You can use a Balanced Scorecard to define and measure success in your business. The ‘Balanced Scorecard’ provides a methodology for translating an organisation’s mission statement and overall business strategy into specific, quantifiable goals and to monitor the organisation’s performance in terms of achieving those goals. Too often, easily measured financial data is used too […]
Archive | Finance and Accounts
How to Calculate Prices in the Creative Industries
Creative entrepreneurs often need help to calculate prices for their products and services. This is especially the case for early stage businesses and for self-employed sole traders. In arts, crafts, photography, graphic design, illustration and many other creative endeavours, pricing is a crucial matter. Here’s an example I use in one of my creative business […]
The Overheads of your Creative Business
Understanding the full overheads of your business is essential for any creative entrepreneur. This article is written particularly with sole traders and self-employed individuals in mind, though its advice applies to any size of business, in any sector. It is especially relevant to designer-makers, artists, photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, writers, musicians and other artistic individuals. […]
Superfans can boost your creative business
Nicholas Lovell calls them “Superfans”. Kevin Kelly has written about “True Fans”. These are the people who love what you do so much that they will buy everything you produce. Too often, creative businesses are obsessed with getting more customers instead of selling more to their best customers. Marketing is too often focused on winning […]
Reassuringly Expensive
Reassuringly Expensive can be an effective pricing policy, resulting from looking at pricing and value from the customers’ point of view. Pricing policy has both an immediate and long-term impact on a creative business and has an impact not only on the economics of the enterprise but also on the perception of its products and/or […]
Financial Management in the creative industries
Financial Management in the creative and cultural industries is all about getting the right financial result by managing your income and expenditure. Many creative entrepreneurs tell me that finance is not their forte; they are driven by a creative passion and find financial management boring or confusing – or both. Creative people are often not […]
Make money while you sleep!
As a creative entrepreneur, you can use intellectual property rights to protect your creativity and make money while you sleep. Creativity is all about ideas and creative enterprise is about making money from those ideas. The main assets of most creative businesses are intangible – ideas and know-how in the form of intellectual property (IP). […]
Financial support for your business
Naturally, most people are interested in any financial support for their business. As a creative business adviser, I have helped hundreds of creative entrepreneurs over the years. Often, their enterprises are receiving financial support – from themselves ! This is because they are not taking into account the cost of things such as: use of […]
The Cost of Time
In order to set the price of creative goods and services, you’ll need to know the costs involved. Obviously you cannot afford to sell things for less than they cost! It’s useful to know the break-even point, if only to set an absolute minimum price. As the price goes up from there, so does the […]
Investor Pitching for Startups – video
At the Serbia Startup event in Novi Sad, Dario Mazzella from Meta Group gave a presentation on investor pitching for startups. Dario said that this hungryhouse presentation to Dragons’ Den investors was a great example of investor pitching for startups and urged all startups to learn from it. Dario also said that a pitch should […]