David Parrish designs and delivers practical business workshops for creative entrepreneurs, tailored to the needs of participants and the organisations that support them.
Rather than offering a fixed catalogue of standard courses, David draws on a substantial repertoire of proven workshop material, business tools, exercises, international examples and case studies.
These can be adapted and combined to create a workshop around the priorities of a particular group — whether the focus is business strategy, marketing, financial management, pricing, intellectual property, international business or another aspect of creative entrepreneurship.
Workshops are practical, interactive and designed to help participants apply business thinking to their own enterprises.
Find out more about David’s creative business training workshops.
The following are some of David’s principal workshop topics.
Designing Your Creative Business™
How do you build a successful creative business when different entrepreneurs have different ambitions, talents, values and definitions of success?
Designing Your Creative Business™ is David’s flagship business strategy workshop for creative entrepreneurs.
It helps participants step back from the day-to-day demands of their enterprises and think strategically about the kind of business they actually want to build.
Participants explore their own definition of success, their creative and commercial strengths, competitive advantage, changes and opportunities in the outside world, potential customers and the different strategic options available to them.
The objective is to bring these elements together into a distinctive business formula — and turn that thinking into practical priorities and actions.
The central principle is simple:
There is no single correct way to build a successful creative business.
The aim is to help each participant design a business strategy that works for them.
Find out more about the Designing Your Creative Business™ workshop and toolkit.
Strategic Marketing for Creative Businesses
Marketing strategy begins long before advertising, social media or other marketing communications.
David’s Strategic Marketing for Creative Businesses workshop helps participants make the fundamental strategic decisions about where their businesses should compete — and where they should not.
Participants explore their competitive advantage: what their business can do particularly well in relation to competitors and alternatives available to customers. They examine how to identify and understand the customers most likely to value those particular strengths, then focus their efforts on the markets where they can compete most effectively.
Topics can include competitive advantage, market segmentation, target customers, positioning, differentiation and customer value. Participants consider how to make deliberate choices about which opportunities and customers to pursue — and which to leave to competitors.
Only after those strategic decisions have been made does the workshop move on to marketing communications. David’s 3Ms of Marketing — Market, Message and Medium — provide a practical framework for communicating with chosen target customers: identifying the right market, developing appropriate messages and selecting the most effective media and methods for reaching them.
The workshop draws extensively on David’s book Chase One Rabbit: Strategic Marketing for Business Success, which uses 63 practical tips, techniques and stories to explore how businesses can become more successful by making better strategic marketing choices.
The title expresses one of the central ideas of both the book and the workshop: you cannot chase every rabbit. Successful strategy involves choosing where to focus your limited time, money and energy — and deliberately deciding what not to pursue.
Chase One Rabbit can also be incorporated directly into the training. For example, David has used the book as the course text for a strategic marketing workshop in Bilbao, with participants receiving copies to use during the workshop and afterwards.
Financial Management for Creatives
Creative entrepreneurs don’t need to become accountants. But they do need to understand the financial information that helps them make good business decisions.
David’s Financial Management for Creatives workshop provides a practical introduction to managing the finances of a creative business. It is about understanding and using the numbers — rather than raising investment, pitching to funders or finding sources of finance.
Participants can explore costs, income, profit, financial accounts, project costing, budgeting, overheads, break-even calculations and cash-flow forecasting.
They learn how to understand financial information and use it to answer practical business questions: Are projects genuinely profitable? Are prices covering all the costs of the business? How much does the business need to sell to break even? What might happen to cash in the months ahead?
The emphasis is on giving creative entrepreneurs enough financial understanding to manage their businesses more confidently and make better decisions, rather than teaching accounting for its own sake.
“I had much more fun than I thought possible at a finance workshop.”
— Alke Groppel-Wegener, Freelance Artist.
Creative Pricing
What is the right price for creative work?
David’s Creative Pricing workshop approaches that deceptively simple question from several directions.
Participants can explore the relationship between costs, prices and profit, including calculating the minimum price required to cover direct costs and overheads.
But pricing is not simply an accounting calculation.
Price also affects how customers perceive a product or service and its position in the market. Participants therefore examine pricing in relation to customer perceptions, competitors, positioning and the particular bundle of benefits being offered.
The workshop can also explore a third dimension especially relevant to creative businesses: what exactly is being sold?
In some circumstances, intellectual property can be licensed rather than sold outright, creating very different pricing possibilities and potentially new sources of income.
“The workshop was excellent. The exercises, anecdotes and group discussions allowed me to organise a pricing structure clearly. David Parrish was extremely insightful and thought-provoking.”
— Stephen Hurrell, Digital Ink Media.
Intellectual Property, Licensing and New Business Models
Creative businesses generate intellectual property — but they don’t always make the most of it.
David helps participants explore different ways of creating value from their creativity, including selling products and services, licensing intellectual property and developing business models that are less dependent on continually selling their own time.
One of David’s established workshops on this subject has the deliberately provocative title:
How to Make Money While You Sleep: The Art of Generating Cash from Creativity
It asks creative entrepreneurs to consider questions such as:
– Are you a creative labourer or a creative entrepreneur?
– Growth — but growth of what exactly?
– Should you sell the food — or the recipe?
– Can you rent your intellectual property rather than sell it?
The objective is not to suggest that every creative entrepreneur should build the same kind of scalable business.
It is to help participants recognise the different assets within their enterprises and explore business models appropriate to their own creativity, ambitions and circumstances.
Exporting and International Business
For many creative businesses, international markets can create opportunities to find new customers, develop partnerships, license intellectual property and expand beyond a relatively small domestic market.
David’s workshops on exporting and international business help creative entrepreneurs explore those opportunities realistically and strategically.
Topics can include identifying suitable international markets, deciding which products or services have international potential, researching customers and competitors, choosing appropriate routes to market, developing international partnerships and adapting business and marketing approaches to different countries.
But international business is not simply about export plans and market data. It is also about people.
Drawing on his experience of working with creative businesses and organisations internationally, David explores the human side of doing business across borders — including cultural differences, expectations, communication, relationships, business etiquette and the importance of curiosity rather than assumptions.
The objective is not to persuade every creative business that it should export. It is to help participants decide whether international opportunities make sense for their particular business, which opportunities are worth pursuing, and how to approach them effectively.
Other Workshop Topics
David can also design workshops, seminars and shorter sessions around other aspects of creative entrepreneurship and business development.
These can include business growth strategies, creativity and innovation, business models, competitive advantage, leadership and managing creative teams, entrepreneurship and starting a creative business.
Some of these subjects are also incorporated into David’s principal workshops. Business growth, for example, is an important part of Designing Your Creative Business™, where participants consider different ways their enterprises could develop — including the possibility that becoming bigger isn’t necessarily the right objective.
Specialist topics can be incorporated into broader workshops or combined to create a workshop appropriate to a particular group.
Tailored Workshops — Not Off-the-Shelf Courses
The topics above are starting points, not rigid packages.
A commissioning organisation might want a full-day workshop devoted entirely to pricing or strategic marketing.
Another group might benefit from a workshop combining business strategy, competitive advantage, marketing and financial management.
A two-day workshop creates opportunities to explore subjects in greater depth, introduce more exercises and group work, and give participants more time to apply the techniques to their own businesses.
David therefore works with the commissioning organisation before the workshop to understand the participants, local context and intended outcomes.
He then draws on his established material and international experience to create the most useful combination.
The question isn’t simply: “Which workshop would you like?”
It is: “What would be most useful for your creative entrepreneurs?”
Not sure which kind of training would be most useful?
Read How to Choose Business Training for Creative Entrepreneurs.
Workshops Can Be Part of a Wider Visit
A workshop can stand alone, or it can be one part of a wider visit involving other activities for entrepreneurs and the organisation supporting them.
These might include confidential one-to-one business advice, meetings with local creative enterprises, an open presentation for the wider creative community, conversations with the organisation’s management team or follow-up sessions.
See examples of David’s Training Projects and Clients.
Discuss a Workshop with David
If you are considering business training for creative entrepreneurs, David is happy to discuss your objectives and explore which topics and format would be most useful.