Turning your passion into a profession

by Startacus Admin

The People Stories create beautiful books that share visual insights for turning passion into profession. Facts and figures do not motivate a creative mind like the power of an emotive story. Roz Ware, Director shares with us her story and the lessons she has learned. Over to Roz to explain all...

The People Stories:

So, designed to overcome text-heavy entrepreneurial advice, we delve into the makings of successful, creative businesses both visually and narratively.

For those deliberating starting a business, our goal is to instill concentrated creative business inspiration in a visually, awe inspiring format that could help you begin your entrepreneurial journey today.

The People Stories will be launching a series of three editions under the title ‘The Creative Entrepreneur’. They are designed to be creative-friendly career books that will get you thinking about your business model and enabling you, for yourself, to identify whether or not your business has potential. See the images for a sneak peek at our first book.

From all the interviews that I, Roz Ware (founder of The People Stories), have conducted, there are a few key points about starting a business that have become very apparent.

It’s incredibly easy to start a business and forget about what value you are providing your customers. Without considering their personal desires, how they buy and why they buy, it becomes incredibly difficult to make that all important sale. But how can something so fundamental be so frequently overlooked? Because it’s very easy to get caught up in your own personal preferences rather than surveying what it is that makes your customer tick. You need to identify why your customers going to come to you? And who are these customers? What do they do? What interests them? How would they buy your product? Where would they see your product? Make sure that you are fulfilling a desire, find a genuine need and provide value. What are you going to do that your competitors aren’t? Think from a customer’s perspective and ask yourself why they would choose to spend their hard earned cash on your products rather than someone else’s.

Get a good support network around you. If something is not working don’t suffer in silence. Talk to your customers, get their feedback and find an expert to help you conquer a particular problem you are experiencing. You’ll be surprised at the free support there is available to you.

But above all, believe in yourself and never be afraid of failure. Failure is considered disastrous for business, but when you break down what it is that is actually happening, it is your business’ way of telling you that something is wrong and it needs to be remedied. It helps us to redefine and enhance what it is we are offering and in the end, make what we initially had better. Chances are, you will always be afraid of failure, but even when on the path to success, it really can be an experience worth having.

So, how did The People Stories begin?

The People Stories was born because of an overwhelming need to create visually inspiring business advice. As a creative, text-heavy information was hampering my desire to learn, and more importantly, my ability to absorb the information I was reading. Two years on, I decided to take matters into my own hands and devise a new way of learning.

After studying trend forecasting and analysis, I began to notice a sudden influx of small businesses and self-employed people emerging. This to me seemed rather odd as we were in the middle of a recession. Why were people doing this when we were heading for financial crisis? But really, in times of austerity, creativity must flourish. This really is a wonderful time to start a business, not only do we have to assess what value we are delivering to customers, but it also creates challenge as it forces you to use your creativity to refine what it is you are offering.

I wanted to devise a new way of learning for this group of creatives. My ultimate goal was to provide a visual experience that acted as a boost of motivation to show readers what they could have if they really put their mind to it. And not only that, to demonstrate what you can achieve even with no business training.

To start a business, all you need is a whole lot of determination because ultimately you will keep pushing yourself until you find a recipe that works for you, and a little bit of common sense, and that’s where The People Stories comes in....

Who will be in the first ‘The Creative Entrepreneur’ book?

Not only will we be talking to some really inspirational creatives, but we will be getting exclusive photographs of them their personal workspaces. The luminaries we will be featuring are Rankin Photography, Secret Cinema, The Future Laboratory, Made.com, McQueens Florists, Quintessentially Events, Neom Organics and many more to be announced.

To pre-order your copy now, simply email your request to our studio. [email protected]

Sign up to our mailing list to receive updates on the publishing date of the book and to win your free copy.

Follow us on Twitter (@PeopleStoriesUK) to stay in the loop and see what we are up to

Roz Ware was part of the School for Creative Startups Programme, where you can learn how to start, run and grow a creative business in a jargon-free, relaxed way. They have helped snail farmers and chocolate makers, secret date clubs to crafters and makers!

School for Startups also offer seed funding in the form of Government backed Start Up Loans with a year of free round-the-clock support and mentoring in a community of other budding entrepreneurs. If you go on to apply for the Government backed Start Up Loans do tell School for Startups where you heard about them (aka Startacus) - every little help in spreading the word of Startacus helps too you know!


If you liked this, then we reckon you'll love to hear about these School 4 Creative Startup folks we have interviewed this week;  Bodopods- Innovative disaster relief pods and an interview with the founder of  iamsocial / iamadventures

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Published on: 24th June 2014