Today, as part of our ‘Love Business’ month, we bring you a fascinating interview with Kathy Heslop, an incredible woman who has lived many lives already, as professional musician, nautical globetrotter and serial entrepreneur who has seen multi-million dollar success for her creative businesses. She also happens to be one of the funniest women I know. ~ Beth
British by passport, half Scandinavian and a NYC/London girl by heart, Kathy was once a professional violinist, working with UK orchestras, theatre and opera companies. She was the first female electric violinist to perform at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club and co-wrote the trailer music for the movie Notting Hill. In 1998 Kathy co-founded the digital recording studio Serious in London with her polymathic husband David. Within a year it had morphed into a digital publishing company and by the summer of 2000 they had moved to New York City to open a sister office. Serious went on to win multiple awards and employ over seventy staff with three offices worldwide, (London, NYC and Singapore). She then made the jump to PR and is now Director of Communications for veinteractive.com, a multi-award-winning technology company which implements online efficiency strategies for domestic and multinational retailers, increasing their online conversions by an average of 25. Kathy has invested more than 10 years achieving strategic business goals through high impact marketing and PR initiatives and has a deep understanding of how effective communications can impact an organisation.
Here she shares some very valuable insight and practical commercial advice for anyone trying to start, or grow, a creative business…
1. What is the most important thing for entrepreneurs to remember if they really want their business to fly?
Well, firstly, if this is you dear reader – congratulations, you have the privilege of having a vocation. Lucky! Even more so if you have mastered flexible working hours to achieve a good work-life balance too. And what great timing you have. Many consumers are returning to an appreciation of quality workmanship and individuality over the mass produced and manufactured, and are rebooting their values and choices in life. So crafting can now become a career. Plus we are living in this amazing networked ‘global’ village with its opportunities and new markets. You no longer need retail real estate, your brand can be virtual and if you’ve got something unique on offer too – you can potentially transcend all borders. On top of this, social media has also created the open source movement, so it’s now easy to join or build communities that share creative information and expertise, and these types of like minded communities are all potential ecommerce customers for you.
…However, drunk as it is easy to be on the fantastic opportunities available today, sober consideration needs adding to the mix too, because if you are serious about making the leap from hobbyist to professional ‘doing the thing you love,’ a leap of faith alone will not be enough. I don’t need to touch upon the sources for creative inspiration here, (ideas, self-belief, listening to and caring about your audience, finding support etc), because this blog is all about the concept that you can build positive relationships whilst doing something you love, and it is already attracting like-minded souls, cruising by full of ideas and encouragement. However, may be where I can proffer help is to add some science to your art, to help you monetise your dreams.
Whether you’re a sole trader or thinking of starting a company, creativity needs to be twinned with enterprise if your ideas are going to be viable. Building and running a business, be it a boutique independent or a multi-million pound retailer, demands organisational control. It also takes patience and dedication, so if you are a start up, you are going to need other means of financial support during this period because most businesses don’t bear fruit for a long while. Then factor in that we’re all still bruised from the global recession, and it’s looking like further battening down of the hatches and ‘frugal innovation’ might be ahead.
So my advice to any creative entrepreneurs is: if you want your business to support you and ideally fly, you’re going to need to keep your feet on the ground first and address some key business skills. With this in mind I’ve made a potted ‘practical’ list below based on my own personal experiences. This could be modified and translated across any kind of business, so take from it what you need and I hope that it brings a little bit of insight and guidance:
• Observe the current market place. Credit is tight and access to funding is tough, this could be a growth barrier to certain types of business.• Refine your business plan and don’t lose track of your main goals.
• Test the market to see if there is demand for your kind of products, if not, rethink, modify and re-test.
• Adopt key performance indicators (KPIs) to make sure that everything is on track (eg. how many jobs need to be being pitched on and worked on at once, what’s in your pipeline, what’s the level of enquiries you’re getting?)
• Build a financial plan – start with the end game in mind and identify stages to get there.
• Make sure you have a cash base to cover a reasonable period of run rate.
• Know your P&L (profit and loss). Figure out your time management to pricing policy ratio, (but not solely on how pricing impacts your bottom line, but also think about the perception that your pricing gives about the quality of your products too).• Keep admin costs to a minimum (always!)
• Make sure you are in the right role and if not, partner with, or hire people to cover those areas. (For example, if you’re not financially minded, get help there so that you can focus on other areas of the business that you are better suited to. And don’t just hire nodding dogs either, hire better than yourself!)
• Work out your branding and messaging, how does this reflect your business’ ethics and authenticity, customers care nowadays
• Think about whether you need to protect your intellectual property and if so, how?
• Plan how to promote to, acquire and then retain customers.
• Think about potential lateral revenue streams that can help support your business – could you teach, write for example? Start building your profile so that new eyes are always finding you so and you can begin to establish yourself as an industry expert. This may give you the cachet to attract commissions, speaking engagements, press or even spin off opportunities to contribute to or write columns and articles. So think about the kind of supporting content you can be creating alongside that will help get your presence and brand equity across all promotional platforms; online, print, radio, TV. Especially think about how this content can be syndicated across online mediums: (blogs, podcasts, webinars, video). It’s so easy to distribute nowadays and content is king!
• Get advice. A business will drown you if you don’t get the technicals and fundamentals right.
However if you think that any of this means selling out as an artist, then seriously don’t do it! Keep your passion as a hobby. Once you have skin in the game and your income is dependent on your creativity, stress can be one helluva passion killer!
2. What do you wish you had known when you were 20?
• Yoga. It took me reaching the end of my twenties to try it and I was hooked immediately. Many musicians suffer with repetitive strain injuries and back in those days, tuition revolved solely around the sound you made, but with little thought as to whether the technique involved might be causing potential long term damage to one’s body. I took Alexander Technique lessons which helped, but I think Yoga would have been a highly beneficial counterbalance to the long hours of playing that have subsequently lead to some permanent knots in my left shoulder worthy of a Baden Powell badge!
• That Scandinavian straight hair is best left au natural. Acid ‘corkscrew’ perms are called acid for a reason
• That life is a blank canvas stretching out in front of you at that age, so crack on with making it super colourful and interesting. My canvas has been, but could probably have done with some sketching of ideas first. It’s definitely been a Jackson Pollock so far; colourful, random and in a myriad of directions!
3. What spontaneous thing have you done that seemed random at the time but made sense later, or was instrumental in putting you on the path you are on today?
Moving to New York. The opportunity came about suddenly at what was actually a blissfully happy time in my life and made no personal sense whatsoever. Only three months earlier we had bought our first apartment and I was enjoying creating my brand new home. But off we went to set up the US office of our UK business, ultimately to live in one room above that first office for over two years! People tell us we were brave. I say more naive and gung ho. We knew no one out there. That we survived and went on to create a successful business is testament to the tremendous capacity New Yorkers have for welcoming and encouraging young entrepreneurs. It lead to eight incredible years of living in Manhattan and a raft of amazing experiences; building the business, working with some truly wonderful people, meeting others, travelling, learning new skills. We acquired an archive of global business experience from investment raising, to recruiting, running an interactive production team, negotiating licensing deals, dealing with approvals processes, organising manufacturing in different continents, dealing with shipping logistics and running three offices worldwide, all of which has lead us to the point we are at now – operating our little boutique management consultancy and helping clients who are trying to achieve results in similar disciplines. We also learned how to really order coffee. “I’ll take a skinny, wet, single shot, soya, decaff latte to go, with extra foam on the top. And make that extra hot please.”
4. What is the most insightful or inspiring thing anyone has ever said to you, and who said it?
There have been several…
• I was once described as “talented but needs taming” by a contemporary British composer who shall remain unnamed. This comment was fed back to me by one of his highly amused fellow panellists after they had been judging my final recital towards my degree. I had performed the dazzling E major Bach violin Partita (fun), the ethereal Debussy violin sonata (gorgeous) and the maddeningly fiendish Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, (do not try this at home!) all dressed in, well let’s just say my own inimitable (flea market) student style and for my piece de résistance had I transcribed a beautiful Pat Metheny composition to play with a Jazz pianist. Evidently my technicolour musical ‘cabaret’ was perceived as the Classical equivalent of having red wine with chicken! Nonetheless his comment provided great amusement and I have to confess it only fuelled my creative spirit more. I was flattered. Follow the herd? I think not.
• Always make time for silly,” Humphrey Lyttleton. (Humph was another of life’s polymaths – Jazz trumpeter, cartoonist, BBC broadcaster, calligrapher… and utterly hilarious guy).
• A business owner once told me: “your troubles start once you have staff.” I couldn’t relate at the time, but for some reason it struck a chord and I never forgot it. Nowadays I know that with strategic hiring and a good company ethos, your workplace should be a happy and rewarding place for staff to be. However in spite of a kind and nurturing culture at her company, she had some incredible horror stories. So don’t be naive in business and especially now. We are living in exceptional ‘get rich quick’ times, (fuelled by the economic downturn and especially endorsed by the popular media). There are people in business who will try to fast track their careers via unethical methods, rather than cultivate a path and enjoy the process of gaining valuable business acumen and skills along the way, people who think kindness is a weakness in business and presume that you’ve had it easy. They don’t see or comprehend the hard work and sacrifice that has lead a business up to the point of actually being able to create their employment. So warning! If you do recruit, mine for diamonds.
• “You won’t recognise your business in 12 months’ time” – my husband. The message being – be open to change. Revenue can come from sectors that you don’t always anticipate. You will be amazed how you can unveil hidden profits in previously untapped markets. (He is one of those entrepreneurs who has the phenomenal ability to zoom out and take a 35,000ft view of a business).
5. How do you keep believing in yourself when things go wrong, or don’t turn out how you wanted them to?
I’ve always been self employed, so I’m used to having to ‘eat what I kill’ and therefore have no other point of reference. But I’ve also had to learn to toughen up along the way too. In my experience, when the chips are down there’s always a solution, you just have to get into a good head space, ideally surround yourself with positive, smart people and then get problem solving! Employing other people is also massively motivating – if you’ve got to make pay roll, you have no choice but to crack on! (We had a million dollars of overheads a month before we even switched a light bulb on in New York…)
I do have a personal point of reference though that gives me a sobering context when things have gone wrong. And that is 9/11. I was in Manhattan that day and those horrific events have gone on to amplify just how lucky I am and they can always be used to trivialise any kind of work headaches. Nothing can ever compare. And after the shocking attacks, no waaay were we going to abandon New York or fail! I’m proud that we dug in and went on to raise over $60M in investment and create jobs during our time there. So my advice would be to find some similar point of reference that is close to your heart and that works as a motivating reality check whenever you need a jumpstart. Or feel free to borrow mine.
When you believe in what you do, real failure isn’t an option. Instead position yourself to succeed, persist and to quote Winston Churchill; “never never quit.” Maybe this concept was indoctrinated in me as a by-product of a rather intense musical training from a young age, because actually you never ever stop learning a instrument, even when you get to a professional level. So keep sharpening that pencil. Create change. Never stagnate. Be resilient. Reinvent. And embrace the process, “the journey is the reward…” (Tao saying).
A winning pitch from David and his partners in Dragon’s Den