Success
Success for your creative enterprise may include a range of factors in addition to financial reward, such as fulfilling creative ambitions, staying true to personal values, and gaining recognition for your work. Each enterprise will combine these and other ingredients differently to create their own particular definition of success.
The meaning of ‘success’ is for you to define. not me. There are no value judgements here about what exactly ‘success’ might mean. Bigger is not necessarily better; often small is beautiful. You must decide where you want your creative enterprise to be in the future. As they say: ’if you don’t know where you want to be, then you will never figure out which road to take’. So your road to success depends on your destination – where you want to be in the future.
Profit
Profit is not always the primary driver for creative enterprises – though even ‘not for profit’ organisations cannot survive if expenditure exceeds total income. As well as spanning 13 sub-sectors, the creative industries sector includes different economics models: commercial businesses seeking profit, ‘not for profit’ or charitable organisations and social enterprises. That’s why I refer to ‘the desired financial result’ rather than necessarily ‘making profits’. Many arts organisations are constituted as charities and their income includes grants and subsidies. Social enterprises define success with the ‘triple bottom line’ approach, measuring success on three counts: financial, social and environmental. Some creative entrepreneurs are also ‘social entrepreneurs’.
Lifestyle
‘Lifestyle businesses’ succeed by delivering both a healthy income and a rich quality of life for their owners, in which the creative person is centrally involved. For others, success means building a profitable business that eventually doesn’t need them, so they can sell it and move on.
What to do next
To help you to be specific about what you mean by success, answer the following questions:
What’s your creative passion?
What kind of lifestyle do you want?
What kind of business do you want?
How big will it be?
How many people will be involved?
Will you always have to be centrally involved or could you devise a business which makes money without your constant involvement?
How much do you want to earn?
What are your core values you want to remain true to?
What kind of professional respect and recognition do you seek?
To what extent to you want to have a social, political or environmental impact on the work.
How important is autonomy to you – to ‘be your own boss’, free from the influence of managers, investors, funders, partners, employees, etc?
What is your preferred personal style of working – your own personal ‘corporate culture’?