Entries from January 2006 ↓

This conference took place yesterday and was organised by UCE (Charlotte Carey and Sara Harris were the organisers)

The theme of the conference was one that I’m particularly interested in, namely how to educate creative people on how to run their businesses better, specifically within Higher Education.

I have to say that it was well-focussed, well-attended and well-organised conference (and it’s not often I say that!). It was great to see UCE at the forefront of a debate attended by HE institutions and policy makers from all around the country.

What was interesting was that everyone seemed to basically agree on what needs to be done. The day had a hugely positive vibe and a feeling of strong alignment between everyone.

Specifically I was hugely encouraged by what the DCMS were saying - pretty much in line with what we have been saying for some time as far as I could tell. One of the major points on which everyone agreed was that enterprise and business is usually only glanced over in a very cursory way within HE courses. Everyone agreed that this needed to be changed, but that to do so was going to take some time as it involved a total shift in the culture of these institutions.

I do think it’s vital that creative students are taught about enterprise and business. However I also think it’s vital that this support continues after college, as these are often the times when the help is most needed.

I find myself to be continually amazed about how often creative people have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how to run their businesses.

As a team who went through the process of setting up a design agency, it was almost impossible for us to find any information on how others had set up and run similar businesses in the past. This meant we had to develop all of our own project, marketing, financial, organisational management and pricing procedures from scratch.

Whilst doing a session with a self employed friend recently, we worked out that because of a major mistake in the way she was counting the time spent on her projects, she was actually coming away from some projects having made less than four pounds an hour.

She immediately changed the way she costed her work and by the next week was making a hundred pounds a week more than she had been previously.

Surely practice as simple and basic as this, which is common to everyone within a particular field would be very easy to standardise and get down on paper, leaving people free to find creative ways to bend the “rules” to their own advantage?

To this day, no book has ever been released on how to run your own creative business. As a result, I find that many people I meet are making the same mistakes.

So how do we solve the problem? How about a creative enterprise Wiki? I have some more ideas on this which I’ll post up some time when I’ve had more of a chance to think about them.

Finally, here’s my blog. It’s taken me a while to get around to it but I’ve finally sorted it out (Thanks Charlotte for giving me the final kick up the bum that I needed!)

I don’t quite know where this is going to lead but I think the main thing for me is that it will help me to start writing, something that I’ve never really done before but definitely want to do a lot of in the future.

So, happy reading and please send me comments when you have time.