It took me 25 years as an artist to realise I was an entrepreneur

This week, I joined Creative England's Early Growth programme with 19 other brilliant founders of UK screen-based businesses.

It made me think about art, creativity and business and how much they have to inform each other.

Most of my career, I've laboured under our national cultural delusion that artists are flaky, flighty, no good at business: Business is only about maths and nothing to do with art.

When I sang at corporate events, I often felt an invisible wall between me, the performer and these “business” people. I could never speak their language and I felt they could never speak mine.

Alongside this, most of the musicians and actors I knew spent years talking about “corporate work” with a sneer. “Well, it’s hardly art but, you know, its well paid: take the money and run!”. The money, and its unequal distribution, created a conceptual barrier that seemed to prevent either side from identifying properly with each other.

But for 25 years, I’ve made shows out of ideas that arrived in the bath and refused to go away. I’ve taken the idea, formed a team, created partnerships with venues and investors, organised a tour, sold tickets, pressed CDs and collected royalties - and when the profitability dwindled, moved on to a new project, a new idea. 

But somehow I never saw this as 'entrepreneurial', despite having a brother who founded the fresh fast food chain Leon. When he opened the first restaurant in Carnaby Street, we were all so excited, and I'll never forget him telling us, “It’s just a cafe in Soho”, while he ran around, trying to keep an eye on everything; keep the investors happy, keep the customers happy, keep the food quality up to scratch. He had a dream of what it might become, but no guarantee. Just like any artist.

What are entrepreneurs, other than people who want to make things, delight an audience, surprise them or fix a problem for them, continue creatively, pivoting when necessary because that is what they are driven to do, against all the odds?

Entrepreneurs are artists - with the only caveat that business schools and start up incubators pedal the possibility of making some money along the way, in a way that few arts institutions do.

A few years ago I had a conversation with my friend, the film producer Sara Woodhatch, who gave me one of the great pieces of entrepreneurial advice I've ever heard. "Nothing is real until it's on paper".

For a long time, my co-founder Ru Howe and I had had the idea for our interactive filmmaking application Stornaway.io. We talked about it, we dreamed about it, and eventually I took Sara's advice. She'd given it about a film idea, but I could suddenly see how it applied to Stornaway.io. I knew the magic of getting your ideas down on paper and watching them grow. I understood how to nurture them, how to keep an eye out for opportunity, how to recognise when they weren't working, as well as how to talk about them until they became reality.

Ru's version of "on paper" was a video vision of what Stornaway.io could be: a creative app to tell interactive video stories without coding. Into this, he poured his experience as a filmmaker and editor, first learnt in his spare time while doing a very unproductive state-funded classics degree (hard to imagine now). Another tech industry veteran called it, "the greatest product demo he'd ever seen". No technology existed at this point. It was all imagination. But from this vision on digital paper, we were able to find the partners and champions we needed to build the dream.

Ru (who I should probably tell you is also my husband) had worked as a consultant in big media companies for over a decade, paying the bills, doing OU Business School at night-time as if he knew what lay ahead.

What was powerful about us joining forces, was that my entrepreneurial skills - learned through years of making shows and improvising - were exactly what was needed to help him make the leap from a careful business school analysis, to producing it like it was the scratch show I performed in the basement of Leicester Square Theatre before taking to the West End and off Broadway in New York - or more recently like the album of improvised songs (Songbirds) I created by going into the streets of Bristol and singing with strangers.

If we'd done it by just counting the beans, we'd never have done it at all.   

The greatest gift that being a writer, producer and artist has given me is to get over my fear of doing something embarrassing. I have failed often and sometimes spectacularly. And I have learned that that is frequently where the good stuff is. You fail, you learn, you get better at doing what you're doing. You step out of your comfort zone and do it again.

A friend recently asked me - when will you know you have arrived? And I laughed. Because as any entrepreneur or artist will tell you, the journey is the destination. And as I go further and further out of my comfort zone, I give myself the same advice I have given myself every time I step onto a stage feeling nervous:

“You have everything you need to do what you need right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here”.