InPress ...By Invitation Only

So last night we our event and it was really successful and we couldn't be happier. A lot of people turned up, enjoyed themselves and bought some prints and T-shirts. We also got a lot of great feedback, people asked us when our next one is going to be and for our website. We have a few orders for extra T-shirts and prints to fulfil, including one large one- 100 band T-shirts (their design) which we are charging £3 a piece, a total of £300.

As people are keen to go to more of our events, we have set up a Facebook page as our website won't be up and running for a while yet.

 

 

The manager of the Library pub (where our event was held) has also asked us to hold a monthly event there. This is very flattering and this is something we are going to discuss. However, I like the idea of it being a bit less often so that we have more time to actual design work as well. 

InPress ...Organising Accounts

When Francesca went home at the weekend she went to my Dads desk and looked at how he organised all his accounts, he is self employed and runs his own business which is the same as we will be when working in InPress, she found the key to how it keeps on top of
it all is organisation....

 

 

Everything is in it own folder, clearly labelled.

 

 

All the invoices for the jobs he does are filled in order so can be referenced when 
needed....

 
Also everything that is spent is written down, this is something we tried to do 
with our money book during the run up to our event, making sure that everyone
knew what was being spent on what buy who.

InPress ..Revised Finance

After meeting with the business manager at Natwest Sadie and I decided to revise our figures to follow her advice and make them more accurate.
These are the differences made-

• We are now using the city car club (car rental) instead of using my car.
• We no longer need public liability insurance as we won't be hiring out our equipment.
• We no longer need our own screen printing equipment as we will be using the colleges for the first year.
• We need to pay to register as a limited company.
• We are now hiring an accountant instead of using Sage One.

City car club: £60

Computer rental: £4,288.44

Paper, ink etc: £130.04

Adobe suite: £1,238.40

Business insurance: £30

Professional and product liability insurance: £100

Rent, including bills and internet: £3,420

Solicitor: £70

Computer repairs: £300

Furniture: £110

We got a quote from Nialls dads accountant and also asked him how much it would cost to register as a limited company. These figures don't include VAT, but as we will be VAT registered we would get this back anyway.

Accountant: £850

Register limited: £75

TOTAL: £10,671.88

yearly costings: £10671.88
estimated yearly turnover (based on first 12 months): £90671.88 (earning £20,000 each)
required monthly income: £7555.99

...meaning that collectively we would have to work 76 hrs per month at £100 per hour, which is 19 hours per week.

Charging £25 per hour as individuals we would have to work 302 hours per month between us- 76 hours per week. Which works out as... 19hours per week each.

InPress ...Limited

Sadie has gone on to the Companies House website to download the application form needed to start our business. They also have a very useful FAQ page.

http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk

Here is the application form that needs to be filled out and sent to Companies House.

InPress ..Company Name Availability

Now that we decided to make our company limited, I decided to check our name availability in the UK. The website warned that there were some similar names which might mean that the application for ours may be rejected by Companies House. I don't think this will be a problem, as none of the companies mentioned are graphic design studios.

http://www.ukincorp.co.uk/company_formation_name_check/default.aspx

InPress ..Meeting with Natwest Business Manager

Today Sadie and I went to Natwest to have a chat with their business manager. She was a lovely lady, extremely helpful and gave us some great tips for starting up our business. She didn't really have any criticism over the figures that we showed her except that we may be aiming a bit high charging £100 an hour. So we decided to say that we will charge £25 an hour per designer, as not all four designers will be working on a project at one time.

She also mentioned that we should be a limited company as our estimated yearly turnover is £89,074 which goes over the VAT registration threshold (£73,000) we will then have to be VAT registered, the best way to deal with this is to get an accountant. We will also have to register our company by filling out a form IN01 application to register a company and send to Companies House along with a registration fee.

She also mentioned that our figures on car insurance, tax and MOT can't go through the company books unless its a company car. We decided that instead we will use city car club, as we won't need a car the majority of the time as we are based quite close to the train station.

She told us to take advantage of anything free, which reminded us that we are able to use the college facilities for a year after we graduate. So we do not need to buy any screen printing equipment until we have started to make an income, this will cut down our start up cost by about £300.

She said to take advantage of any chances to do work experience, whether it be doing free design work to get ourselves known both as individuals and as a collective or working in studios to watch them, learn how they run and even learn from their mistakes.

She told us about the Leeds uni and Met business sectors that offer advice and mentorship. Here are a few other names, websites and places she told us to check out.

Spark and business innovations- Barry Blake

Yorkshire enterprise- Owen Jackson 079515293865, 01132470000

Chamber and Government are trustworthy places to get loans

Natwest.com- start up business.

InPress Presentation Prep

Today we all sat down and started mapping out our presentation. We decided that Sadie and Niall are going to be the main speakers and we will all answer questions at the end. We made notes for each slide, outlining roughly what we are going to talk about. There are ten slides in total each for a different aspect of our research-

1. Logo and advertisement
2. Competition
3. SWOT analysis
4. PEST analysis
5. Funding
6. Studio space
7. Equipment
8. Finance
9. Marketing and promotion
10. Summary of previous nights event

Doing this also prompted us to finalise any research that was missing. Sadie and I researched more into funding and what loans and bursaries would be available to us. This is what we found.

There is a grant scheme by Leeds city council that helps out small businesses starting up. You have to be an established business for at least 6 months, so it would be good for upgrading our equipment once we have our studio up and running. As most of our equipment is going to be second hand or made by ourselves, this would be very useful.

Loans of up to £5,000 are also available for people to help finance the initial stage of their businesses.

befund.org is another website that offer different loans to new businesses. They have low rates and also offer mentorship included in the cost of loan.

They also provide a calculator to work out your credit, this could be very helpful to people handling their own finances for the first time.

80th Birthday Invites

My nan is having a surprise 80th birthday party and my auntie has asked me to design the invites. After designing my sisters wedding invitations, I realised I could do this and took up the offer straight away. She sent me the details and the menu; as people needed to choose what meal they wanted I needed to provide a reply card alongside the invite. So this is what I came up with....

I realised that my target audience would be a slightly older generation, so I chose to back the invited with handmade paper which had flowers pressed into it as I thought this would appeal to them. I also provided a little reminder to reinforce the fact that it was a surprise (these old people do have forgetful memories, sometimes!)

InPress... PEST analysis

Francesca's task was to complete the PEST analysis, this is what she found...

Francesca found this template for a PEST analysis on Business Balls. com, it suggests that you do the PEST analysis before the SWOT analysis because the PEST can inform a SWOT analysis. She is going to use this as a guide when writing the PEST analysis for our company.
http://www.businessballs.com/

Political

-We aim to be an environmental aware company, which
 as a print based company in our current ecologically aware
 climate, is an important issue.

-Arts Council England (ACE) is having its budget cut by almost 30%
 in the government's Spending Review. Which may impact on our
 possible funding and start up costs.

-http://www.defra.gov.uk/- The UK government department responsible
 for policy and regulations on the environment, food and rural affairs.

Economical

 -Economic climate-currently in a bad way, banks may be reluctant
 to give out loans, people reluctant to buy our products/pay for our
 services. How can we make money but still be affordable to our clients.

-The euro zone crisis- may effect trading with other European countries

 and affect our economy. May effect us if we are importing products 

or working with clients in countries that are effected.

Social

 -Print is making a come back, people like to have something they can
 hold and keep. We want to design affordable, good quality prints people
 will want to have. This seems to be growing trend at the moment within
 graphic design.

-We have seen the success of print related events, with the recent Leeds

 Print festival and the interest and excitement that surround it, showing
 print is not dead.

- In our current working situations as students, some of us with part time jobs,

 we have not a lot to loose and minimal commitments and ties, so it works out

 to be a good time to set up a business for us.

Technological

-We all have use of MAC computers, cameras and printers but if we are
 going to be specialist print based companies we need to match our
 competitors by investing in the specialist equipment.

-A lot of more traditional styles of printing have come back into fashion
 so we need to find a way of obtaining some of these to use for our work
. Including letterpress, screenprinting, etc.

-We would need to pay for the Adobe software for each of our MACS,
 which will cost a substantial amount; we will need to also buy all the fonts we use throughout our work for legality reasons.

InPress ...Our Competition

We have done our research on companies that are similar to ours and
do the sort of thing we ourselves would like to do in our business
InPress. The 3 design studios we have decided to focus on are
Catalog, Factory 4, and CRAFT (our fellow class entrepreneurs!)

 

 

Catalog are a print based company, set up in central Leeds, above our some photos of their studio.
They do they own in house t-shirt screen printing which is something we would like to do
in our studio, a lot of their equipment was made themselves to save money which is 
a great idea to slash start up costs.
http://www.thisiscatalogue.co.uk/

Factory 4 is a creative workshop which is open to the public where they can 
come along and learn and use the print facilities, they have in house screen
printing beds which is something we would like to do.

Having screen printing facilities in house is something we would like to 
specialise in and having them open for public use is another way of making money.
I have looked at Factory 4's prices to get an idea how much them charge.....
'Hire of the space is £5 an hour, or £20 for 5 hours,'  

Craft is a design studio being set up by four of our fellow course mates- Charlotte Bourke, Luke O'Brien, Max Gregory and Joe Warburton. We had a look at some of their research posted on their blogs and discovered that they were considering renting out studio space in the same space as us. They would be major competitors being in the same building, also the fact that we would be launching our studios at the same time would make it very competitive.

InPress ...Final Costings

So Sadie and I sat down together with some big pieces of paper to makes notes on and set about working out our annual turnover, income and out-goings. We used the sheet which we previously filled out with Bridget as a basis to ensure we covered all costs necessary.

There were some costings which needed to be taken into consideration but required us to already have a figure for our annual turnover (i.e. Business insurance, liability insurance), but to get this we needed to know the figures we were trying to find (a vicious cycle!) ....

So we just simply estimated these costs based on what Bridget had told us.

We decided that we would need two desks and computer chairs (for our two iMacs), one sofa, a large table to work on and a filing cabinet. Rather than buying all brand new furniture we decided to look on the following website to see what we could get for free or at a reduced price....

Wood to build our wash basin in!

We decided to get our desks for our studio from IKEA as they are fairly cheap and will be more reliable to hold our Macs on! 

...we wanted to buy this and transform it into a wash basin for the screens with the wood on freecycle. 

We also looked on Preloved and Gumtree to see what they had to offer...

....after a little research we decided we had found what we needed on Freecycle and didn't need anything from these two.

 

We then had a little look into solicitors. However, we decided to stick with Bridget's advice and use a package....

Firstly we looked at Sage One Cashbook ...this works out at £5/month. However, we soon realized that for an extra £5/month we could upgrade to the Sage One Accounts. This would also provide us with online access to our account and online help. It is aimed at company's with 1-5 people, so it is perfect for InPress and a lot cheaper than hiring an accountant.

We then got onto look at public liability insurance and business insurance...

MOT: £40
Tax: £120
Car insurance: £385
Business insurance: £30
Professional and product liability insurance: £100
Public liability insurance: £35
Rent including bills and internet: £3,420
Accountant software: £144
Solicitor: £70
Computer repairs: £300
Equipment- computer rental, screens etc: £4,320
Furniture: £110


When all added up this makes our yearly outgoings £9,074, minus the materials and printing costs.
We decided that £100 an hour would be a reasonable price to charge, considering that their is four of us so the work will get done more quickly. We thought that the best way would be to charge the client material and printing costs, as it may vary from customer to customer.

Assuming that we want to earn around £20,000 a year each, this would mean our estimated yearly turnover is £89,074.
This would make our required monthly income £7,423, which would mean we would have to work at least 75hrs per month at £100 an hour plus cost of materials and printing.

We also decided that we would all earn the same wage, owning a 25% stake in the company each.



After, doing our calculations we then decided it would be best to give Jane a quick email to run the figures by her....