Make Art Pay

Episode 1: Katharine Morling – 9 years In this new series of videos Artquest presents three artists and makers who, focussing particularly on the issue of money, funding and finance, look back at their careers and consider what has worked for them when investing in their businesses, getting commissions and selling work. In the first episode of Make Art Pay, visual artist Katharine Morling looks back on the past nine years since she has set up her business. Providing a wealth of advice for artists, she talks about the best way to approach galleries and how to make a portfolio career work. An episode of Make Art Pay will be released weekly, each focusing on a different practitioner at a different stage in their career.

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Building Collective Intelligence with the MMM re.volution programme

Today MyCake’s Sarah presented on the theme of building collective intelligence at the first Learning Day as part of the re.volution programme from Mission Models Money.

re.volution is for leaders of the arts and cultural ecology wanting an end to trying to do too much, with too little, too often on their own. The re.volution peer learning network is designed by MMM to support arts and cultural organisations to ‘renew mission, reconfigure business model and revise approach to money’.

This first Learning Day event is titled ‘Recognising Realities‘ asking the question ‘what kind of governance and what kind of leadership do we need for these changing times?’. Sarah’s contribution is a talk on How pooling our data can help build our collective intelligence – slides available here.

MyCake are collaborating with MMM to deliver elements of the evaluation of the re.volution programme.

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Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap – last chance to register today!

If you’re finding it difficult to think about your creative business as a profit making enterprise and there seem to be more roadblocks in front of you than miles of smooth tarmaced routes to growing your business and making it a success then The Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap can help.

Lateral Action have re-opened The Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap course for the fourth time, this online class features expertise from Brian Clark, Mark McGuiness, Tony Clark, Sonia Simone and Jon Morrow. Registration is only open for the rest of today so to take part in the course you must register now, sign up here.

Former CER student CJ Lyons took The Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap course in January 2011 and spoke candidly to Mark McGuiness in a recent interview about how she used what she learned from the course to help her achieve a top spot in the publishing world, read more in the blog post How to publish direct to Kindle and hit No.2 on the New York Bestseller list.

In Mark’s own words, “To sum it up, it’s a unique class that respects the fact that people who do creative work don’t want to be pulled into the drudgery of “business” – but we still want to grow, and we still want to make a healthy profit.”

REGISTRATION FOR THE CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR ROADMAP CLOSES TODAY SO HURRY BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE! SIGN UP NOW

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Vision, Sound & Music – a 50% discount on offer from the South Bank Centre

We’re excited about Vision Sound Music, the UK’s first festival of music for visuals, bringing together the music, film production, advertising and video games industries, taking place from Friday 2nd September until Sunday 4th September at London’s Southbank Centre.

50% off Vision Sound Music’s B2B Seminar
We’ve secured 10 tickets offering a 50% discount to Vision Sound Music’s Business to Business seminar on Friday 2nd September.

At Vision Sound Music’s Business to Business Seminar you can:

*Meet buyers from across the music, film production, advertising and video games industries
*Learn the latest business ideas at 17 sessions presented by top industry insiders
*Network with colleagues and contacts
*Do all this in a top central London venue

Our B2B partner offer reduces the ticket price from £95 to £47.50

50% off Vision Sound Music’s How2 Seminar
We’ve also secured 10 tickets offering a 50% discount to Vision Sound Music’s How2 (Do Exciting Things) seminar on Saturday 3rd September at London’s Southbank.

At Vision Sound Music’s How2 Seminar you can:

*Meet experts and prospective employers from across the music, film production, advertising and video games industries
*Learn insider tips, tricks and techniques at 16 sessions presented by top industry professionals
*Network with fellow students and young professionals
*Get feedback on your work and test out your ideas

Our How2 partner offer reduces the ticket price from £45 to £22.50.

To take advantage of our partner offers, you’ll need to get your skates on: tickets are limited and the offer closes on Thursday 11th August.

This exclusive offer is only open to telephone and in-person bookings. You won’t find it on the Southbank website. Just go along, or call the Southbank Centre box office: 0844 875 0073. And quote our promo code “VSM PARTNER”

For more information on our events, and to find out more about the other events at Vision Sound Music, go to http://visionsoundmusic.com or follow the festival on twitter: @vsmfestival

See you in September at the Southbank!

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Great Scots!

Wednesday saw us deliver the first of four workshops in Scotland with an elite clutch of 20 arts organizations in partnership with Culture Sparks and The Audience Business. In Glasgow we set to work with a group that comprised a mixture of venue and non-venue based, performing arts, dance and combined arts organizations.

Having covered the basics of what we mean by financial benchmarking (we’re building on the work of The Source project which has run for the last three years) we spent the majority of the workshop using the data as a way in to conversations about how organizations are reconsidering their business models and exchanging knowledge about the various questions being asked by the professionals around the table.

A number of very interesting conclusions were reached:

1 – Reality vs. subjective impressions. The corollary to the mindset shift of doing things to report externally to using the data internally is the difference between an individual’s subjective impressions of an organizations financial (or other) sustainability is that benchmarking ensures that individuals have the ability to work on an objective, accurate set of real figures rather than a subjective set of impressions built on years of experience but which perhaps don’t take into account how the sector or market or funders have changed.

2 – Showing the benchmark as a percentage of income makes it more meaningful. This is something we established many years ago because we needed a way of making meaningful comparisons between small and large turnover organizations. It is not meaningful to show the absolute amount spent by a small and a large organization on say their rent & rates but it is meaningful to show the percentage of income spent on rent. The agreement of common denominators like this is key. In the deployment of the RFO Benchmark in England we’ve adopted common denominators in the way we look at the audience and staff data. In the case of the staff data we’re showing this as the number of staff of different types per million of turnover.This again allows for comparisons between large and small organizations.

3– To get the most meaningful comparisons we need agreement on definitions. On one level this is why the Culture Benchmark started out by focusing on the contents of a Profit  & Loss sheet before considering audiences, and other metrics. We are confident that the definitions within a P&L are robust enough for a benchmark at this level to be meaningful and useful. However, particularly when working with clusters of users who are very similar in their business models there is value in defining individual parts of this in more detail. For example when considering fundraising (one of the lines in the overheads section of the Cultuyre Benchmark) we don’t define whether we mean the people cost and/or the cash cost. We’ve assumed that the people cost will be covered in the salaries section but we can’t guarantee that this is the definition being used in all cases. We’ll be looking at what impact this has in the second of the Glasgow workshops when we are working directly with the participants data. Typically the way we sort this in all our benchmarking systems is that we devise a form with the greatest level of detail required i.e. so the definitions are built into the way we collect data and so that we can then devise the calculations that give us the higher level overview in the benchmark as required.

The second of the workshops in Glasgow is on the 10th August and then we’ll be moving on to Edinburgh to work with folks there on the 24th and 31st. All these workshops are now fully booked but if you want to put your name on the waiting list please speak to Nina Honeyman at Culture Sparks

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Money For Creative People – is LIVE

Hurrah, we’ve made it to the launch. Here’s the link to the product.

In our view selling yourself short is as bad as selling out.

Money for Creative People is an in-depth guide to financial management for your creative business, covering everything from cultivating a balanced mindset about money and creativity, through to assembling a team of experts to help you, the nitty-gritty of doing your accounts, and making the big strategic decisions that can grow your profitability and make your business rewarding in every sense.

It’s designed for the very particular needs of creative business owners:

Creative freelancers of all kinds
Independent artists
Creative entrepreneurs
Owners of small-to-medium-sized creative businesses

(If you’re an employee, this isn’t the course for you. There are some excellent guides to personal finance out there, but this isn’t one of those — it’s a guide to business finance for creatives.)

We start with the bit most books on business finance leave out — your mindset. We’ve already seen why this is particularly important for a creative business, so we’ll teach you to adopt the attitude that distinguishes people who succeed financially as well as creatively.

We’ll then walk you through the process of setting your financial house in order, starting by assembling a team of expert advisers and choosing a structure for your business. Next come the basics of recording your accounts, budgeting for the year ahead and making cashflow forecasts.

After that comes the really interesting stuff — where you analyse your financial figures and make informed decisions that will make your business more profitable and sustainable. We’ll also show you how to make meaningful comparisons between your business performance and others in your sector (Sarah has collected some eye-opening data via MyCake to help you do this!)

So, if you’d like to take advantage of our launch offer ($97 instead of £147) sign up here.

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Money for Creative People – coming very soon!

Very shortly Mark McGuinness and I will launch Money for Creative People. – a new course designed specifically for creative entrepreneurs of all flavours from individual artists to those who run a larger company with a clutch of employees to those who are employees of larger companies!

Money for Creative People is designed to teach you the mindset and the money skills that will help you succeed commercially as well as creatively.

If you want to take advantage of the time-limited launch offer and to claim your copy of our free audio seminar 5 Essential Money Skills for Creative People join the advance notice list here.

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Do you want to change your mindset about money?

One of the things that creatives fear is the idea of ‘selling out’ … we equate it with a reduction in the quality of our work that we think will be noticable to us, our clients and our peers. There is a truth in this.

The question is what does it take to change the emotions we attach to money and shift it from being a threat to our future to being an enabler. In his aptly named ebook ‘Freedom, Money, Time and the Key to Creative Success‘ Mark McGuiness looks at the tools creatives need to create the space for success. Here at MyCake we’re focussed on helping creative sort out the second of these three. Mostly we focus on the practical challenges associated with keeping the money matters in your business in some sort of order. We focus on three key processes to help creatives shift from:

- messy to monitored – that’s the paperwork about your income and expenses, no more shoeboxes of receipts and three cheers for monthly data entry

- ignored to analysed – that’s the information that such monitoring of your money generates … it’s a veritable gold mine that can be used to help you make decisions about the future of your business, a seance with a shoebox is useless but an analysis of your Profit & Loss is a great thing, particularly if you can get your accountant or other advisor to sit down with you and work through it

- isolated to compared – that’s the shift from saying that your business is not like anyone else’s to a perspective that says sure there are unique things about the way you do things, the products & services you offer but there are also similarities with the sector you are part of and understanding how this translates into your business model helps you become the best in your field both creatively and financially

These are all logical considerations but there’s more to it than logic. There’s the emotional barriers to thinking about let alone discussing money. So lets add the right brain element into the mix. Have a look at Mark’s post today entitled ‘7 Reasons Creative People Dont’ Talk about Money‘ and let us know what you think (on his blog or here).

The 7 reasons Mark cites are as follows:

- We think it’s not important

- We don’t know how to get it

- We don’t know what we’re worth

- We don’t want to sell out

- We don’t want to look greedy

- We don’t know how to manage it

- We wouldn’t know how to spend it

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£500k Digital Research and Development Fund for Arts and Culture

A great opportunity for digital developers to work in the arts has arisen through a R&D fund partnership between Arts Council England, AHRC and NESTA.  Up to £100k per project is available for support to arts and cultural organisations across England who want to work with digital technologies to expand their audience reach and engagement, and/or explore new business models.

A key element of the fund is partnerships between arts and cultural organisations and technology providers (any creative, media or technology company including other arts and cultural organisations with relevant technology know-how) that can provide technology services to arts and cultural organisations.  The deadline for applications is noon on 2nd September 2011.

Fund Themes

User Generated Content and social media

Harnessing the power of the Internet and social media to reach audiences and to give them a platform for discussion, participation and creativity.

Distribution

Using digital technologies to deliver artistic and cultural experiences and content in new ways.

Mobile, location and games

Developing a new generation of mobile and location-based experiences and services, including games.

Data and archives

Making archives, collections and other data more widely available to other arts and cultural organisations and the general public.

Resources

Using digital technologies to improve the way in which arts and cultural organisations are run including business efficiency and income generation and the way in which they collaborate with each other.

Education & learning

Developing interactive education and learning resources for children, teachers, young people, adult learners and arts and cultural sector professionals

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MyCake at The Hospital Club

I’ve been talking finance to the Creatives in Residence of The Hospital Club. It reminded me just how useful it is for creatives to have the chance to ask the basic questions about how to run their finances and to do this as early in their careers as possible.

The talk ran through approaches to pricing your time and your work and the need to get a few jobs under your belt before reviewing whether the pricing approach is working. I also discussed how to work effectively with a book-keeper, accountant and bank manager so that you make the most of their broad and deep knowledge of finance and apply it to the challenges you face in your business. Unsurprisingly we took a look at how MyCake can make a creative’s life easier when it comes to day to day financial management and the benefit of keeping up to date vs. doing things once a year in January!

If you’re in London and looking for a club populated exclusively with other creatives and with a recording studio in the basement as well as a screening programme, why not take a look at joining The Hospital Club in Covent Garden.

If you’d like  MycCake to come and talk finance to your crowd of creatives do get in touch

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