‘Creative Business’. An oxymoron?

In my opinion, to be a Creative Business there are only two things you need to get right:

1 Creative

2 Business

Obvious? Ridiculous?

Pretty much all creative businesses are born from an incredible creative talent, passion and an earth shaking moment of inspiration. And pretty much all of the people at the heart of these amazing startups don’t have a business degree or even any experience of running a business. But this doesn’t matter. At least initially it doesn’t. It’s their passion, excitement and determination that gets things moving. No business theory or text book gives you this.

But then what? 6 months in, the work is drying up or never really happened in the first place. Or two years in and the staff, the studio, the endless regulations or the general lack of organisation and control has impacted on your motivation and the creativity.

I have worked with many creative business owners who’s initial objection to anything resembling ‘structure’ or ‘processes’ is that this will kill their creativity and culture, that they don’t want to become number crunchers, form fillers, or data-enterers. A system would be claustrophobic and stifling. We want to keep fresh and keep our identity.

My point is this. You might have the best offering in the creative world, you might have the best people working for you. But if no-one knows who you are, or you mess up your staff’s pay, get hit with an unexpected tax bill, realise too late you are trading insolvently or fall in to any number of potential business pot holes, the creative element immediately goes with it. You have to aggressively protect your ‘offering’ and culture but importantly make the business element work for you. If your top creative needs to go on a 2 day drinking bender or spend a day at The Tate or wandering round the Natural History Museum for creative inspiration, build your systems around this. Cost it. Plan it. Give them that freedom with the knowledge that you have accounted for it and that they won’t be constantly plagued with calls of ‘where are you up to with this job’ or ‘who’s meeting the client today because you’re not in’. I don’t know any Creatives who are able to be creative when surrounded by chaos (the stressful kind, not the fun kind!).

How many of our most admired artists died without a penny? Imagine going back in time and developing Van Gogh’s marketing campaign, negotiating with art dealers, establishing distribution channels etc. Allowing the great painter to focus on doing what he did best (well, he did many things well, but not all were legal or lucid). Who knows, with a decent business plan, would he have felt the need to pick up the gun…

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Blog written by Nancy Dykins of The Launchpad


Detail from Vincent Van Gogh, 'Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear', 1889
London, Courtauld Institute Gallery
© Photo: Bridgeman Art Library, London