A Global system for creative shared practice

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.