Lessen the power that money has over your plans and suddenly opportunities seem much more attractive, and the implementation of great ideas becomes more achievable. How can this be done? The best cultural entrepreneurs do it on a daily basis…

Money is often regarded as the primary source of power. Entrepreneurs tend to consider the provision of funds to equate with power over their ventures. To retain this power, some interviewees have wholly financed their ventures themselves: “It makes it so much better because it means you have got full control, and you take your own risks,” explained one. Others, meanwhile, labour on building sites to raise finance for new projects. The significance for cultural entrepreneurs, however, goes much deeper. Lessening the power of money is both an intellectual philosophy, and a strategic reality increasingly adopted.

Intellectual reasoning

Firstly, the power of funds has been lessened by an intellectual philosophy that places a premium on the ‘creative’ rather than the ‘expensive’. Imagination is a more important and powerful asset than money: “it’s not very clever to be given £50 million and to make a success of it. That’s not very clever. What is much cleverer is to do something out of nearly nothing.” Smaller, cleverer ideas can be much more appealing.

It becomes incredibly liberating to remove cash from the equation. For many successful cultural entrepreneurs, ideas come first, and then they find a way to realise those ideas with or without cash available. To some extent, this is a logical extension of their creativity: business strategies should be as creative as their products. This requires a confident attitude, not least for being responsible for getting and spending cash.

This attitude to money furthermore influences the cultural entrepreneur’s attitude towards risk. As Bilton highlights, since commercial profit or viability is just one of several factors influencing decision-making, this encourages risk-taking outside the guidelines of commercial common sense. Their strategy is a kind of ‘anti-strategy’ allowing them to buck trends and stay one step ahead of the competition, as well as attracting the support of similar thinkers, and building personal trust. For many cultural entrepreneurs, the greater element of risk is not financial, but lies in becoming stale in an industry that requires creative originality.

Practical strategies

Secondly, many cultural entrepreneurs have developed their own practical strategies for lessening the power of money over their decision-making. One approach revolves around the understanding that ideas, and consequently investment, are scaleable. One web entrepeneur explained this strategy as such: “You can build an ecommerce site for £2,000, or you can build one for £20,000. So, maybe the research is the two or three grand one, and if that’s working, you invest the money to build it substantially better, and put the true backend that you need, and then that’s when you go properly live.”

Another strategy involves the strategic use of paid employment, where entrepreneurs stay in secure employment until they gather enough clients or income to justify the risk of starting their own companies.

The general trend towards cultural entrepreneurs wanting “to do things quietly, out of my own pocket”, as one phrased it, is significantly eroding the role of funding as a major decider. As funds diminish in importance, the corresponding power of those who supply funds is also lessened.