School for Creative Startups Comes to Sheffield

by Startacus Admin

It’s Sheffield Startup Month here at Startacus, a great opportunity to showcase the city as the hotbed of entrepreneurial talent that it is.

We have been especially impressed with the number and variety of creative Startups which are sprouting up and spreading their creative ways all over the city… like a wonderful rainbow of creativity.

It seems we are not the only ones who have noticed this ‘creative rainbow’… As of October in a new partnership with the Sheffield College, School for Creative Startups will be offering their amazing entrepreneurial courses for the first time in the city- their first ever-outing to the north of England!

Intrigued by this exciting development on the local creative startup scene, we caught up with Medeia Cohan who is Creative Director of School for Creative Startups.

School for Creative Startups will be opening in Sheffield in October, can you give us a quick rundown of what the school involves and what the value is for someone starting a creative business?

Sure thing! School for Creative Startups offers unrivalled training and support courses for aspiring creative entrepreneurs, who lack the business acumen to make a living from what they make or do, or haven't been able to grow / expand their startup.

The course offers practical support and world class training and is really about helping to empower creatives to be able to widen their skills base and build successful businesses in a comfortable, accessible way.

No jargon or acronyms, no theory or complex methodology, just really easy to understand and implement, help!

Can you give us an idea of why ‘Creative’ Startups need their own specific ‘School’, what makes the creative industry so different from its counterparts?

In truth I think the way we teach is the way everyone should teach entrepreneurship, because it's proven that people learn better in short burst of teaching with lots of visuals and interactivity.

I designed this course to get optimal results for an audience that I understood, a creative community which I am apart of. As a dyslexic person myself, which is just one of the prevalent learning disabilities, in both the creative and entrepreneurial communities, I know I struggle with and felt excluded in impenetrable lectures which were riddled with acronyms and complex jargon.

S4CS is about demystifying complex business theory and welcoming new groups into the sector by simplifying the information and making it readily accessible and practice. Having a community of creatives going through it together makes it seem less threatening and makes it fun and empowering for everyone. The best part of the course is often the network of creatives competing and supporting one another, cross-pollinating ideas and often partnering to build something new and fantastic. It's a unique course but the results are amazing.

As you know it's our Startup Sheffield month so we are very intrigued to find out why, of all the cities in the North of England, you have chosen to bring School for Creative Startups to Sheffield?

I have been absolutely blown away by Sheffield!

We were looking to launch a new hub for S4CS in the North in response to regular requests and the choice seemed obvious. Not only is Sheffield the home of MADE Entrepreneurs Festival, but it's also home to the incredibly innovative and forward thinking The Sheffield College, with whom we've partnered to bring this new course to life. There is so much going on in Sheffield and the greater region and we've been blown away by the support and enthusiasm both for us coming to the area and for entrepreneurship generally. We've met some really inspiring potential students during our visits to the area and I guess the real answer is that it just felt right. It felt very similar to when we started in London 4 years ago.

We imagine that School for Creative Startups is something which would be a welcome addition to many cities right across the UK, are there plans to further expand to other areas as well?

We are happy to start courses anywhere there's a need or a demand for us and are always looking for brilliant new partners. We're currently in conversations with Northern Ireland and in Colombia about new courses. We are mindful that we don't want to saturate the market, but are also aware that there are creative entrepreneurs spread all over in need of this kind of training and support.

Because classes only happen monthly we've found that our students are able to come from a pretty wide radius and as such have seen students from as far as Dubai and Zurich fly over for classes to London. We're hoping to see students from all over the North come to our new course in Sheffield.

Personally I'd like to see new School for Creative Startups courses in Wales, Ireland and Scotland next.

Is there a specific kind of creative business that you are specifically hoping to attract to the the Sheffield School ?

Personally I love working with food and drink based businesses because I'm always hungry and also because it's a very exciting sector at the moment. We tend to have a lot of craft, design, fashion and media based businesses on the course and though I love them all dearly, this year it'd be great to see more music, broadcast media and performance based businesses on the course. Having said all that we welcome anyone on the course no matter their sector. If you feel like your business is creative and you need help making it profitable and breaking through the noise, this course is for you! Whether you've been in business for 3 years or just have an idea for a business we are coming to Sheffield to help you grow brilliant creative businesses!

Thanks for the chat Medeia and best of luck with all those fab Sheffield creative startups!

If you reckon that School for Creative Startups could help you with your business, why not pop over to their website and get in touch?

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Published on: 23rd September 2014