In this 'How to Succeed in Creative Business' video, David Parrish offers five pieces of advice about how creative entrepreneurs can make their creative and digital businesses even more successful.
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1. Define Success - in your own terms, with your own specific and unique definition of success for your creative enterprise.
2. Understand your Strengths - especially your strengths in relation to competitors. Identify what you can do better than everyone else, or at least most of your rivals. Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
3. Choose your Customers. Not all customers are good customers. Choose customers that fit your objectives, your ethos, and your financial aims.
4. Manage your intellectual property. Use copyright, design right, trade marks and patents not only to protect your rights but also to generate income through sales and licensing.
5. Business growth. Be clear about what you want to grow. Grow your business in the right way. Grow the right things. Size isn't everything. Small enterprises can generate large profits and have a big impact.
Clearly, there are many more things to consider when growing a business in the creative industries, but these are five important things to think about. Enough for now!
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Embed this video in your own website or blog from Vimeo or YouTube.This video is published using a Creative Commons licence which allows you to republish it.
An excellent new service to help creative individuals and businesses to protect and commercialise their intellectual property has been launched by Creative Barcode.
A Creative Barcode builds on this information and provides more detailed and robust evidence for the creator: detail of ownership, date of creation and limitations on use. The barcode includes uniquely numbered digital codes on creative works to specify ownership and permitted usage. The barcode can be used on designs, written proposals, sketches, drafts and other copyright works associated with a project.
For example, have a look at the Creative Barcode I've attached to this copyright article at the bottom of this page. (Click to enlarge.)
Creative barcodes make the copyright position even more clear to recipients of creative works than a simple copyright notice (though there's no harm adding that too). Furthermore their use is an indication that you know your rights and are organised. This in itself should help deter unlawful usage of your copyright works.
An additional very useful facility offered by the Creative Barcode service is the ability to forward your copyright works to external parties via the Creative Barcode file transfer area, which adds a password unique to the recipient so that they can download it after receiving your email. In this way, the Creative Barcode system can track receipt of files and register the recipient’s agreement to the conditions of usage associated with the work.
Finally, the Creative Barcode app includes a ‘transfer of ownership’ feature which enables the creator to provide the purchaser with a certificate of ownership when full payment has been made.
Registration costs £30 GBP plus VAT per annum, which includes five free barcodes and a downloadable program to generate them. Additonal barcodes cost £4 GBP each. Annual membership also includes the usage of 200MB of server space to store documents for registered download by clients.
The other day I was advising a client about a trading name for a new creative enterprise. There was a danger that the name she had chosen could infringe the trade mark rights of another business - so she decided to choose a different word for her new brand.
Using a trading name without first checking that it is not already in use by another business offering similar goods or services can lead to a lot of hassle in the future. I know of several cases where businesses have been forced to change their name because of a legal challenge, which is embarrassing, to say the least. The worst thing is that the challenge tends to happen once the new business has become established, simply because the challenger simply doesn't notice in the early days when your new company's profile is still 'under the radar'.
This is not just about registered trade marks, which are relatively easy to search using official registers (for example in the UK Intellectual Property Office online register of trademarks). A trading name can be regarded as an 'unregistered trade mark' and defended by its owner against other people using it. You could be accused of 'passing off' your business as theirs: in other words, trading on its reputation and/or taking business away from them because the public could be confused into thinking that your business is connected to theirs.
Now BSkyB is trying to stop Skype from continuing to use its name because the first three letters spell "sky" according to this article.
It's a reminder that trading names and trade marks can be a complex legal area, so it's best to take professional advice from a trade mark attorney if in doubt.
As a general rule though, the safest trading names to use are totally new words because nobody has used them before - in any context. The KODAK® trade mark is often quoted as a great example of this because the word 'KODAK' was invented, its pronunciation is unambiguous, it has no meaning in English (and, as far as I know, doesn't mean anything silly or offensive in other languages!).
So if you are choosing a trading name for a new business venture, think creatively! If Google can't find any references whatsoever to your proposed name then it's a good start!
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Let us know how and why you chose your own brand name - and share your experience and expertise with other creative entrepreneurs - on the T-Shirts and Suits Creative Enterprise Network.
Creative entrepreneurs are rightly concerned about controlling their copyright ('not getting ripped off') and generating income from their copyright through licensing, ie being a creative entrepreneur.
It seems that we used to have only two options about what to do with our copyright material - either give it away into the 'public domain', or heavily restrict its use, quoting one of those 'all rights reserved' paragraphs often found on copyright material.
But creative people often want to be more flexible about how they restrict or permit the usage of their copyright material - writing, photographs, music, designs, video, artwork, computer programs etc.
Sometimes we want to allow people to reproduce our works, but only on certain conditions, for example that they don't change it or use it commercially. Sometimes we want others to develop the work, but still credit the original artist. We might want to apply different conditions to the use of our copyright material depending on the circumstances, the works themselves or our business strategy. Sometimes we do want to adopt the 'All Rights Reserved' policy and at other times we want to take a 'Some Rights Reserved' approach.
This is where the Creative Commons movement can help. It began when creative people got together with lawyers to explore these different options for use of copyright material and then express these different options both in straightforward language and also in the form of legal contracts. The Creative Commons now offers a range of legally-watertight but also easily understood copyright licences that creative people can use.
For example, the free eBook version of my book 'T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity' has been made available for people to copy, print and redistribute - provided you don't change it or sell it. This is what the publisher and author wanted to do, so we selected a Creative Commons licence to suit this purpose: the "Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence".
Some people seem to think that the Creative Commons movement is telling us to release our copyright, but that's not the case. It's for us to decide what we want to do - the Creative Commons enables us to do it with a legally valid copyright licence.
More information and a range of copyright licences are available on the Creative Commons website.
Customers are more powerful than ever. Because of changes in technology, particularly the interactive internet (Web 2.0), there has been a fundamental and irreversible shift of power in favour of consumers.
The bad news is that businesses that deny or ignore these changes by continuing to regard customers as passive targets will fail.
'New Business Models in the Creative Industries' was the subject of my keynote speech to the Media and Message conference of indepedent TV producers and media professionals in Finland.
We need to be innovative about how we do business and devise new business models centred on demanding, talkative and creative customers.
Presentation by David Parrish at Media & Message, Finland. Watch the video here (if the embedded video above does not play) [or go to the Media & Message site and click "Puheenvuorot" (speeches). It's the last one.]
The Creative Business is a series of 12 modules of information about developing creative enterprises, written especially for people running businesses in the creative industries.
The information is particularly relevant to creative businesses and cultural enterprises in the fields of Advertising, Literature and Publishing, Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Music, Design, Cultural Heritage, and Crafts.
Published on the Creative Choices website, this series of 12 articles covers a range of business issues facing creative entrepreneurs:
Can you give us three top tips for running your own successful creative business, David?
1. Firstly, define what you mean by success – it could be a mixture of financial success, creative challenges, recognition, job satisfaction, quality of life, etc, and that formula will be different for everyone. Define what you mean by success, don’t let others define it for you, and know where you want to go.
2. Be clear about your market and don’t try to sell to everyone. Choose your customers. Choose customers that fit your objectives and your ethos and that deliver the financial results you want. Don’t have a scattergun approach, looking for any old customer. Choose the customers that work best for your business strategy.
3. Understand intellectual property (IP), because IP is at the core of the creative industries. It’s important to make sure you don’t get ripped off by other people, so it’s about defending and protecting intellectual property; but just as importantly, it’s also about how to commercialise that IP so you can make money from it, through sales and licensing, for example. Given that IP is so central, I think most creative businesses could do with knowing a bit more, and learning how to use it.
A useful and readable 'Creative, Cultural and Digital Industries Guide' has been published by Business Link West Midlands
It is available in hardcopy from Business Link West Midlands and downloadable as a free eBook in PDF format below.
This creative business guide was written by David Parrish, author of the book 'T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity'.
The 48 page publication covers a range of issues relevant to enterprises in the creative, cultural and digital sectors.
Sections include: - Strategic Planning - Understanding your Customers - Profiting from your Ideas - Organisational Structures - People and Skills - Promoting your Products / Services - Financial Management - Legal and other issues - Links to useful organisations and resources for creative enterprises
There are also four case studies featuring creative enterprises from the West Midlands region: 383 Project, Stan's Cafe, Gas Street Works, and Capsule.
Similar creative business guides can be written for other organisations in the creative, cultural and digital sectors. Contact David Parrish to discuss options and possibilities for your own version of this creative industries guide.
Thanks to Danielly Netto from Newcastle University Business School, who's researching business models in the creative industries, for including this viral video in her presentation.
This is a video from artist BLU showing the awesome MUTO 'animated graffiti' work in Buenos Aires.
Published on the internet using a Creative Commons licence, it's already had about 3,000,000 views on YouTube so far and received nearly10,000 comments.
The business model used has been categorised as 'Findability/Creative Investment'. In other words, the creator gives something away for free in order to reap financial benefits by other means. It's one of the 3 (or 14) Kinds of Free.
I often advise creative entrepreneurs who have innovative products or services. Sometimes it's a completely new idea and they are planning to open up a new market for it.
Someone asked me whether I'm ever tempted to 'steal' the ideas people tell me about when I'm advising them. My answer was firmly No, for two reasons - more later.
My job as an adviser is to ask questions, including tough ones, to help entrepreneurs make their creative businesses even more successful. One question that goes straight to the heart of business strategy is this: "If you are successful in developing your new product or service, and open up a lucrative market for it, what is to stop other businesses (perhaps bigger businesses with more resources and power than you) following you into the marketplace and taking most of the profits?" It's a killer question that sometimes people cannot answer.
Sometimes the truth is that there is nothing at all to stop others joining the party once all the hard work has been done. In this case I fear for the business concerned. I tell them that they may end up penniless after opening up new frontiers - they may become a 'Poor Pioneer'.
Creative people take pride in being 'groundbreaking'. But breaking the ground for others to make all the profit is not so smart!
In other cases the entrepreneur's answer is that other businesses cannot enter the market and take the profits, because they have created some sort of 'barrier to entry' to prevent others joining the party. In creative enterprises the barrier to entry is often some kind of intellectual property such as a patent or copyright-protected work. In this case copycats cannot easily follow them into the marketplace with 'me-too' products or services.
Intellectual Property Rights are the creative entrepreneur's defence against commercial predators.
Which takes me back to the question of why I don't copy my clients' ideas and set up a rival business. The first answer is that it would be unethical to do so and I have a reputation to protect. However the second answer is more pertinent and more powerful; it is in two parts: 1. I don't want to steal something that in turn can be stolen from me. In other words, if there isn't a barrier to entry for me, then there isn't a barrier to entry for further competitors. I too could end up being a Poor Pioneer. 2. The business initiatives I really do envy are those that do have barriers to entry, that have some kind of monopoly rights for the owner to exploit alone. But of course these are the very ones that I cannot steal!
So I either (1) don't want to, or (2) cannot set up as a competitor to my client after hearing about their new business initiative. I'm still ethical, of course, but that's not really relevant here.
The most successful creative enterprises are capable of both (a) developing new products or services and (b) using intellectual property rights to protect their position against competitors so they can enjoy the fruits of their creativity without 'new entrants' stealing market share.
So don't be a Poor Pioneer, looking back bitterly on all the creative work you did, only to find that other people made all the money from it. Use intellectual property rights in partnership with your creativity, to devise a successful business model.
