Relationships with Money

If you have increased hesitation in your answers to these questions, there may be areas in your relationship with money that need strengthening. Taking action on this issue is critical to the long-term durability of the creative hub.

The starting point should be to map costs and revenues. This is often a dramatic and shocking exercise. Costs should be considered in three layers:

• Fixed expenses that are incurred regularly every month,

• Investments made in the past but still create a burden (for example, sunk costs such as space investment),

• Additional costs that are not yet an active expense but are part of your core business to support your community and mission.

Making these costs visible, creating a rough budget forecast, and regularly updating this data, especially in high-inflation economies, is a critical muscle development for a creative hub manager, at least as critical as creative production.

The second step is to diversify your sources of income. A common feature of resilient hubs is that they are not dependent on a single source. If all revenue comes from a single source, the risk is high. Large initial projects or large funds may provide short-term comfort, but this can lead to permanent increases in costs and an unsustainable structure. Many hub founders we spoke to said they fell into this trap early on.

Creative hubs can be more resilient when this diversification is considered to generate revenue from the community. For example:

• Developing rental models for different uses by dividing the space into smaller pieces,

• Issuing tickets for events,

• Establishing a subscription system for a good information product,

• Provide small-scale, accessible training and support programs to community members.

• Developing individual counseling and community support services.

It is common for most creative hubs to have income problems in the communities they aim to support, meaning that the purchasing power of the community is often weak. However, this does not mean that a financial relationship with the community cannot be established. On the contrary, in resilient creative hubs, commercial models developed with the community create long-term and solid relationships, while systems supported by external resources are often short-lived and erode durability.

Therefore, it is critical to produce creative solutions when developing products and services for communities with limited purchasing power. Instead of blindly adhering to generally accepted prices in the market, it is necessary to develop models that are easily accessible to people, have low unit prices but can provide sustainable income in total thanks to economies of scale. Creating such solutions not only strengthens your revenue model, but also makes your relationship with the community more balanced and mutually beneficial.

At this point, designing a creative commercial model that is unique to your hub and fits the realities of your community is a critical step for long-term sustainability.

Trying to sustain programs that the community cannot financially support solely with sponsorships carries a similar risk. The private sector or international organizations may support these programs for a certain period of time; however, what is really important is how the community will sustain itself if this support is cut off. For example, will a community that has grown with sponsorship be able to provide resources for other communities in the future? Or will the hub be able to sustain this structure with its own revenue models when the support period ends?

Therefore, in sponsored systems, it is vital to establish not only the initial financing but also an exit strategy from the outset that will enable the program to stand on its own two feet, in order to ensure long-term durability.

Corporate consulting in areas you specialize in can be an attractive source of income. However, the short-term comforting effect of corporate work can cause a creative hub to turn into a consulting firm over time. Therefore, it is important to keep corporate projects limited and remain true to the hub's core creative and social mission.

If necessary, classical financing tools such as bank loans can also be evaluated. Small-scale and manageable financing methods, especially for progress in human resources or technical infrastructure, can increase resilience.

For many creative hubs, grant programs are a top source of income diversification. However, grant programs are often tied to a specific theme or goal. These goals may not always align with the hub’s own priorities. This creates two main risks:

• The Hub deviates from its own purpose and is shaped according to funding conditions,

• Deterioration of cash flow due to slowness and conditionality in fund flows.

Before applying for a grant, it is important to ask these questions:

• Is this program distracting us from our own mission?

• Do the terms of this financing contribute to our long-term resilience?

Poorly designed grant programs do not provide the expected cash flow; project delivery and reporting processes can eventually undermine your primary focus. It is important to be patient until you find the right funding. Instead of acting with the feeling of “we are missing something”, it is necessary to remain true to the question of “what do we want to achieve”.

As we take all of these steps, it is important to constantly remember one fundamental question: Is our income getting us closer to our goal or further away?

Answer : Yes. It’s clear that creative hubs need to have both a social and commercial mission to fulfill their critical role in the ecosystem. So if you choose to do this, learning how to make money is not a choice, it’s a necessity.

Your relationship with money is directly related to your individual skills as a creative hub founder or manager. To hold a mirror up to yourself in this area, you can ask yourself these questions:

• Ability to prepare sales and offers,

• Business model and revenue design skills,

• Budget planning and cost management reflex

• Capacity to think strategically and make long-term plans, flexibility and clarity in operational steps such as collection and payment tracking.

If you are weak in these skills, it is important to establish support lines. Sometimes an entrepreneur friend, sometimes a family member with financial experience, or sometimes the right business partner can help you fill in the gaps in these areas.

However, it should not be forgotten that some of these reflexes must be present in the founders/managers or must develop there over time, because these areas are too critical to be delegated from outside.

When identifying the things you can't do, it's important to ask yourself two questions: Is it because you really can't do them? Or is it because you don't like doing them? Your honest answers to these questions will help you identify steps you can take to strengthen your resilience.