A crash business course for artistic types

BUSINESS TRAINING

The School for Creative Startups in London has a year-long programme designed to teach artists, designers and artisans how to set up, and run, successful businesses in order to make a living from their craft.

Gregory Thompson, president and CEO — as well as chief cook, taster and marketing director — of Shakespeare’s Sauces, found his inspiration while walking to the British Library.

Thompson, who had directed theater productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain and the Kennedy Center in Washington, was on his way to research “King John” and “thinking about the fact that while we know Shakespeare didn’t go to university, his plays are full of the books he read. And they are full of references to food and drink.”
“His period, the Elizabethan era, is also the first time we have a number of printed cookbooks in English,” he said. “So I suddenly found myself wondering: ‘Can I use sauces to tell people about the sources?”’

He hopes to retail his Shakespeare-themed sauces at shops and supermarkets.
Recently, Thompson and about 90 other fledgling entrepreneurs went through three days of “boot camp” at the School for Creative Startups , a social enterprise whose yearlong programme is designed to teach artists, designers and artisans how to set up and run successful businesses in order to make a living from their craft.

Jessica Huie’s company, Colorblind Cards, was born when her 7-year-old daughter Monet “was going through a princess” phase.

“I was looking for a birthday card for her and all the princesses were blond, with straight hair,” she said. “There was a complete lack of anything reflective of the reality of London as a multicultural city. So I started to make my own, and within seven months we were in Clintons,” a British retailer.

Five years later, Huie’s company has spread her message — “The only thing that should be separated by colour is laundry” — to the United States and South Africa, but she still is not making enough to quit her day job.

Andy Heller, currently the sole employee of Catered, a business that delivers a recipe for a meal plus all the ingredients needed to prepare it in a single box, said his new business started just as his old business went bankrupt.

“This has been one of the worst few weeks in my life,” he said. “Recently, I decided to liquidate my company. At the end of the week a huge bottle of oil broke and soaked the back of my car. Now I’m here hoping for a new start.”

The school is headed by Doug Richard, an American-born entrepreneur and investor best known in Britain for his two years on the BBC television programme “Dragon’s Den.” (The US version is “Shark Tank.”)

“The creative industries in Britain are one of the few vibrant sectors in the economy,” he said during a brief break from the stage at London’s Conway Hall, where, under a proscenium arch inscribed “To Thine Own Self Be True,” Richard preached a gospel of salvation through work, as well as a close study of the market.

“The poor don’t buy pretty. They can’t afford it,” he said, urging producers of luxury goods like handbags or jewelery to match their sales pitches and websites to their target audience.

Why would a one-woman operation selling luxury children’s pyjamas in traditional cotton prints need a website?

“You can be small and global,” Richard told the students. “The Web changes everything.”
“There is a desire by government to drive forward entrepreneurship,” said Richard, who was recently asked by the government to lead a review of apprenticeships in Britain. “But all their effort has been devoted to high-tech. It seems silly to want to copy Silicon Valley when we already are the Silicon Valley of the creative industries.”

Fewer than half of those who apply to the school are accepted. And though a few of the wealthier students pay the full £3,000 cost of tuition, roughly 90 per cent pay only £600. In return, students get 10 full days of instruction by Richard and experts in the fields of planning, production, marketing and distribution, including special sessions on how to price work and attract investors.

During their second term, students get access to “titans of industry” to help mentor them. These include prominent supporters of the school like Luke Johnson, former chairman of Channel Four; the fashion designer Paul Smith; Nathalie Massanet, founder of the online retailer Net-A-Porter ; and Matthew Slotover, co-founder of the Frieze art fairs.

They also benefit from Richard’s abundant, frequently profane, advice on everything from men’s wear — he’s a fan of Hiut jeans, which he wears with bright French-cuff shirts — to the perils of dealing with small retailers.

“Small retailers suck at paying their bills because they’re all being hosed by rich landlords,” he said.

The school, now in its second year, was originally funded entirely by Richard, who started and sold a series of software companies in the United States before moving to Britain in 2002. Current funding comes from other, for-profit Schools for Startups, from corporate sponsors and from a group of “angels.”

“Besides helping us to do good, they get first-look rights at any of the businesses that start here,” Richard said. However, graduates are under no obligation to allow Richard or anyone else to invest. Indeed, one of Richard’s lessons is that, while all businesses need capital to grow, outside investors should be regarded warily.

For Miles Campbell, a refugee from the corporate world who “stumbled across the school on Twitter,” the boot camp was a crash course in turning a passion into a business. Campbell is a clock maker who hopes to sell his work to collectors. But with each clock taking many months to complete, he was having trouble deciding on what to charge — or who might buy them. “I can make a clock. I can design a clock. But I can’t take it to market,” he said.

Pia Townsend, a letterpress printer who sells her work online, said she thought the course “would be good to help me get to the next stage without taking all the wrong turns and making all the mistakes I might otherwise make.”

Kelly Brown, who runs a company managing trips and events for corporate clients, hopes the course “will give me more confidence in negotiating with clients.”

“I didn’t go to university, and this is a quick way to learn more about business,” she said.
Frankie Snobel is still supporting herself as a freelance journalist. But she hopes to use her skills and experience as a bartender to start a business selling cocktail-themed gift baskets.

As the students practiced their “elevator pitches” — 30-second descriptions of their businesses targeted at potential investors — the school’s creative director, Medeia Cohan-Petrolino, acknowledged that not all graduates were likely to realise their dreams.
“I think it’s like sex education,” she said. “Not everybody is ready to have sex when they take sex ed. Not everybody here is ready to go commercial. But when they are ready, they’ll be better prepared.”

“I’m not going to go hungry tonight,”Richard said of his motivations. “But I’m still ambitious. I want to be on the cover of The Economist as the man who moves the GDP of nations.”