Running a Creative Company in the Digital Age

How to successfully set up your own media company

Lucy Baxter

• Publisher: Creative Essentials
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781843449263
• eBook ISBN: 9781843449270
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

A practical guide to building and managing a thriving creative business in the digital age.

In today's media landscape, digital content production is more accessible than ever. This guide provides the essential knowledge and tools to navigate the challenges and opportunities of running a creative company. Learn how to set up your business, structure your team, manage finances, and produce compelling content for diverse platforms, including TV, film, and digital media.

Running a Creative Company in the Digital Age offers expert advice on funding, marketing, and networking, with case studies and interviews from industry leaders. Discover innovative business models, strategies for handling tricky situations, and tips for building a strong brand. Whether you're a filmmaker, designer, or digital content creator, this book will empower you to turn your creative vision into a successful and sustainable business.

Target audience: Aspiring and current creative entrepreneurs, media professionals, and students in creative fields.

PART ONE

GETTING STARTED

YOUR USP

So who are you, why are you here and why should audiences and funders care about you?

Fundamental questions you need to ask yourself when setting up a creative company are: what makes you tick and how do you want to influence, educate and entertain others? Take some time to think about the things you really enjoy. Do campaigning virals make you think about the world in new ways? Or do longer documentaries help you to engage with the human story? Are you a gamer who interacts more online than in real life and, if so, what would you do differently or innovate with? Is there a disruptive technology idea that has been brewing in your head? Do you want to work in animation, live action, factual? Do you want to tell audiences stories directly by making and appearing in films yourself, or oversee the process from behind the scenes? Do you want to help businesses tell their stories?

It is also vitally important to know the landscape. Find out who is out there already doing what you want to do. Who made the content you have engaged with the most in the last year? Don’t know? Find out and do some research on them. If they seem approachable you could ask them to meet for a coffee – or alternatively stalk them online until you understand exactly how they got to where they are today.

EXPERIENCE LEVEL

Media production, and the ‘creative industries’ in general, has always been one of the most popular career choices and also one of the most vague. Even if you have done a relevant degree in film, media studies, digital content production or broadcast journalism, it’s so fiercely competitive out there that it could take years of free work before you get your dream paid job.

Broadcasters, production companies, digital agencies, technology and creative corporations are frequently approached by hopeful graduates and non-graduates alike.

Being a digital native obviously helps. Thousands of employed people have to retrain in digital skills including social media, web development and project management tools such as Javascript, Flash, Agile, JIRA, Waterfall (and many more) to get hired nowadays. You need to know some of this stuff to set up and run a company, too. There are myriad digital courses that can be done online, and organisations such as Digital Mums are aimed at people returning to work and a bit mystified by the world of digital media. Things move so fast now that you only need a few months not using these platforms to be out of touch. Those of you who are young enough to have been born into the digital age already have a great skills base to start from, but if you don’t, never fear – there are plenty of training options out there and people you can partner up with.

The best way to get noticed now is to create a profile online using free platforms. For video, these would be content platforms such as Vimeo (or Vimeo Pro at a small fee with much larger storage), YouTube or Dailymotion, showcasing any work you have done, so that any approaches you make are backed up with an easy link that shows your identity as a content creator.

My advice would be to do this in the first instance and get some years of industry experience behind you as a freelancer in the creative industry you aspire to, before setting up a company. In parallel, create your own content and put it out there into the world.

If you are a novice and want to set up a company, first find a business partner who knows the industry ropes and will set up the company with you. This should be an experienced producer or executive producer, head of talent, head of development, chief technical officer or finance director depending on your individual company needs and the kind of creative enterprise that interests you.

WHAT IS A CREATIVE BUSINESS?

Running a business involves a huge amount of creativity. That doesn’t mean it isn’t for you. It just means that sometimes you have to rediscover yourself and what makes you tick, after functioning in a society and education system that values conformity.

The advent of the digital age has meant that things change faster than ever before in history. In almost any industry today, and certainly in the creative industries, ‘Innovate or Die’ is an apt phrase. Keeping on top of things is hard enough; keeping ahead of the curve nigh on impossible. The Silicon Valley generation, which opened the door to our digital age, taking notice of the crazy ideas and developing them, was often buoyed up by the hope and innocence of youth and had bypassed the traditional education system.

The Western education system is not, alas, always the friend of creativity. Much of it is stuck in the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century with large classes behind rigid rows of desks, listening to a teacher by the whiteboard, anxiously waiting to be singled out. Although schools vary in terms of teaching style, learning by rote is still often used for children in primary school. Uniforms, rigid rules, timetables, punishments, obedience: conformity is key and it is often at the expense of creative expression and allowing individuals to develop their talents and capacities. How can we make new, exciting connections, forge new brain pathways through free exploration that lead to profound innovation, when the ability to do so has been educated out of us? As is often mentioned by those encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit, some of the biggest tech and media tycoons are school or university dropouts; Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft, Richard Branson at Virgin, David Karp at Tumblr, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, to name a few.

Finland offers hope for the future of our education system. It has banned subjects completely post-16, in favour of an integrated curriculum which follows the specific interests of students. Instead of individual subjects, students will study events and phenomena in an interdisciplinary format. The goal is that students choose for themselves which topic or phenomenon they want to study, according to their ambitions for the future and their capabilities. Students will no longer sit behind school desks. Instead, they will work together in small groups to discuss problems. The head of the Department of Education in Helsinki, Marjo Kyllonen, says: ‘There are schools that are teaching in the old-fashioned way which was of benefit in the beginning of the 1900s – but the needs are not the same, and we need something fit for the 21st century.’ Let’s hope it catches on!

The stereotype of the ‘creative’ as useless at business, often peddled by creatives themselves as well as those around them, helps maintain a convenient distance between the number crunchers (and profit takers) and those doing the content creation. It has allowed middle and senior management to cream profits off the top for generations – stories abound of musicians, painters, filmmakers and writers being fleeced by their management through time immemorial. It still means that, for example, in documentary feature film production today, directors and originators are the people who make the least cash out of the finished product.

Of course, sometimes it’s true that an individual is terrible at running a business, but just because you create the content doesn’t mean you can’t grasp the fundamentals of business and finance. You just have to learn, and not sell yourself short. A 2016 report by RealScreen called Documentary Pays? The Price of Filmmaking was a candid look at how directors in particular are selling themselves short while everyone around them makes the cash. In the report, documentary filmmaker Emily James is quoted as saying:

We’re exploiting ourselves, but we’re also being exploited by all the people around us who are making a proper living from what they’re doing, and using our work as the center of that … Nobody ever pays you back for all of that effort you put into [development]. But then, if the film is good, you suddenly have all of these other people that are working for distributors, festivals and broadcasters – who are being paid a waged job – and they’re using the work that we’ve created as the central commodity of their industry without ever repaying the people that took the major risk at the beginning.

It’s incumbent upon everyone to take creative roles seriously and allot to them a decent salary, and also upon creatives to understand their worth.

I remember being labelled ‘artsy’ at school. This meant I could not be ‘mathsy’ or ‘sciencey’, and indeed I was useless at science and maths while being good at writing, art and the humanities. But before that, at primary school, I was among the top of my class at maths and science. And after working as a producer on various science and medical films and programmes on subjects like particle physics, autism, intensive farming and heart surgery, I became passionate about scientific ideas and came to view them as intensely creative. Alas, I still lack the foundation in science that might have allowed me to appreciate them fully, because I was shooed away from it at school. What I’m saying is, don’t judge yourself as not up to the task without giving yourself a chance. The old adage ‘The more you do, the more you can do’ is true. Boardrooms are full of financiers, lawyers and administrators who think they know best and keep the ‘creatives’ out of the room. You can help change that by appreciating that we can be multifaceted and having the gumption to do your homework and stand up for yourself.

TEN FOUNDING AND GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR YOUR CREATIVE COMPANY

1. Follow the Passion, Not the Money

This might sound rather quaint in today’s profit-orientated landscape, where turnover is so much more important than quality. In the creative arena, in my experience, you are far better doing the things you care about – and if you get to know the landscape and the basic rules you will eventually be savvy enough to make it lucrative, too. When I have tried to follow the money, it has only got me lost and made me question why I wanted to do this in the first place. That said, you need to be practical, too. If your main passion will never bring more than a trickle of funding in, think about what else floats your boat and how you can diversify to bump up your turnover. Even better, find a business partner whose job it is to follow the money for you!

2. Know Your Talents and Know Your Limits

No one is brilliant at everything, so work out what you are great at and what you are not so great at – and identify the people you know and trust that can do the things you can’t and are interested in the things that bore you to tears.

3. Know the Landscape

Find out who is out there already doing what you want to do. Who made the content you have engaged with the most in the last year? Don’t know? Find out and do some research on them. If they seem approachable you could ask them to meet for a coffee – or, alternatively, stalk them online until you understand exactly how they got to where they are today.

4. Do Not Max Out Your Credit Card

You may believe in your passion project, and that’s great – in fact, without that passion and belief, you won’t get very far. But you need to be practical, too, and take all the variables into consideration. So when you’re starting your company with a project in mind, get some backing, and some opinions first – and don’t use your own cash, unless you can afford to lose it. It all depends how much stress you want in your life! I know some creatives will disagree with me on this, because they have taken a punt with their own cash and it has paid off. If you are starting something that you have a lot of experience in already and you have a couple of busine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One Getting Started
• Part Two Hit the Ground Running
• Part Three Growth and Moving On
• Conclusion
• Resources
• Appendices
• Copyright