John Moore, Senior (Equity) Advisor for the Creative Industries at GC Business Growth Hub, looks at the opportunities for creative businesses right now to grow and how it’s more important than ever to think about becoming investment-ready.
If you’re a creative entrepreneur, I would surmise that having a tight pitch deck to outline your business’s scale-up prospects and to attract potential investors is probably not even close to the top of your priorities right now.
And yet with many financial challenges to navigate following the outbreak of Covid-19 – with a recent report from the Creative Industries Federation predicting bleak prospects with up to 406,000 potential job losses and £74 billion in revenues at risk for the sector – this moment in time could prove vital for creatives to go back to the drawing board and ensure that ambitions and growth targets are fully formed and crystallised.
Back in January, two weeks before the first cases of coronavirus were reported in the UK, we were looking at investment-readiness through an entirely different prism. With New Year’s resolutions still driving hearts and minds, the Growth Company and Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) launched Creative Scale-Up. The programme, which is fully funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), is designed to provide creative businesses with the tools necessary to become investment ready.
