself or you. Formal and corporate and style are more casual and quirky. Your brand is where more than just colors, fonts, and pictures that you use. Like we said at the beginning of this class, it is intimately connected to the why. Why are you here? What do you believe in? What do we mean when we say company values and how can a company have values? Well, simply put, companies are built by people and people have values and goals. Like we said previously, success looks different to different people and your goal when creating your business can be very varied. You might be seeking financial freedom or social justice to a specific cause. You could be looking for a better work environment or to engage in more ambitious projects. Wherever they are, your goals are particularly determined by a personal views as a company founder and they will distill into your venture. Defining these early on will help you convey your story with authenticity and real illness to your customers and build stronger relationships with them. Likewise, they are crucial to have in place as soon as you start working with others. Whether this is to hone your first team or collaborating with consultants. The clearer your brand is articulated, the easier it will be for others working with you to understand what they're working towards and to feel part of your company. Brand has so many areas to work on. Identity, image, employee branding, positioning, and much more. I was once told by one of our branding consultants that brand was what people say when you're not in the room. This is completely true. Your brand is not a redundant thing, but essentially what will define your legacy? Your priorities will be clearly perceived by our customers good or bad. So genuine good intentions and actions will come much more than thousands of pounds and dollars spent on advertising. Brand extends how your employees and partners and how your self treat others. And this is for a reason, you need to start articulating early on. What is your goal? What is it that you want others to say about your company when you're not in the room. We will be creating a class specifically for the purpose of branding. As this is a huge yet super crucial topic. But for now we will want to leave you with this useful checklist that we've created based on the advice and experiences of many brand experts, digital marketing specialists and business mentors that we have had work with us over the years. The questionnaire will ask you three simple questions. What do you do? Try to define your offer in as the least amount of words as possible, but appeal more to the emotional side of what your offer is. Let's go back to the laptop stand example. In this scenario, you are designing a sudden laptops duns or desk ergonomic organizes. If we go by the last product pivot that we had in the previous lesson. So rather than saying, I create ergonomic desk and try to think about this and what it means to customers and put it into words. One possible result could be we create healthy and comfortable desk basis for professionals. Bring in some of the phrases you've heard from those you've interviewed in your market research stages. Now, the second question is, what is your brand promise? This bit, Let's go one step further in explaining what we do. The brand promise is a short stem and that tells your potential customers what it is that you promised with your offer. In other words, what can they expect from you? Some great real-life examples includes FedEx is your package, we'll get there overnight guaranteed. This isn't a really good explanation that is not necessarily emotional but appealing to its effectiveness. The statement clue tells you what the company does, delivers packages. Also that they guarantee a speedy delivery. In the creative industries, however, we might want to build a business for reasons other than to create an effective solution for our problem. Effectiveness is a great of course, and if we can deliver this to our customers, That's great. But oftentimes solution to a problem is not speed or a shot process. It might very well be that what you are trying to do is not about effectiveness, but more about offering some sort of emotive outcome for your customers. Coca-cola is a company that has triumphed over and over in following this approach, their current brand promise is to refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and uplift. To create value and make a difference. And certainly they have been very successful with the branding machine. With many people associate happy memories and identifying with family-focused events and advertisements that are released by the company. Perhaps your company wants to focus on doing this rather than offering effectiveness as the main promise. This is certainly what our company black goblin is doing at the present time with the development of our first product, we're creating a collaborative suite for sound effect creation where Visual Experts field not only more confident to create sound without all the super technical layout that current audio of tech solutions offer, where they can also collaborate with audio experts, be part of the artistic aspect of the sound creation. With this product we're creating, our goal is to release our customers from the strands that we're holding them back so they can live sound and use it consciously on their projects. So our brand promise is creative freedom through sound. And this draws from that feeling of being trapped that dozens of our customers and subjects and our market research referred to when thinking about sound. So now what is the promise you're making to your customers with your product? Is your solution and more straightforward effectiveness or efficiency related one? Or do you want to appeal more to your customers emotions? I always suggest that even if your solution is saved a 100% based on a process that has made better, you can always find a way in which an emotional contexts can be brought in and your customers can relate to it. As this will not only be more effective as a brand promise, but it will help you remember how your customers feel when they have a problem you are trying to solve and how you want to make them feel once you've given them the best solution. Finally, the third but not the least important question is, what are the three key elements and everything that you do? Think social media events that you attend to, how you communicate with potential customers. What are three key elements that all materials produced by you absolutely need to have? If you are posting an update about your business, you'll be taking part in an event to showcase your products. What are the three attributes that your post must contain? Is the way you communicate with an audience, Quirky or informative? Is it fun, playful, or does your brand call for an old-fashioned language of shades of formality? Perhaps you are gaming company and your main product is video games and medieval ages. You might wish to build a whole folklore on the story. Maybe this calls for the usage of language is part of the narrative or in opposition you might want to brand to have a bit more of a contrast the approach by adding some modernism to the narrative of your brand. What are the three attributes that you want others to remember about your company? Once you've chosen these, then consistency is key. Making sure every social media post every bit of merchandise, every talk, confidence that you take part draws from those attributes. Having the answers to these three questions will enable you to start building your legacy and a compelling story that will clear your company for years to come. 8. Financing your Creative Business: We've now reached the difficult and often uncomfortable topic of money. The reality is that you need money to get started. Ideally, you would not need any and you could just start getting as soon as your idea is set in motion. But in order to generate revenue, you need some sort of investment. This topic is so broad that it would take us a whole class to give you all the insights and information to fund your business. And we will indeed release a class as part of this creative entrepreneurship series focused on this. However, for now, we will go through the most important concepts. Bits you need to know how to start a financial plan and get your idea started from today. If you start looking up information about funding and financing your company, you will most likely find a huge array of articles and books, particularly regarding investment and getting your company investment ready. While this is a hugely important subject to talk about, investment is actually a slightly more advanced step to take with your business once you have validated your offer and customer base, of course, particularly for our creative company, seeking investment might be a bit more difficult at first, as it is only in recent years that the government has openly stated the huge income that countries are getting from the creative industries. And economic reports have shown the real drive that creative workforce has on worldwide economies. Fostering my interests from investors into companies working in this sector which has great, having said this, not a lot of investors will have huge deal of experience in the creative industries, will fully understand what you're talking about right away. This doesn't mean that investment is not for creative industry companies, quite the opposite. But you want to make sure that your company is in the right position to take on investment. And the huge amount of responsibility that comes with it in a way that is advantageous for you and any co-founders that you might have, as well as knowing that your vision for the company will be maintained. Likewise, you want to make sure that you can find investors that doesn't understand and commit fully to your business. If possible, not only with the most need of financial assistance, but also with the industry and business advice which usually investors tend to have plenty of. As I said before, create businesses are oftentimes different to those in other industries. Creative professionals founding their own business does tend to see that entrepreneurial ventures as a pathway to work in doing what they love in a substantial way or as a solution to a problem they face every day. So creatives level of commitment to their enterprises tends to be much higher than in other sectors. In other words, oftentimes when a creative starts a business, they want to be part of that business for as long as they can. They don't come in with the idea of developing it for a bit and then selling it. So for this reason, doing a bit of establishing and growth on your business before. So the equity is a good idea. So next we will go through some facts that are really important not to forget at the start of your business so that you can develop it and grow it with financial sustainability while you decide not to get investment ready. 9. Cash is vital!: Without cash, it is very much likely that you will have to pause your business endeavors. Operating a business even when in pause cost, for instance, paying your indispensable contractors such as accountants to fill your tax returns, confirmation statements, and so on costs money, even without the company generating revenue. To 2020 pandemic hit businesses had precisely because of this fact, many businesses had to pause their activities while still incurring hefty bills like rent, business rates, and all the consultancy fees such as accountancy, legal and so on. We know that for the entertainment industry, particularly live and in-person events, this was particularly hard, but also for small studios generating content. A big loss of income came as a result of canceled projects. When your business is running, costs can still be pretty high. Operating your business requires you to consider employee salaries, rent costs, software, hardware, and other operating expenses, as well as production costs when it applies. Don't forget about the sales costs and how much does it cost for you to acquire a customer? Particularly when you start, you will find that your company will consume large amounts of cash without having a lot of income to back it up. This seems very daunting and you might ask, how will you get started? Well, because cash is vital, it is important to have some in reserves. But this is difficult and don't we know it. A robust funding strategy is needed in which you lay out the potential means to fund. It is important that you can contemplate this from minus 100 in your business journey. In other words, before you even start trading or full-on designing your offer, where can you get cash from? Well, grants are a great way to get equity free cash for new businesses while also allowing you to maximize your existing cash depending on where you are located, government or privately given grants allow businesses with innovative ideas to participate for cash to develop their concepts in the UK. Some examples include grants by Innovate UK, your local council, and specific clusters dedicated to sectors in the different industries which are there to support you. Some examples include the debt, London, scotland, and the Welsh cluster. Cluster support those businesses and the audio visual sector and many more. If you are located in Europe, Creative Europe offers various strands of funding depending on the area of your business. And in the United States, there are various opportunities from government funded programs such as the small business innovation research and the Small Business Technology Transfer. Two grants by private bodies and other government funded grants, which are also available to be distributed for small businesses. Pitch competitions are also on the rise. Shark Tank and Dragon's Den style calls where businesses shortcuts that idea and compete for funding in different strands are sometimes supported by government or private organizations. Look for those competitions where the cash prize is not equity, you will find quite few pitch competitions, although there can be a bit nerve-wracking, if you're not particularly into public speaking, are a great opportunity to showcase your business network and practice how to concisely present your idea to a wide audience. During the early stages of black goblin, we took part in many competitions. Regardless of the outcome, we found that even though both my co-founder and I worked reading public speaking, we learned how to find the core of our business and bonus, we networked a lot, so much so that several contracts for work can find networking from these events I made up for not getting the price. Sometimes. You might also want to look at lawns. Now this seems scary and by all means, if you think this will put you in a precarious situation, don't apply to them and wet a bit. There are many options out there and some companies that, for example, give loans against your revenue. So if you have several products, for example, and one of them takes off sooner, I start generating some income. You can borrow some cash for your growth and pay it when you get money from your sales. You do need to be trading for this to work though. Now, are you good at creating content of any kind? Well, there are great ways in which you can look at generating some passive income. Granted they also require some time, but they can help by getting your business known and overtime might increase their contribution to your cashflow. If you are a great photographer, are you considering royalty-free stock photo sites where you can perhaps sell some of your work. This is great because you can upload your content once and then it worked for you all the time. Are you great at creating explainer videos? How about YouTube channel even better? Create Skillshare class where you can share your knowledge with others. These estimates, samples. But in a nutshell, what I mean is, what can you do right now to help you generate some cash in an efficient manner so that you have time to develop your business, particularly activities that are tied to your company so that you can also use this as a pathway to build a good reputation and remember, to build your legacy. Lastly, but not least, crowdfunding. Some products and businesses are more suitable for crowdfunding by nature. For example, products that can easily be showcased like artifacts and physical things. Having said this, there is a rise on software products also been showcased. The biggest example is a Kickstarter, which features a section on software products. Crowdsourcing is a surprisingly good option for products in the creative industries. If you have a service rather than a specific product, showcase, why not try pair to you on a platform that has resulted particularly well for those creating content is a great way to get exposed to an existing big market that can have an interest in your offer. And it is a great way to live test ideas. If you have multiple products or services, you can create tiers of support on page one, for example, and figure out what works best. Of course, pitch on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, crowdfunding are many examples and we're not endorsing a particular one. The point here is to look for whatever platform suits your needs and utilize this in a way that is good for a, funding your business at its earliest stages. And B, to get in touch with your potential customers as soon as possible, or even significantly grow an already existing market reach. Think of all these options. Build connections through funding applications. And yes, absolutely, think about investment in this process and how best to attract the right investor for your business. 10. Human Resources: Most expensive assets or human resources, there are also the most needed salaries will take a big chunk of your monthly budget. In fact, they will very much likely take more cash than any other aspect of your company. Cuts can be made in terms of hardware and software or even monthly office costs, but not in terms of salaries. One of the biggest and often most difficult decisions you will have to constantly make. Particularly at the beginning, is a founder of your business. How many tests can you take on for yourself? You will find yourself wearing many hats. And up to a certain degree, this is not a bad thing on it. Dawn. We have found it incredibly rewarding, but also very useful to take on many different roles throughout our company for managing our staff and human resources task to do in our own bookkeeping, managing our own social media accounts, business planning and financial tasks such as fundraising and customer service. We also delve into the product design with our research and development team. And of course, we still do our usual sound design work. Having said that, there are areas that do require expertise and you don't want to take on every single task of human resources, accounting or law, for example, as this can have serious consequences if a step is mismanaged. And of course, there is a reason why people prepare themselves in different areas such as marketing, finance, administration, and much more. So the goal here is to find a balance between having professional help which is needed and not breaking the fragile bones of your cashflow. Luckily, there are small companies and consultants that understand the struggle of small businesses. Look for these professionals who have specific knowledge in the areas that you need and have an open disposition to being flexible. To give you a small example, are accountants and lawyers are both firms which I'm very successful. But that help us by doing the most needed things for us on a yearly basis in a similar fashion to an annual subscription, which we compare for them to make sure, for example, our annual filings are submitted, but also that there are just a phone call or where if we need any help. Likewise, our lives are amazing at this and we can engage with their services, are in a consultant basis and get our questions answered when we need them, it's important to look for several consultants, have an initial call with them and see whether you can get whether they're good vibes with them, like you would with any of the project. And if you feel the consultants understand your business and you and seek for our healthy work relationship where you feel your consultant will be willing to educate you now because you want to take on their job of course, but because they understand that you might need to jump in and help in the most basic areas of work at the early stages of your company. These consultants that are willing to do this, I'll also very likely confident that your business will grow and that they see this as an investment. So this is grit. Seek for those consultants that will invest in you and your business, not by doing things for free of cost. We all deserve to be paid fairly for our work and services. But that will take the time to educate you and help you manage the cash output that, that expertise required in an accessible way and conscious of you being in an early stage company. Doing this means that you do not need to have employees, but absolutely every aspect of your business from the beginning, which can help you cope financially while your company takes off. 11. Financial and Business Planning: Financial documents and business planning might seem like a waste of time, but there is an advantage for you there. The art of creating and practicing a pitch or creating a pitch deck. An executive summary might seem daunting at first. It might seem as well like pitch competitions or investors. I just asked him for a bunch of documents to make your life difficult. But ultimately, they are for you to have a clear pathway or what is your business on the road you must take to make things happen is essentially a game plan that you can follow at times, constantly update until you start reaching your milestones. A business plan can be short, but it's usually a bit longer. And in here, you can explain clearly what your offer is, what problem you are solving. Who are your customers? How are you going to reach them? You can also detail all financial aspects from how you are funding of business up to how much you will charge for your product or service and how much you will make from it. Your team is also defined here and any other relevant information on technology, market, finance, or expertise is laid out here. The bad news. By the time you finished with the business plan, it will most likely be obsolete already mean a lot of aspects might have already changed, meaning your team is no longer the same, or you are further refined your market. Writing, our game plan allows us to further reflect on what we're doing and why those allowing us to pivot when needed. Which means the faster we discover we might need to change something, the better for our business. The same applies with financial forecasting, cashflow, profit and loss, as well as balance sheet. Trudy, your best friend and early stage of your company is cashflow. Like we've said before, without cash, everything stops. But no matter how annoying it can be to battle with an Excel, it is important to be aware of how much cash is coming in and how much is going out. So do take time, some time in your week to make sure that you're constantly aware of what happens to your business by maintaining these documents. Now, very important. You do not need to write a book. I've seen amazing business plans don't as booklets or interactive presentations. We are creative people. So why constrain ourselves to a Word document? Present your plan in whichever way works best for you. Particularly as you might have to be updating this, make it something pleasing. 12. Don’t Fund your Business using ONLY your Money: Have you heard the expression, don't invest your money in your business? Well, why not? You may ask, very simply put, we have heard countless stories of people put their savings into a business idea, or sometimes even put their personal assets on the line like houses, cars, and other property. Best-case scenario, you can recuperate the money eventually. But you would have to put yourself in a very precarious situation for a long time. The truth is that businesses take awhile to pick up even the most successful ideas. Don't become profitable business from one day to the next. So this is a very good reason not to put your whole finances at risk. Now, even worse, if your idea does not go well, you could potentially lose a lot of money. And what I said, a lot of money, I mean, a lot. Bear in mind what we've been talking about him. Grants, loans, competitions, investments. Why bother with all these things? If I have some savings I can use. Well, this is the reason why when I said, but also just a bit of your own money. I mean, if you do have some money set aside to get your business started and amount that won't damage your personal finances. There are ways in which you can make this work for you. A lot for government grants, particularly support businesses, but require a match funding amount to get them. So let's say the grant we are talking about support to 70% of your commercial or product development endeavors up to a quantity of a £100 thousand. This means that you could fund 70% of your project with a total cost of around a 142 thousand. So if you had 20 thousand for your business, you could turn this roughly into 66,667 roughly. And a grant would contribute 70% or 46,666 and you would contribute the 20 care. This is a great way to maximize your investment in your own business. Likewise, investors like to see that you've put some of your own money into your business. It shows them that you believe in what you are doing. However, I cannot stress this enough that you must only put your own money into your business if you're in a position to do it. And this is why there are other ways in which you can try to fund your business before using your own cache. 13. Think Lean!: These last two points are where shorter think Lean. The lean approach to a startup is just the idea of making sure that you are having more substance in the way you operate your business, rather than more fluff when developing a product, think of what is the minimum requirements that you need to showcase, what the product does at its core. This is often referred to as a minimum viable product or MVP. But user experience designers have cloned another term which we up black goblin, much more and feel is more appropriate for creative businesses. The minimum lovable product. So this is an early version of your product, perhaps with reduced features that exemplify what the offer is about, but making good enough and presentable enough for your potential customers to fall in love with. This same process of thinking. Lean goes way beyond your product. How will you administer your time and your finances, and how you spend your cash? Look at your current processes and expenditure associated to it, and see where costs can be, could of course be mindful in this process and be careful not to cut costs where you really need to spend cash. Do not ever compromise your customers experience or your staff well-being. Which takes me to number six. 14. Don't Forget About Yourself!: It is very often that founders plan their finance around every single item that they can think of, but often forget that they need to pay themselves. This is just a very sharp point, not to forget yourself. You are also essentially an employee for your company. And when you're planning your finances, you must include your salary and all employee related costs associated with you've been employed by your business. These facts and things to notice should be more than enough not only to get you started, but to help you build your business from its early stages to a more established position. 15. Your Team: In most circumstances when starting up your business, it's likely that it will just be yourself at the beginning. That is common. And depending on your company structure, you might never need to hire any of the stuff to help you. Say you are a freelancer and you position your offer as a premium. Perhaps you consist in your business this way without needing any more people, are maybe only relying on some consultants to help you manage the more specialized parts of running your enterprise. However, all the time this will not always be the case. It is important to take this step and look at the skills that your business requires an auditor function and assess whether or not you have all the skills needed. If there isn't an important skill set crucial to the success of your business, then you may need to look at employing someone who has the skill set that you need, or you will have to educate yourself in that area if that is a possibility to keep your costs down. As mentioned before, a great way to acquire first grid knowledge on a budget is to contract in services dependent on what skill set the consulting company has. They might have ways to keep costs down for startup companies as they don't need to fully dedicate themselves to that small business. Be careful though as sometimes the opposite might also be true. Hiring a consultant might actually be more expensive than hiring that talent in-house. During any startup phase is important to keep costs as low as possible, which is easier said than done most of the time. But hiring shouldn't be a priority when first starting unless it's really necessary. And you had the funds to do so, particularly because once you hire is not only about the money, but you're also responsible for the financial stability of other people. So plan ahead and surround yourself with business advisors that can help you prepare your business for your first team. When you get to that stage. 16. Final Thougths: We've come to the end of this class. I'm so excited to tell you that we are bringing you more content around the subject of Creative Entrepreneurship. This topic is super close to our hearts. As through these classes, we get the chance to share our story with you and hopefully help you navigate some of the more complex aspects of state upheld business. During this first-class, we have gone through all the basics of how to style your creative business. From identifying the reason why you started this journey. All the way to find in the people you're helping, developing your offer, an underpinning everything with the concept of brand. We spent quite some time talking about the different funding options, as this is always a hot topic. And we've now finished with the basics of when you absolutely need to hire someone. Remember that our comments section is always open. And if you have any burning questions on any of these topics, or even if you were just like us to create any content on it, specific subject, please just let us know for now. Please don't forget to complete the exercises in this class and please do share with us in the discussions as showcase. And this is your project cost. And if you need any guidance, feel free to pop the question to us and we'll make sure to respond. We're here to help and hopefully will help all of you even just a little bit on your way to creating amazing new ventures. So have fun and we'll see you soon.