OUGD502 - Taking Care of Business - Goat Collective

A large majority of my friends are creatives and a lot of them are very good at what they do. We came up with an idea to combine all our skills under one collective. We wanted to use our skills to promote social causes that we feel strongly about, as well as working commercially. 

The 'Taking care of business' project was an excellent opportunity to develop this idea further.

 Along with two other members of the collective I attended a week long enterprise course where I learnt invaluable information about the business side of the creative industry. We had visiting speakers from various different places come and spend time with us.
Keith Evans from CIDA talked to us about how viable our idea was and what it means to be a creative entrepreneur. We also looked into various business models such as: sole traders, partnerships, LTD companies, Not for Profit's and various others. With his help we determined that an LLP would be the most suitable for our business. With an LLP there is no rigid hierarchy and it eliminates any risk of bankruptcy. 
We also looked at cashflow with Keith Evans and did some exercises to help us understand this in more depth. 
Nick Scott spoke to us about the importance of writing a solid business plan and how to go about doing this.
Russell Smith, who owns his own accounting firm, came and talked to us about some basic accounting that we would need to know when setting up a business. 
Anna Franks, a marketing a PR consultant spoke to us about effective marketing, some of the notes from this session are shown below.
A lawyer named Keith Arrowsmith spoke to us about intellectual property and copyright laws. This session was probably the one which I found most valuable; protecting Goat Collective's work is hugely important.
We had a session with Rick Ferguson about pitching our ideas, another vital part of any creative business. We then pitched our ideas to the Senior Management Team of Leeds College of Art. This was great practise and we got some really good feedback from it.
Shown below are some of the notes we made during the sessions alongside our partnership agreement.

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