Arts organisations often struggle with the business side of their operations, and with the sorts of concerns common to many small businesses.
David Sharpe is one of three creative industries business advisers working out of the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (CIIC) in Ultimo, Sydney who help creative businesses by conducting comprehensive business reviews of their operations. On the other side of Australia, former Chief Executive of the Sydney Writers Festival, event and arts manager, and academic, Dr Wendy Were is also working as a Business Adviser with the CIIC, out of the University of Western Australia in Perth. ArtsHub spoke to them about some of the common business problems arts organisations find themselves facing.
1. Not Planning and Tracking
The first thing on David Sharpe’s list is planning and tracking and it’s something that applies equally to artists and people running arts companies and arts organisations. Many arts companies or organizations don’t strategically plot a course for themselves or they don’t actively pursuing it. But it can be just as problematic if they have a plan but don’t then track their progress or measure how successful or profitable a particular activity or outcome has been. ‘I think that often gets subsumed by the day to day running of a company or organization and a lot of people find they don’t have the time to devote to those planning and tracking mechanisms,’ he says.
