… going where no Creative Industries workshop has gone before! Yes, it’s the first time workshops of this kind have been delivered by the British Council so we are indeed in virgin territory.

Dammam is a city where nobody walks, this is partly the temperature …. we’re only in May and it’s already 40 degrees in the shade … but it’s also partly cultural as the main social activities take place within the home not in public places. This has a knock on effect upon where the creative crowd can be found and how they communicate with each other.

It is pretty challenging to find the creatives if you’re not a local so here’s a few tips for places to start ….

• Desert Designs … in addition to the work sold in their shop these guys run stand up comedy nights on their upper floor and at the moment they have an exhibition of local artists and designers called Loud
• Albaylasan Art runs painting workshops and art exhibitions. The former happen in their studio in Khobar, the latter are periodic and are in hotels
• In addition to her work as a founder of Albaylasan Sameera runs a mentoring programme for artists
• You’ll find a few galleries in places like the Rashid Mall
• If you have friends on the Saudi Aramco compound then you’ll find all manner of creative businesses such as the abaya designer Shaista Qurashi
• There are a couple of magazines to look out for – Oasis and WTD
• In the souk you’ll find shops selling traditional crafts which range from cedarwood furniture to jewellery and textiles
• In the malls you’ll find abaya shops some of which stock locally designed and made pieces
• Hussa is working on a new fashion magazine to complement the work she does as a stylist, it’s online at the moment

Plus of course once you start meeting people you’ll find yourself being introduced to the rest of the folks who make up this seam of creativity in the Eastern Provinces … it’s all about getting inside the walls and meeting the people!

The workshops we’ve been delivering here are the first of their kind in Saudi Arabia and are being provided courtesy of the British Council and their partners. We’ve focussed on marketing and finance though in our usual style of highly participatory activity based learning.

As these workshops are the first of their kind their role in establishing a network between creatives of all flavours has been every bit as important as the knowledge transfer of the content! So we’ve connected jewellers to artists, cake makers to solar technology folks as well as training the participants in the basics of a marketing process and an approach to both pricing and budget and cashflow preparation.  In some  cases we’re working with lifestyle businesses but in others there will certainly be a need for access to investment. There is also a clear need for a programme of ongoing work to support these creatives in their business development, help them grow beyond their local market and start to service clients across KSA and the wider Gulf region.

The Start up to Success workshops that MyCake have run for the British Council have certainly demonstrated the demand and that there is little provision currently .. the workshop doctor prescribes … more workshops, a mentoring programme and connections to local support systems!

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Sometimes at an early stage of discussing a commission the client wants a ball park idea of the price of the work. This can be quite a tricky thing to do when you don’t necessarily know what materials you’ll be working with or how complex the final work will be.

There are two things people tend to worry about:

- quoting too high a price and risking putting the client off

- quoting too low a price and having it not cover the time and materials and end up making a loss

The simplest solution is quote a range of possibilities, ideally with pictures so that the client has a clear idea of both ends of the scale. The challenge for the client is to understand what their money will buy so that they can manage their own expectations of the commission.

If they don’t know how to connect either the complexity of their request or the refinement of ideas into something simple but powerful then they can’t be expected to know how these elements of time and ideas affect the price. It’s also worth bearing in mind that what might seem like a simple idea to them may be difficult or time consuming to realise so again helping them with their expectations is useful to both of you.

Once you both have an idea of the ball park for the cost of the commission then you can look at how much value you try to squeeze in to the project!

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Brighton Palermo Remix by David Batchelor at The Regency Town House (photo: Bernard G Mills)

As arts festivals and events go the range and sheer volume of activity going on in the vicinity of Brighton & Hove in May is incredible. Lauren, our MyCake marketing and comms manager has been immersed in the pre-festival and present festival atmosphere for over 6 weeks now and is just coming up for air. Lauren is working on aspects of HOUSE, a contemporary visual arts event showcasing new work by internationally renowned artists alongside regional artists’ work that responds to themes of art and domestic space.

HOUSE is visual arts partner for the Brighton Festival for the first time and in a major new co-commission they bring David Batchelor’s work Brighton Palermo Remix to Hove’s grade I listed building, The Regency Town House.

Tonight at 6:30pm in Brighton’s Old Courthouse building Batchelor will talk about his latest work commissioned by HOUSE and Brighton Festival as well as his other works on display this May in Brighton, including Skip and an exhibitions of Related Works in The Regency Town House Basement. Places are free for tonight’s talk, but limited and can be booked through eventbrite.

There are so many other exhibitions and events happening, you can find information on all the other HOUSE exhibiting artists on the website, it’s well worth a trip to the seaside before the end of May, just time it right so that there is some sunshine about!

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Kinneret, Ruth and Kiki at Anti Curate, mac arts centre birmingham.

Birmingham based craft development organisation Craftspace do some amazing things below is some information about one of their latest ventures.

Craftspace and Shelanu join the exciting world of crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a new way for people to pool small amounts of money to back a good idea or project.  Shelanu is a group of refugee and migrant women working to develop their own creative social enterprise supported by Craftspace.   Craftspace invite you to look at Shelanu’s entry into the world of crowdfunding here: http://www.angelshares.com/projects/19/shelanu-collective.

Donations would help the members of this fantastic group buy a kiln and jewellery benches which will help them reach their goal. Angel Shares is a pilot initiative and any feedback on your experience of accessing and using the site would be much appreciated.

We are keen to raise awareness of this exciting venture as widely as possible, and with only 6 days to run to reach our target,  if you are able to send this information out to your networks that would be most helpful!
If you would like to see more about Shelanu visit their website www.shelanucollective.co.uk

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What Sarah knows about making money in the creative sector is highly valuable information. Even those who can afford her consulting services can’t have her in their office all day every day.

No wonder clients sometimes say to her, “I’d be a lot better off if I could just download your brain!“.

You’ll be pleased to know that as this service has not yet been invented, Sarah has teamed up with creative business coach Mark McGuinness to put together the next best thing – a plain-English guide to taking control of your creative business finances. That you can download, digest and refer to whenever you need it.

In a special promotion for you, both the Money for Creative People course AND the ebook version – the Creative Money Manual – are available at a substantial discount from the everyday price.

So why not stop stressing about money and start using it to achieve your creative ambitions.

This discounted offer means if you want to learn how to sort the finances of your creative business – simply and calmly, once and for all – it’s now very affordable for you to do so.

Here is the short version of what the Pack and Manual are about (you can get the full details via the link at the end of this newsletter).

The Money for Creative People Pack is a multimedia course that walks you step-by-step through sorting out your finances and pricing, and comes with audios, non-scary spreadsheets and practical worksheets.

It’s perfect for you if you want to get the most in-depth guidance possible in your journey to stress-free money management and would love a little more hand-holding.

The Creative Money Manual is for those of you who prefer reading to listening and writing. It’s the core curriculum of all the lessons, worksheets and spreadsheets you get in the full version of the course.

It’s perfect for you if you want all the essential information in the simplest format, but still want the benefit of the ideas in the full course.

(Note: The manual is included in the pack.)

That’s the short version – you can click the link below to see all the details, as well as the fun illustrations in store for you as you read through the Creative Money Manual.

Click here for details of the sale.

The sale goes on for the next few days, and we do hope you’ll give it a look.

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The fabulous MyCake ladies met amongst the bustling cafes of Lambs Conduit Street last week to talk about current MyCake projects and planning for growth over the next 7 months.

We are all well versed in running small businesses: Sarah with MyCake, Marion with design management consultancy and Lauren with arts project management. It was a meeting of getting our heads together to see what more we can offer to our community of MyCake’rs and how we can get everyone more involved in the future. And of course there was the opportunity to devour some delicious cakes accompanying our coffees.

Above all we concluded that our mission is to educate creative professionals and the creative sector about the immense value of benchmarking their financial data from business activities against the data of others working in the industry, including arts organisations large and small.

We do this by offering an online safe and secure book keeping platform that creatives can trust, powered by Kashflow, and provide professionals with a way to link up their financial data with our benchmarking platform, powered by Primenumbers. Data is incredibly important to us as is what we then do with it so that forecasting and financial planning is made loads easier for everyone. Getting things all figured out is the motto we live by.

We care deeply about our customers  and clients and we were recently named a Constant Contact All Star for our marketing activities in 2011 – we want to keep up the good work throughout 2012.

Thanks to all our customers and clients who are with us for the ride.

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Money makes the world go round but not in every case it seems, especially in the creative industries. During these tough times new ideas for currencies are popping up such as virtual global ones and systems of free exchange.

Art Barter was launched by London-based curators Lauren Jones and Alix Janta in November 2009. Art Barter is a system of exchange that encourages the trade of art for goods and services with no money changing hands. Not an entirely new concept as this is a familiar bargaining method for many famous artists of the past, it is revived for this new era of austerity. The artworks are bartered for at Art Barter shows happening around the world, the shows attract the more unconventional of buyers. The premise is: “What is a piece of art worth? A year of psychotherapy or piano lessons?” We imagine Art Barter shows must turn pretty bizarre in some trade offs.

I first came across the virtual global currency, VEN when reading about what goes on in the co-working communities of shared office spaces, for instance at part of the Hub Culture Network in London. VEN, also emerging in 2009 as a currency online, can be used to buy, share and trade knowledge, goods and services within the Hub Culture network. It is tipped as the only currency to be linked to the environment due to the introduction of carbon to the calculation price.

For years gamers and internet veterans have known about and no doubt traded Bitcoins amongst their peers online, free exchange is going on around us all the time. It would be interesting to see more examples of this trading system coming out of the creative sector.

Are these trends set to mark the end of money as we know it?…

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Starting up in the creative sector is a field we know a lot about here at MyCake. Sarah regularly delivers a range of workshops across the UK and internationally for a diverse group of creative entrepreneurs about developing their business idea, marketing their business, their relationships with money and generating revenue.

Last year Sarah, along with fellow trainer Percy Emmett, delivered the British Council and NESTA partner programme Start up to Success: A Creative Entrepreneurs Plan in Beirut. This year Sarah will be heading out to Saudi Arabia with the British Council during May to work with entrepreneurs based there. Look out for some arabian inspired blogposts from this trip.

Attendees at the Startup to Success programme in Beirut took part in a video about their experiences on the course.

If you’re working in Fashion you can catch Sarah at the Fashion for Profit workshop on 19th April being delivered in association with Fashion Angel at Cockpit Arts in Holborn, London. Tickets will be on sale until Tuesday 17th April so get in their quick. Book through the eventbrite page

We’re looking forward to the Live Chat on the Guardian Culture Professionals Network site today at 12 noon on thinking like a creative start up – we know our community of start ups will have a load of things to say on this matter.

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….or is it a better idea to grow sales through other retailers?

Let’s set the scene, you’ve been growing your creative product-based business for a few years. You’ve sorted out the production processes in your studio or atelier and there’s been a steady demand for your work from retailers both in your home country and abroad. However you’re studio isn’t really working at capacity which means that your staff costs are a high percentage of your company’s expenditure and you’re not really reaping enough benefit from this.

If you’re in fashion the equivalent is that you have minimum production volumes with factories that are exceeding your sales levels so you have stock left over. Either way there’s too much supply and not enough demand as things stand at the moment.

You see a couple of options for your growth, both are demanding so you really need to focus on one not do both badly.

Option 1 – grow sales by extending your network of retailers

Option 2 – set up your own retail and sell direct to the customer

What to do? Unsurprisingly there’s no clear cut answer to this question, either could work, it rather depends on the skills and resources available to you and the dynamics of the market. However there are pros and cons to each approach and factors that will affect the success of each that we can look at so that you can work out what’s right for your business.

Option 1 – Growing sales by extending your network of retailers

This strategy requires you to take your brand out into the B2B market, find and pitch your offer to the retailers. You’ll need to spend time researching the retailers to look for the ones whose customer base is the best fit to the products you’re offering. This in turn means that you need to understand the end customer to a reasonable degree so that you can chat knowledgeably to the retailers about market segments, buying behaviour etc. You need to come to understand how buyers work, when they buy, and what criteria they base their buying decisions on. With small retailers the buyer will often be the owner, will spend quite a lot of time on the shop floor and will know their customers by name along with their buying habits. With larger retailers the buying team will be armed with detailed information on the sales successes and failures of different lines and more detailed demographic research about their customers.

It is worth spending time getting to know the buyers individually and if you can then also spend time in their shops and come to know the layout of the store and the mix of products they stock. This also means you’ll become more familiar with how your product works when surrounded by other stock.

How do you win these retailers as clients? Well clearly you can approach them individually but frankly you’ll do better to find a way to meet lots of them in a short space of time. This is of course the reason that trade fairs and fashion weeks are important to the sector as they offer buyers and sellers alike the chance to do a lot of business all in one place. Your challenge is knowing which trade fairs are right for your brand. One way to answer this is to visit any trade fair you’re thinking of taking a stand at at least once before you take space with them. Once you reach the stage of attending several trade fairs a year you should be considering taking on a specialist sales person to manage these relationships with your B2B clients. A proactive sales person will not only do the front of house and deal closing work on a stand but they’ll also spend time suggesting ways for clients to try out your new products, re-order sooner and you will move from being a company that reacts to orders coming through the door to one that goes and seeks new business on a daily basis. The perspective on the range that a sales person brings will also be invaluable as their focus will be satisfying clients rather than the creative pleasure of the design. A great counter balance!

So, what does this route require you to invest beyond your own commitment?

-       research into national and international trade fairs

-       designing and taking a stand several times a year

-       the salary for one or more specialist sales staff

The advantage however is that if you are not quite sure what the demographic is for your products nor how to market to them then working with other retailers is a great way to better understand your customer base.

Option 2 – Setting up your own retail unit and selling direct to the customer

So the challenge here is that you’re putting a lot of eggs in one basket and making quite a long term commitment. You can test things out in the short term of course with pop-up shops which last only a few weeks or a couple of months. This is a great way to get a customer base used to the idea of your own retail concept rather than finding you only online or in other retailers stores. Plus of course you start to get your head around staffing a retail space, epos systems, stock management, store management and store layout.

Let’s look at the long term retail concept in a bit more detail and unpack some of the costs and risks to see if you are ready to take them … after all we can all imagine a rose-tinted upside where there is a queue around the block!

The first challenge is finding a space you can afford. Do you go for somewhere that is already in a key shopping area or do you go for something that will require you to become a destination that people travel to. In reality few young designers can afford prime retail space for their first store. To get around this challenge of high costs per square foot you will find that some will have a combined office/production and retail space such as the work/retail units in the OXO tower or they will head a bit out of the centre either to areas where creatives are already congregating or to a surburban high street. This is a more viable option now that online retail has grown so much. Look at the success of Beyond the Valley, they have one fairly small retail space one street east of Carnaby Street and a flourishing online store. The combination of these two has helped them weather the recession.

It’s worth looking out for areas where other creatives have been congregating because it is often an indicator of cheaper and shorter term rents. The Mar Michael and Port areas in Beirut host a wide variety of independent retailers for exactly this reason … much more fun than the brand names of the Beirut Souks.

So, you’ve found a space, the next trick is negotiating a lease that suits .. the key thing here is a ‘break clause’ … this is your get out of jail free card that allows you to get out of a lease before it has expired … the longer the lease the more important the break-clause becomes.

With these technicalities out of the way you move on to thinking about not just store layout and staff but crucially the mix of stock. How do you work out what mixture of price points? What the likely sales mix between high and low ticket items will be at different times of year? If you can bring in a shop manager at this point i.e. well before you open then so much the better as they can work with you bringing their experience to the cash flow forecasts that you will need to plan your first three years and convince banks and investors that you know what you’re doing. If you’re looking at a blank sheet of paper with no retail expert to help then start by reviewing the patterns in your wholesale orders and use this as the basis for building your sales forecast.

Having built your sales forecast you need to return to the cost base to look at staffing, utilities and all the other costs of running the space. You will find that one of the greatest challenges is that you’ll see yourself spending significant sums before you open and in general there will be quite a delay between spending funds and seeing income. You will probably need a good relationship with your bank! Look at whether you can get an overdraft and plan for the lowest point in your funds/debt.

By now you may be thinking ‘is it worth it?’. Well the up-side is that you will come to know your customer base in much much more detail than by selling wholesale and of course you’re seeing the full retail value not just the wholesale price. So it can definitely be worth it but it’s a question of whether your business is ready for it. If you’re struggling to predict the mix of price points and items that go to make up either a single sale or a monthly turnover then you may not be ready yet and you might be better off pursuing the wholesale route for a few more seasons. If you can put the forecast of income and costs together then the responses of a bank or investor are another acid test. If they don’t think your plans are feasible they’ll tell you.

If you can talk to other creatives who’ve opened their own retail you should definitely do this so you can learn from their successes, failures and take on board their top tips for controlling costs at the early stages.

Some years ago Wendy Malem who at the time ran the Centre for Fashion Enterprise said that you could take a business to a million pounds in sales without your own retail unit but the big challenge is going from one to ten million. Brands such as Chloe and McQueen have benefited from substantial investment from specialist investors such as the LVMH  group who understand the risks of going global. Several such brands have lost money for several years until the retail sales grew into a profit making business.

At the end of the day both routes require considerable commitment and involve the ability to balance risk against return. Your challenge therefore is to develop a strategy appropriate to your business and not just follow the crowd!

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Here at MyCake Towers we’ve taken half an hour in the sunshine to think about the A&B 2011 figures on private investment in culture and compare it against our own 2010 and 2011 data so that we can see how non-profit arts business models are changing.

Before we get into that however lets just remind ourselves of how A&B and MyCake calculate our figures so that we can see how to make meaningful comparisons. A&B collect data on approximately 1000 organisations and have been doing so for near on 30 years. They then scale up this representative sample to give a national picture and a national total for their focus area of private investment in culture. MyCake attacks the data challenge slightly differently in that we look not at straight £ of income or cost (though of course we do collect this data) but we show things as a percentage of income. This allows us to compare small and large organisations in a way that we simply could not if we just compared £ income or spend raw. Because A&B and MyCake do things a bit differently we need to make sure we don’t get confused when talking about a 2% change vs. last year that is to say 2% of what … a national figure or a percentage of income … we’ll do our best to be clear as we go through this below!

The Arts & Business figures reveal that in 2010-11 private investment in culture increased by 4% on the previous year. This includes a 10% increase in trusts & foundations funding,  a 6% increase in individual philanthropy and a 7% decrease in business investment.

The Culture Benchmark data shows the following changes on a per organisation basis (as opposed to sector total):

• An increase in the percentage of income derived from trusts and foundations from 8.3% of total income in 2009-10 to 10.8% in 2010-11
• A decrease in corporate sponsorship from 3.8% of total income in 2009-10 to 1.0% in 2010-11
• A decrease in the percentage of total income derived from private donations from 3.2% to 2.3%
• An increase in other sponsorship & donations from 5.9% to 7.3% of total income

The Charity Benchmark data does not go into as much detail as the Culture Benchmark as the data held by the Charity Commission is only in headline format. Nonetheless we can see some differences in this comparison against a complete 2010 data set and an early set of 2011 results. The following is all expressed as a percentage of total income:

• income achieved from ‘voluntary income’ sources has dropped from 38.9% to 33.4%
• income acheived from legacies would seem to have dropped from 17.3% in 2010 however the data on 2011 is too small a data set to be certain just yet
• income achieved from ‘activities generating funds’ has dropped from 24.5% to 20.6%
• income achieved from ‘charitable activities’ has risen from 48.2% to
• income achieved from investments has dropped from 5.0% to 2.3%
• income acheived from ‘other’ sources has risen marginally from 10.1% to 11.5%

As we operate a live benchmark that receives new data on a weekly and monthly basis information for the latest year tends to continue to change for up to 15 months after a year end given the variations in year end dates in audited accounts. So for example the Charity Benchmark data set for 2010 contains data on some 513 organisations but as many have not submitted their data for 2011 yet this data set is currently only on 30 organisations. As the Charity Commission site updates so our data set will increase!

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