BUSINESS WORKSHOPS

Throughout the year Rob and I have been attending the business workshops at university, these workshops have helped us to understand what it is like to work for yourself and run your own business. The workshops have taught us the basics of being a freelancer and what is needed to succeed as a profitable business. Without these workshops, we wouldn't have fully understood how important it is to get these sorts of things right the first time if you can do them right the first time it will benefit us massively in the future. We found that going to these sessions has been able to strengthen our ideas for WYS as we had already considered a lot of the points we were being taught but it gave us the opportunity to ask questions and see how it would work for us. As graphic designers, I that we are already taught to think in a business savvy way but these workshops have been able to help us start learning about business properly. We will be looking to do more business type workshops in the future to help us once we have left LAU. 

Copyright Laws 

• How to use copyright 
• Who owns copyright
• Post-it trick - in order to prove that you were the creator of something you can post it to yourself to prove that you are the original creator (kept sealed).
• How long does copyright last - 70 years
• Copyright restrictions 
• Creative Commons 
• Public domain 
• Moral rights - Paternity/integrity/privacy 

Marketing and PR 

• Building marketing approach 
• 7p's of marketing (Product, price, place, promo, people, physical evidence and process) 
• Understand your product - Who are your competitors and target audience
• Setting objectives - What do we want to achieve
• 40% Marketing 50% Making 10% Admin (time) 
• Features and benefits - Whats in it for the user
• Pricing a service 
• Measuring success 
• Action Plan - Where do we want to be in 6/12/18 months 

Business Structure

• Sole Trader - easy to set up (GOV.UK) easy to go bankrupt 
• Limited (LTD) Company - Has a business structure and business is libable to invadiual
• LLP Limited Liability Partnership 
• Checking business names - Company House website  
• TM - Free to use 
• R - Registration fee 
• Keeping records (Tax, transactions, achieve value, ownership)

Managing Money 

• Budgeting 
• Costing and pricing as an artist
• Cash flow 
• Accounts 
• Overheads - Fixed cost and variable costs
• Research and Development 
• Labour 
• Time costing (what is my time worth) 
• Targets (income)
• Profit and loss 
• Business value