Art Business Ltd: A Business Plan

Art Business Ltd: A Business Plan, by Rachael Clerke and Maddy Costa

Whether you want a business or have a business, you need a plan. A business plan.

But what is a business plan? It’s a strategic document that covers everything from your business structure and key goals to financial projections and unique selling propositions (USPs). A well-crafted business plan details your business’s objectives and the steps you’ll take to achieve them. If you’re seeking investment, planning for growth, want to avoid pitfalls, and to stay on track each day, a business plan is what you need.

Thanks, HSBC guide How To Write a Business Plan for the information there.

HSBC also acknowledge that, while there are guidelines, there is no fixed template for a well-crafted business plan.

This means we can do what we like.

Introducing: the all-new, on-track, uniquely projecting business plan for Art Business Ltd (financial year 2024-5) as (not exactly) discussed by Rachael Clerke and Maddy Costa

Part 1: Business concept

Clearly articulate your business’s core concept. Consider your unique selling proposition (USP): this is what sets you apart from the competition. Highlighting your USP could attract potential investors.

Rachael: Art Business Ltd is a company, limited by guarantee, that I’ve set up to be a formal container for my art practice – like how someone might set up a theatre company. It’s also a performance of a business, specifically an art business, specifically my art business. It has a website and a bank account and a logo. It also has a work uniform and an official song and a dance – the Dance of Professionalisation for Survival that I’ve been making with Clara Potter-Sweet. It’s the back end of my practice as an artwork in its own right.

Maddy: What’s interesting about that synopsis is that it doesn’t include any of the technical stuff that you’ve told me about, setting up systems for the back end – systems for invoicing, for updating the website, for capturing data – which to me sounds like a nightmare of excruciating boredom. Online, Art Business Ltd looks like parody, but when you talk about it, it feels incredibly serious.

Rachael: I have a complicated relationship with seriousness. I’m taking the piss out of the boring aspects of running a business, but actually this is about what it means to work in an industry that doesn’t work under capitalism, while living under late capitalism. What I want to know is: how can we support each other to work inside these terrible systems while not giving up everything for them? How can we create new systems that are non-hierarchical? It doesn’t feel very easy for me to announce those things because my happy place is doing a parody of the corporate business world. But really that’s what I’m trying to do, and I do want this to be useful and – not earnest, I hate things that are earnest – sincere.

Part 2: Company information and organisational structure

Outline your business’s organisational structure. Identify the owners, management team, and any key employees.

Maddy: When artist Rhiannon Armstrong describes the work carried out by Rhiannon Armstrong Inc, she lists the staff members – the finance person, the producer, the HR person, it’s about 20 roles – and all of those jobs are done by Rhiannon Armstrong.

Rachael: That’s great. I’ve decided to be CEO of Art Business, just because it’s funny. But is that the right job? We have all these shortcuts with job titles. Some of them – like performer – fine, we know what they mean. But when people say producer, who knows what that job is?

It’s easy to muddle along without asking too many questions. I’m interested in defining some things as a way of making them clearer to myself, and changing to a business structure forces me to actually work through the questions I’m asking. Obviously I’m overdoing it – that’s the fun of it – but I’m also interested in how, if you have a company and it’s listed with Companies House, your actions are public and therefore have to be done in a certain way. I have ways that I work with young people but if I have to write a policy, what does that do?

Maddy: Given that there are thousands of versions of that policy, is the writing of those documents just giving yourself bullshit jobs (TM David Graeber)? I also loathe the way policies and paperwork become the “body” of the business, replacing the human bodies of the people who work there.

Rachael: Sure, but most of the gatekeepers in our industry can hide behind companies, behind businesses – whereas I’m always having to interact just as myself. I’m making work, self-producing, I’m in my own work generally, and also my work often talks about the politics of work and of money. I’m sick of being just myself: I want to be able to hide behind a company. But that feels slightly illicit. I’m using QuickBooks now for my invoices: I fill in the invoice and press send, and it arrives with a note that says “thank you for shopping with Art Business”. I don’t have to write a friendly message, and even that gives me a little rush of something that I’m interested in.

I’ve been thinking about what I can do as a company that I’m not allowed to do as an individual artist. Advisory boards: asking people you feel are important in their field to give their time voluntarily to be invested in you would seem like the most egotistical thing that you could do as an individual artist. But it feels fine for Art Business to do that, even though it’s just me.

Maddy: What is that difference? Or, why would a personal support system like The Hologram be “right” for an individual but not a business? Is it because, in the language of business, a human is a resource?

Part 3: Industry overview

This is where you demonstrate that you understand your industry and market. Your broad view of your industry can include its size, growth rate, trends, and outlook.

Rachael: When I was in my early twenties, I was very serious about having a theatre company (Clerke and Joy with Josephine Joy), getting funding, touring to venues, playing the game. Not uncritically, but that was the professional path that I could see. More recently, I’ve been in a phase of DIY and anti-professionalisation, thinking about what alternative economies we can create. I’ve managed more or less to be annoying and outspoken and still get work because people like it when you’re annoying, which is funny. But I’m pretty sure I’ve only been able to do that because I did enough of the first thing.

Having a few years away from theatre made me realise how much of how it works is absurd. I don’t think tours are getting booked through sending tour packs to venues, but it’s like this dance we’re all in where that’s how you do it. And I don’t want to engage in that system of hustling. When I was booking dates for Work Party for Cheats, I just emailed everyone and said: these are the dates that are available, this is how much it costs, pick your day. We didn’t have to have any back and forth, and everyone was so relieved. But again, you couldn’t do that if no one knew your work, so it’s not really a solution.

Maddy: All that hustling is so much work – and, for independent artists, work that is invisible and unpaid. Unless you make it visible – like how producer Jo Crowley greys out sections in her Arts Council application budgets which describe the unpaid labour required even to get to the point of applying for money.

Rachael: I see people burning out front and centre, myself included. These systems are very difficult to challenge. If Structurally Fucked didn’t completely derail the publicly funded arts, I don’t think I can.

So what things can I create that are bolsters for navigating this environment? And can I make that useful for other people – not just for artists, but for gatekeepers and institutions as well? One of the things I want to do is write report cards about every open call that I apply to, scoring them on the quality of the questions, how long it took to complete, things like that. People won’t like that because I’ll publish them online. But if they choose to engage then it might actually be helpful because no one ever feeds back on these things. It feels so risky to feed back – like you’re bitter at not getting it.

I have a question: in my experience it’s almost always marginalised people – people of colour, trans people, queer people, disabled people, women – who are doing this work of creating alternative systems. Why is that?

Maddy: That’s come up in another project I’ve been documenting, Imagining Futures. It’s a network of festival directors trying to imagine what more collective and collaborative working might look like. The whiteness of the industry is visible in the group – but everyone around that table is also queer and/or disabled and/or female. We know that a different way of doing this has to be imagined, because otherwise we’re stuck with a system which definitely isn’t working, for anyone really. Even the big institutions are barely surviving.

Rachael: And lots of small organisations don’t survive once they become NPOs. People start their grassroots thing, they grow it, they become an NPO and so move away from art as something that is non-commodifiable, then they have a team, they’ve got wages to pay, then they lose the NPO and they fold the company. That’s not what sustainability looks like to me.

Part 4: Growth highlights

Describe how your business has grown since inception, including financial or market highlights.

Rachael: I feel very strongly about artists being able to work outside of institutions, and think I’ve found some ways to make small art that way: stuff like Subscription Business, or projects selling merch. But I don’t know how you make bigger art through DIY. Across 2025 I’ll be part of a university research programme called Creative Organisations Change Labs: the call-out was for creative companies who are interested in less capitalist ways of operating, diverse economies that aren’t growth-based or profit-based.

Maddy: Diverse economies being?

Rachael: Have you seen the iceberg diagram by the feminist economists JK Gibson-Graham? Above the water you have waged capitalist structures and finance, then below the water you have everything else: child-minding, swapping, sharing, mutual aid, black market, stories, stealing – those are the diverse economies. But the thing is, everyone in this programme is actually saying: we already operate in anti-capitalist ways. We come from DIY art culture, our work isn’t capitalist and isn’t following these growth models. What we want to do is formalise and make more money and play the system – survive – without selling out. But how?

Part 5: Services and target market

If you provide services, describe them in detail. Define who your customers are and what kinds of message they are likely to respond to. Not understanding your target market can lead to unrealistic assumptions and strategies.

Rachael: When I started out making performance in the early 2010s, it felt like a heyday of going to festivals where all this amazing performance work was being made, but people would be really rude about each other’s work being “art for artists”. They’d say “they’re just making that for other artists” as if that was the worst thing they could do.

Maddy: Tanuja Amarasuriya wrote an excellent text in 2014 [no longer online] disputing the separation between “artists” and “real people”, and the desire to “know what real people think of my work”. She said it “demeans everyone; it dismisses theatre-makers as phoneys and patronises non-professionals as less informed”.

Rachael: Yes! My friend Paul Paschal told me a great story about an artist collective in New York called Group Material who put on an exhibition of objects given by people who lived in the neighbourhood. An interviewer asked one of the artists, “what do the public think about it?”, and the artist said: “Well we are the public and we LOVE it.” There’s pleasure in the taboo of making art for artists: how great might it be if we actually did that well, making art for people that like art.

Maddy: So who is Art Business for?

Rachael: Me! Which feels uncomfortable, because these days I’m mainly understood as a socially engaged artist who works with marginalised communities and children. Usually when I come up with systems they’re for other people to use. In 2025 I have monthly dates with Old Diorama hosting Work Party for Cheats: I love holding that workshop and people say they get a lot out of it – but I've never been able to take part in it.

To give the website, the accounts, the admin, the energy that I would give an arts project has been really satisfying. Because I’m always doing these things anyway: the business parts are always happening in the cracks and you’re not supposed to talk about them or think about what would make them better or what would make them work for you. I’ve had a website in some form or other since 2010 or 11, so the fact that the Art Business website updates automatically from information I put into a google sheet, and that system – which I designed with artist and coder Suzanna Hurst – works really well, I love it.

I’ve been funded to set up an Art Business School as part of this year of work, but I haven’t done it, I think because I’m reluctant to make something for other people with Art Business before I’m able to do it for myself. I’d still love to do the School – but in three years’ time, not now.

Part 6: Measurement

Define how you’ll measure the success of your business efforts. This could be through key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, etc. Your strategy should be flexible: as you learn more about your market and customers, adjust your strategies accordingly.

Rachael: I’m trying to resist a desire to curate the data. I was having a really good time getting ready for the launch event and thought, what if I have too many good days in a row and people think it’s not hard being an artist? But then last week I had quite a few bad work days in a row, and then the next day when there were good bits and bad bits – which there always are – I thought, I should put it down as a good day overall because it’ll look like I’m grumpy or miserable otherwise. That feeling of responsibility to be an example comes from the way that our data is used by funders. In 2024 we understand much more than people used to that our data is storytelling.

Maddy: Where does data collection sit in relation to the culture of bullshit jobs?

Rachael: Data collection feels way, way less bullshit than a lot of the emails I send, or the amount of applications that are badly designed, or the meetings I have with people who apparently want to book my work but don’t have any money but want to have a meeting anyway. I don’t think I’d want to do it for ever but right now the data collection is interesting, because it’s making me think loads about what work is and what art is. I do a lot of things in my work day that are not the bits of my practice that people see, and often those are the things that make my days feel good and creative. Like I spent a whole week making my partner’s 40th birthday presents; in that week I was also doing a few things that I would think of as “work” – I’d have a meeting or reply to a few emails – and I realised I was quantifying the whole day based on the one hour that I would spend on my admin, rather than on creative making. Even in this art practice, there’s an idea that work should be the thing that you are obligated to do, and not the thing that you want to do.

Maddy: This raises the question: what does resistance look like in a creative practice? Especially when a creative practice is arguably 24/7: if every book you read is part of the work of making art, everything you go to see, every conversation that you have, if you’re even attending to your dreams, how is it possible to delineate hours of work?

Rachael: This is such a weird thing to come out of this process, but I feel like my hardline workers’ rights moment is over. I moved away from certain forms of left-wing organising because it was full of annoying men who’d been Marxist teenagers, but also because it’s really difficult to apply that stuff to making art. You can apply it in a theoretical way, but once you start to get into what these Marxist theories are advocating for, I think I am undermining that all of the time.

On the outside Art Business has made me look much more workers’ rights-y: I’ve been sending people links to the Bank of England inflation calculator and asking them to pay me more. It seems like I am quantifying these things, and I am. But I’m not working for some horrible machine: I’m working for myself. And if you are making art, even if you are on a salary or paid to make art, you are doing piecework, and if the piecework is shit then you won’t get to do more of it. The measure is quality, not time.

It’s probably an unrealistic desire but I really want to not feel overwhelmed and out of control all of the time. I want the performance of Art Business to take place for a year, but I want the company Art Business to continue beyond that. And I need it to work, because ultimately I do have something to protect. I want to keep doing this, and to do it in a way that makes me enough money to make a semi-reasonable living and have a kid. So how we could think about this in a different way? Like, what’s the sweet spot between a favour and a service?

Maddy: But also, how can you live through the principles of mutual aid and still get the bills paid?

Part 8: Financial forecast and future plans

You need to have a clear understanding of your financial needs, cash-flow projections, and profitability forecasts. This is particularly important if you’re seeking funding: it shows potential investors or lenders that you have a solid understanding of the financial aspects of running a business. Clearly outline how your business will make money: not doing so can raise red flags and damage your credibility.

Rachael: Part of the idea of setting up Art Business was to find a way to make more money but that absolutely hasn’t happened. Which is kind of entertaining to me. I worked a lot in 2023 and for the first time ever saved a bit of money, plus I had a grant to set the company up, so I spent February to June 2024 mainly on this, setting up systems, organising the launch. I was having such a good time I forgot to line up any other work and had to spend what I’d saved, so from June I had no money and had to go into summer hustling. I got lots of work, but the classic irony is that it was mainly running workshops about money, artists’ rights and work, for organisations. I love doing that, but it’s so raw when you’ve only taken the gig because you've got no money, especially when you then burn out from the hustle and overwork.

Maddy: So basically the performance of business reveals the reality of business, which is that you don’t make any money from the performance of business. I’m curious how we get to a place where work is towards the practice of living rather than towards making money for other people – be that an institution or a landlord. I love that all of the systems you’re setting up are fundamentally about creating space for living rather than building things for capitalism.

Rachael: Yes but I still want to make Art Business real. I haven’t written a constitution, I haven’t set up a board, I haven’t filed any accounts yet. I need some actual business support if I’m going to make that happen. It’s almost like a situation where having a patron would be ideal. Having a rich person who really believes in you, who says: I’m going to pay you a wage, do what you want, I’m interested to see what you do.

Maddy: But then that upholds the system of inequality – and it’s the same system that stopped art from being a practice of living 500 years ago and made it a commodity. I know why it’s a dream for so many of us but also we need new dreams.

Rachael: We need Universal Basic Income.

Maddy: And no landlords.

Conclusion: Executive summary

Rachael: There’s still a part of me that thinks, what if we all admitted this is really stupid and inefficient and exhausting? Then we could get somewhere.

Remember: a business plan is a living document that should evolve with your business as it grows and changes. You don’t write these things once, put them in a drawer and forget about them. You need to rewrite them regularly, year after year, revise and rethink, for as long as the business survives.

Appendix One: SWOT analysis

A good business SWOT has a deep understanding of their business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

a. Strengths and Opportunities

Rachael: I have an Arts Business uniform, part of it is a little waistcoat jacket that I can wear over the top of whatever I’m wearing. Recently I went to Nottingham and had a meeting with a curator, she’s a friend of a friend who’s seen and liked my work, so we went for a coffee but I could tell that neither of us knew if it was a meeting or not. I’d organised it, so I should have decided whether it was a meeting or not, but I didn’t really know. I had the waistcoat with me but I didn’t put it on, I just had it on my knee the whole time. And when I left I thought: that’s perfect. It’s a really good example of how this project is asking me to find clarity or reject clarity in ways that feel helpful or interesting.

b. Weaknesses and Threats

Rachael: Setting up a company might have been a really bad idea. In lots of ways it’s not a clever or practical thing to do. It might be costing me loads more money because now I have another bank account and I need to keep a bit of a buffer in it. I’ve got this mad diagram for working out what goes in and out of my bank account and what goes in and out of the Art Business bank account. And unless I put myself on PAYE and do all of my work through Art Business, I still have to be a sole trader. So technically I’m not The Artist Formerly Known as Sole Trader – well, I am, but I am also secretly still Sole Trader Rachael Clerke. Is it a problem calling myself “formerly known as” when I am also actually the sole trader? I did a quick google search of “can I call myself CEO of a business I’m the director of” and the answer seemed to be yes but I don’t really know what it means, and there genuinely might be a question about whether I pay business tax or – actually I think I’ll have to pay both. I’m really hoping that none of this kicks me in the arse.

Appendix Two: Inventory

This document was compiled by Maddy Costa with editorial support from Rachael Clerke from the following materials:

Four conversations between Rachael and Maddy, on 3 April 2024, 4 June 2024, 19 November 2024 and 6 February 2025.

Three voice notes from Rachael, sent on 1 May 2024 and 24 May 2024.

Plus the various online documents linked in the notes.

Maddy was paid a flat fee of £500, which we both agreed could not possibly represent the amount of work that would be required, despite Rachael’s desire not to take the piss. It has been written from that sweet spot between service and favour, commission and mutual interest, work and love.

Notes

HSBC UK: How to write a business plan, posted 24 April 2024 https://www.business.hsbc.uk/en-gb/insights/starting-a-business/how-to-write-business-plan#business-plan-format

More on Rhiannon Armstrong (Inc): https://www.rhiannonarmstrong.net/

Work Party for Cheats is a workshop/structure where participants swap uncompleted tasks with others: https://rachaelclerke.com/Work-Party-for-Cheats

David Graeber’s “work rant” on bullshit jobs – indispensable: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Info on the Hologram: https://thehologram.xyz/

Info on Imagining Futures: https://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/en/kul/erp/imf.html

Structurally Fucked – EVERYONE read this: https://static.a-n.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Structurally-F%E2%80%93cked.pdf

The diverse economies iceberg: https://www.communityeconomies.org/resources/diverse-economies-iceberg

More on Group material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Material

Useful primer on mutual aid: https://www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/