One of the biggest challenges for creative businesses, especially fast-growing enterprises, is the management of cash flow. When businesses fail, it’s frequently because of a cash flow crisis rather than lack of profitability. The gap between cash outflows and cash inflows becomes too big and they run out of cash. An unprofitable business will inevitably …
Tag: business
Selling cheese: an error of marketing strategy
An incident in the the BBC TV programme ‘The Apprentice’ provided an excellent example of a marketing error. It also demonstrated how the term ‘marketing’ is often misunderstood and used simply to mean ‘advertising’ or ‘selling’. In fact the marketing process goes much deeper than selling. In one episode, Sir Alan Sugar sent his teams …
Artistic Passion – combined with Business Focus
Rob Kinsey is an artist with a passion for the sport of motocross, defining himself on his website as ‘motocross racer, fan and award-winning artist’. Art and sport have been important to Rob for many years. He qualified as a technical illustrator in the 1970’s and his artwork has developed in parallel with his participation …
Your world-class ‘Hedgehog Strategy’
Many creative enterprises offer a range of goods or services and regard this as a way of maximising their options and income-generating potential. I understand what they are trying to do. They say it’s a case of ‘keeping your options open’ and ‘casting the net widely’ in order to increase the chances of winning new …
Online Social Networking – for Business
How can creative entrepreneurs benefit from using social networking systems such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Second Life – and others? Leanda Ryan is the director of Leanda Ryan Graphic Design, in Manchester, UK. Her story is an interesting one: “Flickr was the first service I signed up for 2005. I posted a …
Your Creative Business Plan
Let’s make a distinction between planning for a successful creative business and ‘writing a business plan’. The two are not necessarily the same. In my own experience, many people write business plans purely because they are a requirement of investors or funders. These business plans tend to be written without conviction and are then quickly …
Innovating for the ‘Base of the Pyramid’
TÉLO is the first public telephone especially designed for public transport vehicles. Using a card for payment, millions of people using public transport are already using the phone on buses, trains and underground transport networks. Founded in August 2004, by Paulo Lerner and André Averbug, Brazilian company PV Inova (Public Vehicular Innovations) invented the system …
Ideas don’t make you rich
“Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.” So says Felix Dennis, poet, owner of Dennis Publishing, and one of the wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs in Britain. I met him several years ago when he gave generously to support a project I helped with at the National Library for the Blind, though he …
Let’s license works like George Lucas
We can devise business models in the creative industries by learning how to license works of creativity profitably, following the example of George Lucas – and a self-employed commercial illustrator in a small city in Brazil. In this way a business can be devised to transform the owner from a creative labourer to a true …