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Calling Bristol creative businesses! There’s still time to join the second round of the Bristol Creative Industries Internship Programme.

In partnership with Babbasa as part of the OurCity2030 Pathway into Creative & Tech, the scheme is a stellar example of how BCI members can come together to fund and deliver a complex programme of internships and training to support some of the region’s most underrepresented young people.

After a successful pilot in 2023 with 14 brilliant agencies, we are now looking for more creative businesses to join our mission. They will support the second cohort of interns during the next phase of this innovative project.

How it works

Onboarding to the programme including guidance and templates around internship structure/workplan.

ED&I, mental health and neurodiversity training with a focus on working with young people from underrepresented groups.

HR support and mentoring from BCI’s dedicated internship programme manager Clare Leczycki.

How to find out more

Join an online information event with Clare Leczycki and some 2023 participants on 1 February at 11am. Register here.

Feedback from agencies on the pilot programme

A robust public relations (PR) and reputation management strategy is paramount in today’s competitive landscape. We invite you to join us for an informative workshop where we will explore the power of PR and provide you with the knowledge to create a PR blueprint for your business.

Hosted by comms experts, this two-hour interactive workshop is designed to equip businesses with the knowledge and tools to leverage positive impact through PR and reputation management for sustainable growth effectively.

Whether you’re a tech start-up, a service provider, or a seasoned entrepreneur, this workshop will provide valuable insights and actionable strategies.

Why PR and reputation management?

Your corporate reputation significantly impacts your bottom line, accounting for 45% to 100% of your business’s success. It’s not just about what you offer but how your organisation is perceived. A strong reputation can distinguish you, attract customers, and create opportunities. This workshop teaches you the art of a game-changing PR strategy.

What to expect:

Get a comprehensive introduction to PR. Understand the foundations of crafting compelling stories and messages that resonate with your target audience.

Learn how to manage and safeguard your brand’s reputation. Discover strategies to deal with crises effectively and emerge stronger.

PR in practice; you’ll apply your knowledge from the session to your business. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have your own three-step PR activation blueprint ready to go.

The 60th anniversary specials of Doctor Who, Jayde Adam’s Ruby Speaking and Daisy May Cooper’s Rain Dogs are among the shows filmed in Bristol that contributed to TV and film production’s £20.1m boost to the local economy in 2022/23.

We’d love to know your favourite Bristol filmed movie or TV show. Send us a post on X at @Bristol_CI.

The new figures from Bristol Film Office show that £20,134,750 inward investment was generated in 2022-23 by 220 recorded productions.

The office assisted 838 filming days on location in the city and at The Bottle Yard Studios, the largest film and TV studio in the West of England.

A total of 502 licenses were issued which allow filming to take place on Council-owned streets, properties and green spaces.

TV and films produced in Bristol

Celebrating 20 years of Bristol Film Office

Bristol Film Office celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. It was founded in 2003 by Bristol City Council to “attract, assist and provide business development opportunities for the moving image industry for the benefit of the city’s economy”.

In total, Bristol Film Office and The Bottle Yard Studios have assisted TV and film production worth an estimated £322m to Bristol’s economy. Its operations have generated more than £2.1m income for Bristol City Council through filming permits and charges.

Bristol, England, UK – 23rd August, 2023 – Marvin Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, visited Torchbox, a purpose lead, B Corp Certified digital agency, and fast-growing, employee-owned (EO) company, to deepen his understanding of EO business models and explore ways the council can proactively assist these unique companies with the challenges they encounter.

“At Torchbox, we’re eager to demonstrate how a business can be profitable and responsible when governed by its workers. We invited Marvin to hear about our journey, how EO companies can be socially responsible, and to encourage others thinking about this route succession.”

Over the last four years, Torchbox has transformed from a founder-led team of 60 to a global employee-driven powerhouse of 150 co-owners. This transition has allowed them to challenge the traditional business model and prove that it’s possible to run a respected, progressive, and financially robust company that values its workforce above all.

Torchbox is deeply committed to diversifying its talent pool, minimising its carbon footprint, and exploring sustainable avenues for business expansion in the US.

Mayor Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, said “It was great to visit the team at Torchbox, and hear about the exciting work being done from their Bristol office. They are another example of the fast-growing and exciting technology sector we have in the city.

“They are doing impressive work, for huge organisations, on an international level. With clients including NASA, Oxfam, the University of Pennsylvania and Tate London, it’s brilliant to see this work coming out of Bristol.

“I’m looking forward to forming a strong working relationship with them and discover ways of integrating Torchboxes’ expertise into Bristol One City, including connecting their academy to more local talented young people.”

“Torchbox has a thriving office in the heart of Bristol. It was fantastic to meet with Marvin to understand how we can work closer with local schemes to give back to the community and help Torchhbox prosper”

The Mayor’s visit times with recent changes in the employee-ownership landscape, including Jeremy Hunt’s proposed overhaul of employee ownership schemes. While these reforms aim to boost participation in Save as You Earn (SAYE) and Share Incentive Plan (SIP), there’s controversy brewing around the proposed tax crackdown on entrepreneurs who transition their companies to Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs).

Career opportunities are available now across many disciplines at Torchbox. Follow @Torchbox for updates on new opportunities.

Torchbox is deeply committed to diversifying its talent pool, minimising its carbon footprint, and exploring sustainable avenues for business expansion in the US.

Career opportunities are available now across many disciplines at Torchbox. Follow @Torchbox for updates on new opportunities.

This summer’s arts trail, Unicornfest, will hit the streets of Bristol on Saturday 1^st July. This extraordinary event promises to captivate both residents and visitors to the city, as 60 beautifully adorned and crafted unicorn sculptures descend upon the streets of Bristol and surrounding area.

Expect to see the streets come alive with incredible sculpture paintings and designs by the likes of renowned artists such as Bo Lanyon, creator of the much-anticipated Golden Unicorn, and Holy Moly in collaboration with notable sponsors including IKEA, First Bus and Maserati

Spanning 55 prominent locations in Bristol and beyond, the arts trail will showcase multiple artists and designs in support of Leukaemia Care.

As part of the 650 Years of Bristol celebrations running this year, after the trail there will be a Farewell to the Unicorns festival at Prop Yard in September followed by an auction of the unicorns in October with proceeds going to the UK charity Leukaemia Care.

The 1^st of July will also see sponsor IKEA, host an exciting and free family fun-day event outside their store in Eastville to spread awareness of the trail and collect further donations. As well as displaying two ‘life-sized’ unicorns, they will also be exhibiting a small herd (or blessing as a group of unicorns is known) of smaller unicorn foals, which have been decorated by local schools.

Families are invited to participate in activities such as face painting, experience the fun of a Victorian fair, unicorn racing, and even seize the chance to get a sneak peek at IKEA’s very own unicorns painted and decorated by artists including Amy Magee.

IKEA’s Marketing and Sustainability Manager, Andrias O Shaughnessy, comments: “We’re so excited to be a part of this amazing project. It’s a great opportunity for myself and the rest of the IKEA team to position ourselves as community partners who are very much involved with initiatives like these, and not just as a corporate company.”

Each unicorn has gone through an incredible journey with its artists and sponsors to achieve the final product.

Among these are sculptures painted by Inkie, Cheba and Silent Hobo and the glorious Golden Unicorn, designed by local artist Bo Lanyon as a mystical creature that shimmers in the sunlight, reflecting the light in a beautiful glow.

Bristol-based artist Bo, shares: “It’s been amazing to be part of this project. Creating this unicorn was an incredible journey as I was able to use different techniques like gilding, an ancient technique stretching all the way back to the Egyptians. It’s a meticulous way of working and converting objects into something precious and special.

I’m excited to see the Golden Unicorn take the streets for everyone to see!”

Around 10,000 people per year are diagnosed with leukaemia, and the UK’s leading leukaemia charity, Leukaemia Care, offers support to them all.

For over 50 years, the organisation has ensured that everyone affected receives the best possible diagnosis, information, advice, treatment and support. Their wide range of support services ensures that people get information, practical and emotional support at the times when they need it. This year, they have funded a hospital support worker within Bristol to be on hand at haematology clinics to give advice and signpost services that actively improve the lives of people living with leukaemia.

Unicornfest is set to raise thousands of pounds for the charity to help continue their work in Bristol and beyond.

The final few sponsorship opportunities remain. For more information about how to become an event sponsor, visit the Unicornfest website or email Jodie Hancock: Jodie@theunicornfest.co.uk

Babbasa, the Bristol-based social enterprise, which works to transform the lives of young people from ethnic minority and low-income backgrounds, is celebrating 10 years this month.

Since its founding in 2013, the organisation has helped support over 4,000 people across the city of Bristol, spanning over 60 cultural groups, providing mentoring, skills training and recruitment support to successfully advance their professional ambitions through its network of over 500 cross-industry organisations

This incredible milestone celebration comes following the launch of Babbasa’s ‘OurCity203O’ campaign, which is aiming to support young people from low-income households, starting from inner city Bristol, to secure a median salary role by 2030.

Poku Osei, Founder and CEO of Babbasa, speaks of the organisation’s milestone; “It fills me with immense pride to celebrate a decade of Babbasa. When I started back in 2013 it was with a vision to help create a world where young people living in areas of disadvantage are inspired and able to realise their employment and enterprise ambitions – irrespective of where they live, their nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, or faith.

“10 years on I am proud to see the thousands of people we have been able to help and how so many of them have developed the skills and confidence to pursue a professional future in roles and industries that interest them.”

Over the last decade Babbasa’s offer has evolved to include recruitment and inclusion services, focused on supporting organisations to diversify their workforce and create inclusive working environments and is now one of the UK’s leading social mobility agencies.

This has included their recent partnership with Bristol Creative Industries to create a city-wide internship programme. The initiative was designed to help young people (18-24yrs) from underrepresented backgrounds into paid roles within the creative sector and has just seen its first cohort of 14 start roles in many of the city’s leading creative businesses.

Poku continues; “While I am proud of the work we have done to date, and the incredible the team and our extended network does every single day, there is still much more to be done.

“The OurCity2030 campaign will be our core focus for the next 10 years as we aim to lift individuals out of poverty, increase representation at the workplace and create new generation of role models for society. It will act as a catalyst for Bristol to become a world class model city for inclusive growth.”

To commemorate the anniversary, Babbasa will be hosting an event as part of St Paul’s Carnival fringe calendar, to celebrate Babbasa alumni and hear about some the amazing success stories from the last decade.

I’ve been reflecting on a day spent with the wonderful people at Mayden recently. For those that don’t know them, Mayden are a Corporate Rebels bucket list organisation who have flattened their hierarchy and embraced agile across all their activities. Needless to time spent with them is always thought provoking.

Are there only two types of Organisation?

Sweeping generalisation alert: I wonder if there are only two types of organisations. Those that have recognised the folly and toxicity of the command and control approach to management and rejected it, and those that haven’t.

Now here’s the thing. Most leaders of most organisations would feel that their approach to management was not “command and control.” yet it is only a tiny minority of organisations who are, genuinely, committed to a path where the tacit assumptions that underpin command and control are entirely absent. Indeed, many accepted best practices are built on one or more of those assumptions.

Another way of framing it is to consider which of the following open questions better describes your organisations’ approach to people:

How do we create the conditions where people find great intrinsic reward in giving the best of their whole self at work? or
What are the best levers, carrots, sticks, perks and coercions that we have to give us the best return on our salary bill?

These two questions set you on very different paths, so is there any middle ground? A question I’ll return to.

The convergent evolution of progressive organisations

Bill Gore set up W.L Gore to create an organisation entirely free of bureaucracy. Jos de Blok set-up Buurtzorg to reconnect nurses with the job that they loved and to give their patients the best, personalised care. Chris May developed Mayden with a desire to do something better for its people than follow the herd with conventional management. Although very different in size, sector, era and geography there are spooky similarities in the norms and everyday practices you would find in all three organisations. And I guess we shouldn’t be surprised; if you set-out to create your organisations to fundamentally “work with the grain” of humans; our psychology, sociology, and anthropology we will, by iteration and emergence, arrive in a similar place.

If we set out now to invent the norms and mechanisms of our organisations based on what we know about humans and human performance, what we’d come up with would bear no relation to what we see in most organisations today.

But many of us are not starting our organisation from scratch

Bill, Jos and Chris all bore the scare tissue of experiencing command and control management and that galvanised them to create something different. Those different “somethings” were all built on very different and better informed assumptions about people. Most of us are not in that situation. The organisations that most of us lead are work in progress, not a blank sheet of paper. Many of us feel that we have inherited a situation which is not of our design, very likely there are bits about it that we don’t like and perceive those bits to be hard to change.

In reality we are all on a journey

No start-up has ever scaled and flourished into an organisation and got everything right first time. Snags, glitches, wrong calls and failures are inevitable and essential to finding the right path for your unique situation. Even the poster child progressive organisations have had these set-backs along the way, they are quite open about them.

This is perhaps where we find the middle ground, every organisation will have its own level of comfort or discomfort with the conventional approaches to management. The more discomfort there is, the more rapid the evolution will be.

What determines how quickly your organisation will evolve?

So, assuming you ascribe more to Q1 (How do we create the conditions where people find great intrinsic reward in giving the best of their whole self at work?) than Q2, how do we get started and how quickly can we progress? Here I’m reminded of something that Margaret Heffernan said when speaking with Lisa Gill on her excellent Leadermorphosis podcast.

“…do not think you can think your way to the answer. You can’t, it’s impossible. You have to do something different and see how the system responds. From that you’ve learned something that you can build on. But absolutely, none of us can solve these real world problems in our heads. It’s not physics, it’s not math. It’s human beings working together. And the way people learn to work together, is by working together.”

Is experimentation the difference that makes the difference?

The practice of experimentation is the key. Experimentation is largely absent in command and control organisations, and woven into just about everyone’s roles in progressive organisations. Based on our research into change-enabled organisations, experimentation is the “how” that applies to the majority of the 26 areas of practice that our research identified.
Experimentation is also, in and of itself, a practice that helps people find great intrinsic reward and creates opportunities for them to give the best of their whole self at work. It is also the engine-room of ever-improving ways of working. So, both the process and the output are accelerants to the evolution.

Two types of organisation?

Absolutely not. Some are more command and control than others, some more human-centric. But if you are committed to a journey from the former to the later, giving people the time, the safe climate, and the autonomy to develop their own safe-to-try experiments will really help build momentum. What’s stopping you from experimenting with it?

Afterword

The Vitality Index (VI) engenders the habit of experimentation in every team in the organisation. Based on our research, The VI is able to identify the three (out of 26) areas of practice that, if changed will be most beneficial to that specific team at the current moment in time. These insights, in combination with some independent facilitation from us and some inspiration from the Vitality playbook get the teams started on their journey towards ever-better ways of working. This is not just experimentation, this is change that the team own, change that is emergent and responsive and most importantly change that people feel good about.

When you get a quote for an insurance policy to protect your company, you’ll need to provide details of who you are and what you do. We come across business descriptions of all shapes and sizes, including the weird and wonderful. And the more accurate, the better.

In this blog, we’ll unpack why it’s important to make sure your business description is correct, up to date, and matches your activities on your insurance policy.

When applying for insurance, you’ll need to provide a business description, among other details. This is an explanation of what your business does, including the products or services you offer and how you operate.

Why do insurance companies need this information? They’ll use your business descriptions to understand the specific risks you face in your sector. This informs the level of coverage and the policy cost.

You might find it difficult to write an appropriate business description when you deliver multiple services. However, it’s especially important that you explain your business activities accurately and comprehensively. Aim for a broad but precise description that covers all activities, products, and services.

For example, at RiskBox we have several clients who class themselves as a digital agency. They may deal with a diverse range of services, including strategy, graphic design, digital marketing, web design and development, and more. Their business descriptions must cover all these activities so that the insurer is fully aware of what they do.

If you don’t provide an accurate business description to the insurance provider, you run several risks, such as:

Therefore, it’s important to provide a thorough and accurate business description when applying for a commercial insurance policy.

Let’s say a digital agency specialises in creating websites for small businesses. Their services include everything from graphic design to web development. But when they provide their business description to the insurance company, they only list their logo and business card design services.

Down the line, a client hires the agency to design a new website. But the website isn’t functional, and the client incurs significant financial losses as a result. They sue the agency for compensation, and the agency’s professional indemnity insurance policy is called upon to cover the legal costs and any settlement or judgement amounts.

Yet, because the business description initially provided didn’t accurately reflect the full scope of the agency’s website design services, the insurers would reject their claim. As a result, the agency must pay for the legal costs and any settlement or judgement amounts out of pocket, which could be financially devastating.

Whether you’re taking out a new insurance policy or updating your coverage, you must make sure you’re clear and accurate about what you actually do.

The best approach is to break down every area of work in your business – no matter how big or small – and calculate the percentage of turnover generated in each. Then, your broker or insurer can help make sure the description is sufficient to cover your business activities and services.

If you think your business description may be inaccurate, contact a broker or insurer right away. They can update the description and issue you the revised documentation to give you peace of mind – and, importantly, protect your business.

For a specialist’s opinion, or to have someone double-check your business description, get in touch with our friendly team. You can reach us on 0161 533 0411, at info@riskboxuk.com, or by filling in our online contact form.

Share space with other creatives in the centre of Bath. Just £200 per month plus VAT will let you have a desk in an open plan office (well, as open plan as an old Georgian office allows!), meeting room, heating (yes – we know that’s really important!), lighting, all the tea and coffee you can drink (yes – that’s important too!) and a bit of light banter.

Our offices are just off Queen Square, which is handy for the pubs and shops, railway station, bikes and anything else except cars.