News
The business of learning
Published 15.08.07
CIDS and Winning Pitch have both been running programmes designed to help creative businesses up skill on nuts and bolts issues.
Since February of this year, CIDS have been offering a helping hand to ambitious creative businesses in the form of Loop Academy – a series of four half-day seminars covering the tricky issues of Leadership & Management, Pitching & Selling, Building Company Structures and Finance & Funding. With a third series running as this issue of CT hits your letterbox, we’ve had time to gather feedback on the first two and, even if we do say so ourselves, the response has been resoundingly positive. “The Loop Academy is one of the most relevant and useful things that Code has ever experienced from CIDS, successfully making it work for all types of agencies,” said Tony Foggett of award winning Code Computerlove.
The Loop Academy isn’t just about learning though, it’s about networking too. However you feel about the ‘n’ word, networking can play an important part in developing your business. There are at least five reported instances of Loop Academy companies collaborating on client projects as a direct result of meeting on the programme and Lewis Horton of Ignition, for one, reports that he “finally feels part of a creative industry.”
CIDS have also been working with Winning Pitch, the Manchester-based management consultancy, to provide another academy for creative businesses - this time helping them develop clear business strategies and hone those all-important selling skills. The Winning Business Academy is a joint venture between Winning Pitch and the University of Manchester Incubator Company and has so far seen ten creative businesses graduate, with another programme to follow in the coming months.
“The Winning Business Academy has helped us create a coherent vision and strategy across our studios. One-to-one support has meant that our business plan and strategy has been developed especially for Smoothe, making it totally relevant to what we do. It’ll be exciting to look back in a year and see whether we’ve achieved the goals set out for us,” said Samantha Crothers of Smoothe, one of the participating companies.
For more information on Loop Academy contact Andrew Birley at CIDS:
T: 0161 827 9742
E: andrew@cids.co.uk
Contact Winning Pitch for more on the Winning Business Academy:
T: 0161 918 6785
W: www.winning-pitch.co.uk
