Tag: startup

Get out more!

At the launch party for Creative Times Online, which was full of ‘creative industries’ people clustering together, I met a civil engineer. Civil/structural engineers don’t normally attend these gatherings of ‘creatives’ (fashion designers, musicians, writers, film-makers, advertisers, artists, website designers, broadcasters and publishers, graphic designers, performers, computer games programmers, designer-makers, etc.) So I was intrigued. …

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Rolls and Royce: a shared vision

Successful creative businesses need a combination of creativity and business strategy – what I call ‘T-Shirts’ and ‘Suits’. Sometimes, one individual has both of these elements in good measure, but more often than not, the harmony of creativity and business is formed by two people, or a larger team. Frederick Henry Royce met Charles Stewart …

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Good Enough…

Thanks to Phil Birchenall for sending me this article about the Flip Video camcorder. It’s about a simple and inexpensive camcorder that’s “good enough” rather than being “the best”. It has just the right range of features to be usable and useful, at a reasonable price. It’s opened up a new market of ‘ordinary’ users, …

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Don’t Co-operate

In contrast to the business strategies of collaboraton or Co-opetition, there is another strategy to consider: ‘Don’t Co-operate’. This is one of the characteristics of the success of Apple Inc., according to Wired Magazine in an article called ‘How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong’. The article shows how Apple breaks several of …

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Freemium: Give it away free!

Creative entrepreneurs often ask me how they can make money from their music or computer games when MP3 files and software is so easy to copy. One answer is to use the fact that people copy your stuff to change a threat into an opportunity. Banda Calypso’s music is copied onto CDs and sold on …

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Let your heart drive you…

A creative passion is often the driving force for creative entrepreneurs. My advice is always to recognise this, in order to understand our own motivations in business. In other words, what ‘makes us tick’. I was asked recently by Putte Svensson from Rockparty in Hultsfred, Sweden, what would be my advice if someone said they …

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1,000 True Fans

Instead of dreaming about having millions of fans, nurture one thousand ‘true fans’. That’s the advice for creative individuals from guru Kevin Kelly. He writes: “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 …

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Selling stories (“We don’t sell beer…”)

The Duvel Cafe in Stockholm is a bar which sells a range of Belgian beers. They are tasty, strong and expensive (compared to England). I was fascinated by the beer glasses as much as the beer itself, so I took a couple of photos. Part of what I was buying and enjoying was the packaging …

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Managing Cash Flow and Fixed Costs

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 …

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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 …

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