These Creative Entrepreneurship Essentials form the basis of all my work helping creative entrepreneurs to be even more successful, in my work as a creative industries business adviser, trainer, speaker and author.
These entrepreneurship essentials also apply to my own business and the strategies I devise and follow to keep my business relevant, competitive and profitable.
– Success – what does it mean for you?
– Creativity and Business / ‘T-Shirts and Suits’
– Two kinds of Creativity: “a-Creativity” and “i-Creativity”.
– Your Unique Business Formula – the building blocks of your successful creative enterprise
– Designing Your Creative Business™ : a method to devise a ‘blueprint’ for your business that delivers the success you want
– Marketing. It’s about choosing the right markets that fit your work and your Business Formula (it’s not just a bunch of promotional activities)
– Business Growth, Scalability, the ‘Exit’ and the ‘Creative Lifestyle Business’
More details about each of these below…
My website ‘tree’ continues to grow, with new branches and leaves. But most importantly, I nurture the roots and strengthen the trunk.
These Creative Entrepreneurship Essentials are those foundations. They represent the essence of my thinking and provide a starting point for exploring my ideas, perspectives and techniques in more detail.
Success. What exactly do YOU want your success to look like?
What does success mean to you? Is it just about money? Or does it include following your creative passion, doing meaningful work you’re proud of, earning recognition for your expertise, achieving job satisfaction, collaborating with others, or enjoying a healthy work-life balance? Perhaps there are other ingredients too.
It’s different for everyone. There is no standard definition of success. Each of us needs to be clear about our own definition so that we can deliberately design our business to deliver the success we want.
When working with creative entrepreneurs, I ask this question because if they are not clear about where they want to go, I cannot help them get there.
Without a clear definition of success, we can simply get busy doing work and end up with what I call “the wrong kind of success” — for example, making plenty of money but becoming trapped in a business that leaves too little time for the other important things in life.
Explore further:
– Five Steps to Business Success as a Creative Entrepreneur
– How to be a Successful Creative Entrepreneur masterclass (video)
Creativity and Business. How we can get the best of both worlds: creative satisfaction and financial reward.
Creative work and business methods are not trade-offs. We don’t have to choose between being true to our values or making a good income. Nor do we have to ‘sell out’ to achieve commercial success.
It’s not even a matter of ‘balancing’ creativity and business, as if one counteracts the other. The two can complement and strengthen each other — if we deliberately design our businesses that way.
We can combine our creativity, values and ambitions with smart business techniques, choosing and adapting them to suit our own purposes rather than simply following conventional business practice.
I call this powerful combination of creativity and business “T-Shirts and Suits”.
“T-Shirts and Suits” — a metaphor for combining creative talent with smart business thinking.
“T-Shirts and Suits” is the name of my first book, T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity. It sets out the essence of my work — my manifesto and roadmap for creative people who want to be smart with business and achieve both creative and commercial success.
The book has been published in translations in 14 countries and is also available as a free eBook on my website. I want to share my expertise and experience abundantly with creative entrepreneurs worldwide, helping creative people generate income, establish successful enterprises and achieve success on their own terms.
“T-Shirts and Suits” has grown beyond the book to become a metaphor, a body of work and a brand. It is also the name of my company, T-Shirts and Suits Ltd, and is a registered trade mark.
Explore further:
– T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity
– About T-Shirts and Suits®
Two kinds of Creativity: “a-Creativity” and “i-Creativity”.
The word Creativity has become strongly associated with the arts — with painters, musicians, writers, actors, designers, photographers, architects, dancers, film-makers and other creative people.
But there is another kind of creativity found in all fields of human endeavour. It isn’t necessarily artistic; it’s about ingenuity, problem solving, thinking differently, breaking the rules and innovating. We find this kind of creativity in education, manufacturing, healthcare, banking, science and every other sector of the economy.
So I suggest distinguishing between two kinds of creativity: “a-Creativity” for Artistic creativity and “i-Creativity” for Ingenuity. I explored this distinction in my TEDx Napoli talk.
For creative entrepreneurs, the important point is that we can use both. Instead of switching off our creativity when we move from the studio to the office, we can keep it switched on and think creatively about how we do business.
We can use a-Creativity in the studio and i-Creativity in the office — applying ingenuity to our marketing, contracts, systems, organisational structures, intellectual property and methods of generating income.
Explore further:
– Two Kinds of Creativity — my TEDx Napoli talk and article
Your Unique Business Formula — the building blocks of your successful creative enterprise
A Business Formula is not a business plan. Business plans can be long and detailed, yet still be based on flawed assumptions. They might describe the financial model without identifying the underlying formula for success. A business plan might be necessary, but it is not sufficient.
First, we need to construct what I call a Business Formula. This brings together four essential building blocks:
1. Your definition of Success — what you actually want the enterprise to achieve.
2. Your creative talents and passion — the work that drives you and gives you creative satisfaction.
3. Your Competitive Advantage — what enables you to outmanoeuvre the competition.
4. Your chosen markets and customers — people who ‘get’ you, value what you do and are prepared to pay the right price.
The challenge is to combine these four elements into a formula that fits together realistically and works for you. This becomes the foundation on which we can build the business, devise strategies, do great work and generate income.
My article Create Your Own Unique Business Formula explores this in more detail and is available as a free download in several languages. The Business Formula is also an important part of Designing Your Creative Business™.
Explore further:
– Create Your Own Unique Business Formula
Designing Your Creative Business™ — a method to devise a ‘blueprint’ for your business that delivers the success you want
Designing Your Creative Business™ is a deliberate method for achieving the success you want by designing a business model that fits your creative, commercial and lifestyle goals.
The aim is to get the best of all worlds: fulfilling creative work, financial reward and a happy lifestyle — in whatever combination is right for you.
The DYCB™ Process provides a practical way to develop this ‘blueprint’ for your creative enterprise. It is set out in the Designing Your Creative Business™ Toolkit and is also used in my interactive training workshops.
Explore further:
– Designing Your Creative Business™
Marketing — choosing the right markets for your work and your Business Formula
The word ‘marketing’ is often used as a fancy word for selling, promotion and advertising. These activities are important — they are part of Marketing Communications — but they won’t help much if you’re focusing on the wrong customers, operating in markets where you cannot profitably compete, or working with a Business Formula that isn’t viable.
So before getting into a frenzy of promotional activities, we need to stop and think.
What do I really want to achieve? What can I do better than my rivals — my Competitive Advantage? With which customers can I be my authentic self? Which customers value what I do and are prepared to pay the right price?
These are the strategic questions we need to answer first.
Strategic Marketing is about choosing and aligning with the right markets — where what you do particularly well matches what particular customers value. Get that right and selling becomes easier, advertising becomes less necessary, and marketing doesn’t need to feel embarrassing or painful.
Strategic Marketing is therefore an essential part of a successful Business Formula.
My book Chase One Rabbit: Strategic Marketing for Business Success explores this approach in much more detail, with 63 tips, techniques and tales for creative entrepreneurs.
Explore further:
– Chase One Rabbit: Strategic Marketing for Business Success
Business Growth, Scalability, the ‘Exit’ and the ‘Creative Lifestyle Business’
There are many ways to grow a business, depending on what you want to achieve — and what’s realistic.
Some businesses grow by employing more people and occupying bigger premises. Others ‘scale up’, perhaps using digital products. Some increase sales, though not necessarily profits. Some become highly systematised, while others depend on interpersonal relationships and trust. Some are built to be sold eventually, allowing the owners to ‘exit’. And some deliberately remain small but become increasingly profitable.
There is no single correct model of business growth.
A Creative Lifestyle Business is deliberately designed to provide the owner with a satisfying lifestyle as well as profits — integrating ‘work’ and ‘life’ rather than deferring life until the weekend or retirement.
In the world of high-growth startups and venture capital, the term ‘lifestyle business’ is sometimes used dismissively for businesses that aren’t designed to scale rapidly and eventually be sold for millions. But some entrepreneurs choose a lifestyle business deliberately. They haven’t ‘failed to grow’; they’re pursuing a different definition of success.
Personally, I have deliberately designed my own business to be small, profitable and to give me the lifestyle I want. I reject the idea that bigger is always better. Small can be beautiful too.
The important thing is to understand the choices and decide deliberately what kind of business you want to build. That takes us back to where these Creative Entrepreneurship Essentials began: What does success mean to you?
Design your creative business — or redesign it when circumstances change — around your own definition of success, values, personal style and goals.
Explore further:
– How to Design a Creative Lifestyle Business
Bringing the ideas together
These Creative Entrepreneurship Essentials are interconnected. Your definition of success influences the kind of business you design. Your talents and Competitive Advantage help determine which customers and markets are right for you. Together, these choices shape your Business Formula and provide the foundation for your strategy.
For a structured approach to putting these ideas into practice, explore my Strategic Planning Framework for Creative Enterprises.
You can also explore more Business Frameworks, Techniques and Terms for Creative Entrepreneurs.