If you could go back to the start, when you were just beginning your creative business or even your creative practice, what advice would you give yourself?
Do this. Don’t do that. Make a U-turn? Double down and go faster?
Earlier this year, I met actor and podcaster Nell Nakkan, who has built a collection of content around these questions. Her motivation for doing so is, in part, a desire to go back to the start and give her earlier self a bit of advice before embarking on a career in film and TV. Let’s face it: who wouldn’t want to avoid a few potholes along the creative industries road?
Hence her drive to create events, resources and content under the brand How to be a Savvy Creative, including a podcast series where she’s working her way systematically through topics like sales, marketing, brand and grants. There are eight episodes of this series, and I’m delighted to be on Episode 3, talking about business planning. You can watch it online here, or if you prefer not to see me, the audio version is here. (And also, check out friend of SA, Matt Taylor, talking about what makes creative businesses unique on Episode 2)
Skill gaps in the creative industries mapped
There’s often a lot of talk about skills gaps in the creative industries. But details about which skills are missing and which industries they apply to can be hard to find. In the UK, the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Creative PEC) and Work Advance have released a comprehensive report (enormous, in fact) that provides a deep dive into current skills challenges, recruitment hurdles, and future needs across the creative economy.
Assuming you don’t have a week to read the whole thing, here are a few quick takeaways for you.
- When creative employers struggle to fill vacancies, it is rarely due to a lack of qualifications. 72% of hard-to-fill vacancies are caused by a lack of required skills.
- Success in the sector requires a kind of “alchemy” that blends technical and digital capabilities with vital “transversal” skills (like planning, adaptability, and communication) and business-critical acumen (such as marketing, client management, and fundraising).
- The biggest talent gaps are at the mid-career level. While much of the industry’s policy discourse focuses on entry-level pathways, the reality inside creative businesses is quite different.
- In many sub-sectors, professionals are advancing into senior roles without the necessary training to develop their management or strategic skills.
- Technological advancement is rapidly changing the skills required in the creative industries. 23% of companies attribute their skills gaps to the introduction of new technology.
As ever, it’s difficult to generalise in a field as broad and varied as the Creative Industries, but thankfully there are specific reports for 11 subsectors: advertising and marketing; architecture; crafts; design and designer fashion; IT, software and computer services; museums, galleries and libraries; music; performing and visual arts; publishing; screen industries and video games. Jump into those for intel about your particular creative specialty.
Grab popcorn, tune out
Who doesn’t love a trip to the movies, particularly one not interrupted by a ring tone, or marred by the eerie blue light of someone looking at their phone? Turns out there’s a movement away from second-screening while enjoying the silver screen. According to a recent piece in The Guardian by Alfie Packham, filmgoers born between 1997 and 2012 are now out-attending older generations at the box office. A recent US survey revealed that 87% of this age group has visited a cinema in the past year, compared to just 58% of baby boomers. The appeal lies precisely in the cinema being a “distraction-free zone” for a generation umbilically attached to their phones. It’s pure switch-off time.
Ironically, while the cinema offers a break from screens, its popularity is growing through social media. Packham highlights that platforms like TikTok have “romanticised” the physical cinema trip, turning the act of watching films into a shareable aesthetic. The rise of the film-logging app Letterboxd—which now boasts over 26 million users, predominantly aged 18 to 35—has transformed moviegoing into a deeply community-driven activity. The app allows young cinephiles to track their viewing, share reviews, and find recommendations. So cinema might be reinventing itself as a mental-wellbeing experience.
By the way, I have a movie recommendation. Independent Australian film Southerly is available to rent and watch on Amazon Prime and soon on Netflix. Written and directed by Gregory McCann, the film follows Ada, a young musician who flees Melbourne’s 2020 lockdown for a rural coastal property in New South Wales. After waking up in a neighbour’s yard, she discovers a washed-up musician named Josh and his fully functioning music studio. The two embark on an uneasy collaboration that forces them to challenge each other and confront their personal demons. I thought it was smart, funny, and beautifully shot, and I’m only slightly biased as the lead actor, Jimmy Williams, is my nephew. Check it out!
Canva: compete or create?
I recently had the opportunity to speak to members of the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) about running a profitable design business. During our conversation about what’s working and what’s not working in their businesses, inevitably, someone dropped the c-word: Canva. Canva is disrupting the graphic and web design industries, as business and government clients use internal resources to dabble with it. The question that came up in this session was, “How can we compete?”
For me, the answer is another question (typical consultant!): “Is the choice compete or create with Canva?” After all, just because people are using Canva doesn’t mean that they’re doing it well. Designers bring a level of trust to a client relationship that Canva alone can’t, so competing means having a conversation about the skills designers bring that a DIY platform can’t. But then, why not become masters of Canva and work in that platform alongside your clients?
I’m backed up by some other voices on this. Lewis, the Head of Design at rawww.com, writes about how tools do not make good designers. And at Creative Boost, there’s a podcast from 2022 about how to stop worrying and love Canva.
Shock: Radiohead singer is upset
No-one expects sunshine and lollypops from the frontman of Radiohead, but at the 2026 Ivor Novello Awards, Thom Yorke really let fly. He used his induction into the Fellowship of the Ivors Academy to take music executives to task over their failure to support emerging talent. As detailed by Ben Kaye, Yorke condemned the “insane flow of money upwards that leaves nothing but dust for new artists”. He argued that the industry’s focus has shifted away from nurturing fresh talent and toward the “financial frenzy” and inflated valuation of older generations’ back catalogues.
Yorke warned that the music business has become dangerously “risk-averse” and incapable of fostering the very creatives it relies upon to stay relevant. Emphasising that young artists need support and room to make mistakes while learning their craft, he declared that the industry’s current fixation on the “exciting share price of streaming services” is an act of “weird, myopic self-destruction” rather than a true investment in the music sector.
His blunt conclusion to industry leaders—”This industry will die and (you) arseholes with it, if all you do is devalue the next generation of artists and their fans. Just remember: without us, you ain’t shit!”— will probably go down as one of the most quotable comments on this era of disruption in the creative industries. Let’s just hope he’s wrong.
Permission to play with entrepreneurship
Finally: who starts businesses and why? A recent study in the Journal of Business Venturing reveals that individuals experiencing job loss often use entrepreneurship as a coping mechanism. Researcher Angelique Slade Shantz and her team found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, people with a financial safety net frequently chose to “play” with entrepreneurship to explore a new identity or to see where a venture might lead. Rather than pursuing entrepreneurship for survival or wealth generation, these individuals recognised an opportunity in their crisis and reclaimed a sense of control in the process.
The study highlights a psychological process that entrepreneurs go through called a “permission-play cycle”. Rather than rushing impulsively into a new business, these individuals permitted themselves to launch a venture, framing the decision as a “now-or-never moment” to pursue latent passions or as a temporary time-out for experimentation. Even if the new business ultimately failed or the individual decided to return to a traditional job, the entrepreneurial detour was still viewed as worthwhile.
Perhaps it is indeed time to go back to the start. What new idea do you need to permit yourself to play with this month?