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FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
What is your background? Is it related to the accounting sector or the creative industries?
Strange as it may sound I’m a biologist by training. I think it’s my analytical skills that I’ve transferred into my work in the Creative Industries. After completing an MBA in 2001 I moved away from the corporate world and set up my own consultancy working in the art market and the creative industries. Having worked with the likes of NESTA and other creative industries development organisations it became very clear that creatives are generally poor at financial management and if we could change this they would run better businesses.
What influenced your decision to launch a tool such as MyCake?
Having worked with hundreds of creative entrepreneurs from start up through to multi-million pound turnover businesses it became clear that the education and training had a gap in it. Very few creatives have any need to learn software such as Excel whilst they are at college and as a consequence are not confident in handling numbers. This translates into a lack of confidence about the numbers in their business (despite being able to handle personal finances perfectly well!) and a preference for seeing visualisations rather than spreadsheets. At the time all the book-keeping tools on the market were really aimed at either accountants or finance personnel and weren’t designed to help managers let alone creatives understand the books and use the insight that the numbers could give them to help them hone their business model.
Who are your main business partners, and how do they help you?
We partner with creative industries development organisations such as Artquest, Cockpit Arts and Screen Yorkshire, offering business finance training and MyCake book-keeping and benchmarking at member rates. Education is key and we do a lot of workshops and seminars for business and creative hubs.
Is MyCake one of a kind, or are there any competitors that offer similar services to your same target clientele?
There are now lots of online book-keeping services but none that focus on the Creative Industries and none that use the wisdom of crowds in the way we do to create our benchmark data set to the benefit of all subscribers and the sector in general.
The creative industries include a very varied range of businesses, whose activity is not always simple to assess. How much relevant data for benchmarking do you actually possess, and how do you aim to improve the Culture Benchmark section?
Well with 4-5 years of data on several hundred creative businesses we’d say we have a pretty enviable data set! For sure there are industry specifics in terms of business practice that mean that an architect would prefer to compare themselves to other architects rather than just ‘all’ creatives but there are similarities between product based businesses and equally service based businesses can also be compared.
The Culture Benchmark is our second benchmarking product and is specifically aimed at non-profit arts organisations. We have data on some 200+ organisations at the moment (since Nov 2010) and we’re working with Open Charities to bring in data from some 22,000 arts non-profits (5 years of data) so this will give us a huge data set. By comparison, the Arts Council England collects an annual survey from some 900 organisations.
Creative activities are deemed to be very risky. In your opinion, how difficult is it to manage a small business in the creative industries? What concrete risks have you identified for people who try to establish themselves in the sector? The core reason behind this is that most creative businesses have a clutch of intangible assets but very few tangible assets such as a manufacturing plant or other buildings. Even the type of intellectual property they have is hard to protect, as they’re not patents but design rights and copyright.
The advantage of setting up a business in the creative sectors is that in the early days at least it is mostly about the time you put in rather than setup costs. So the barriers to entry are low. The risk of this however is that people will take a ‘suck it and see’ approach to starting a business and will put off worrying about the finances. The difficulty here is that you might price things too low, so not only is there not enough profit, but you’ll find it very hard to put your prices up.
What kind of creative businesses has MyCake worked with, and what kind of people would you encourage to join up?
Probably more a case of what sort of creative businesses haven’t we worked with! The user base contains lots of design businesses, a fair smattering of fashion folks, clutches of artists and designer makers, a growing crowd of architects, a group of film, tv and games folks, a few music folks … what have I missed? Businesses range in scale from tiny start ups to multi-million pound businesses and from local clients to international trade. In terms of who we’d encourage to join up … if you’re serious about turning your creative talents into a business then we’d say sort the money numbers sooner rather than later!
Sign up to Mycake to receive a free 2 month trial. When you sign up please jin the 'jotta' faclitator group. Each new paying subscriber gets a 1 to 1 phone session with MyCake to cover the financial basics.
