If you own, lead, or invest in creative businesses, you’ve probably found yourself asking yourself in the bad moments: why can’t we figure out which of our products makes or loses us money? Why can’t we figure out how to best spend our time? Why is everyone overworked, but we’re still in the red? And at the worst moments: Is it just us that’s a mess?

For 15 years, I’ve been working on the business end of creativity – and I’ve asked myself these questions thousands of times. My entire professional career I’ve either advised creative businesses or worked inside these businesses operating at the intersection of strategy, operations and finance. I’m a 3x CFO and have worked across organizations large (3,000+ employees) and small (sub 10). If I know one thing, it’s that operating creative businesses is hard work. But why is it so f**king hard?

It’s hard because the creative business is inherently complicated and has become ever more complex, requiring more specialists, more projects, and more outputs – creating an operational headache with hundreds of workflows, distinct teams, and limited visibility amongst them. Data capture is challenging and often limited to one facet of creative input or output, and isn’t tied to financial outcomes, meaning operators are either flying blind or spending hours trying to drive insights from disparate inputs. But what if there was a better way?

Simply put, a creative business is any business where the main input to the product you’re selling is creativity. This can be a “traditional” creative business like media, entertainment, or advertising; but also creator businesses, gaming studios, PR / consultancies, live events, music, etc. It is also the broader set of creativity-led businesses like interior design, product design, and probably any business that has “design” as a word in its title.

For a moment, put aside the fundamental issues with creativity as a product – taste, style, the preferences of clients and / or audiences, the ephemeral and temperamental nature of talent, an ever-evolving landscape for revenue – as if all of that isn’t hard enough! There are a few core, indelible issues with creativity as a business.  Creativity as a business has two main operational components that makes it fundamentally different and more challenging than other business models - projects and people (as product).  

Creative businesses are operationally challenged because these two main components, people and projects are difficult to measure and manage. 

Measurement is, put simply, the creation of data about inputs and outputs, both financial and operational. Management is the act of centralization / institutionalization of that data, reporting that turns that data into operational insights, and tools that simplify workflows. In project and people-based businesses, measurement and management are acutely difficult because: 

The result: Information lives within individuals rather than with the institution - in multiple communication platforms, asset storage solutions, budgeting templates (and approximately 1,000 google sheets). CFO, owners and operators find themselves asking questions like: did we make money on that client? Is our Youtube worth the investment? Does it make sense to hire an art director full time, or does it make sense to just hire a freelancer? Without cohesive real-time data,and the ability to quickly turn data into dollars, it’s difficult to make fast decisions that impact today. Lack of comprehensive historical data with clearly defined metrics of success means that it’s impossible to tell what makes a “good” project outcome versus a “bad” outcome, making success less repeatable, and failure less avoidable. Current systems are not designed to measure and pull together the multiple inputs that make creative projects tick, leading to a perception bias in which every new project feels like starting from zero, in turn leading to margin leakage as we make the same mistakes over and over again. 

These problems have compounded as the creative ecosystem has become more complex, with more types of content, more platforms, and more client deliverables– alongside less consistent revenue. This means more specialists, greater demand for flexible business models, and more decisions being made in a vacuum. The financial leakage and lack of ability to clearly forecast based on past data makes hitting margin goals challenging, and has reached a place where many investors consider many creative businesses non-viable in the longer term.

At FOL-IO, this challenge is our north star. We want to help creative businesses succeed by helping them better measure and manage their people and their projects, and understand the margin impacts of decisions in real time. At FOL-IO, we’ve built an operating system native to creativity that sits at the center of your data map, capturing and centralizing information in one platform, paired with a suite of tools to make management workflows simple. 

At a high level, that means a single platform to unify:

If all of this sounds un-sexy in a sexy business, that’s because it’s meant to. Our driving mission is to take the operational headache out of creative businesses, so that people can focus their time where it matters - on creativity itself. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll be delving into how FOL-IO helps with measurement and management of both people and projects, and how we turn that into margins. If you’d like to see FOL-IO for yourself, please reach out: [email protected]