This article is a personal review of PAD’s Innovation & Creative Entrepreneurship program by Rupa Subramaniam, an art practitioner finding her way to improve her business strategies to thrive in the Malaysian Creative Gig Economy.
By Rupa Subramaniam
When I first saw the post on Instagram for the Innovation & Creative Entrepreneurship (ICE) Program, I was intrigued but sceptical. Is there really anything new that I can learn?
What I enjoyed about my media agency days were the strategic discussions across various teams. We would spend hours discussing our client’s product, their target audience, conducting surveys, going through data—before we began brainstorming creative execution ideas.
However, when I left the corporate life to venture into the visual arts in 2014, I found that our artists were doing it all. They risked being too self-absorbed in their art and philosophy that they dismissed the research about the audience. The outcome was often only relevant to a niche audience—their immediate circle.
Photo of my CEO, Salem, not being very impressed with my work.
After seven years of being my own boss, I deem myself successful in breaking out of the circle. But I was not happy with the financial health of my business and the lack of structure.
Did the ICE Program meet my expectations?
I joined this unique business course hoping to find solutions to the following:
- Understanding what’s required to have a tidy financial book-keeping and tax.
- Streamlining my creative business processes and improving the efficiency of my team.
- Enhancing my client’s experience and improving our working relationship.
To be honest, parts of the financial module: revenue and cost excel sheets, confused me so much I wanted to give up. And hey, I really don’t want to perpetuate the idea that artists are bad with numbers. I love data. The image below shows some of the curves I find sexy in ensuring I keep optimizing results for my clients.
YouTube Ad performance results: Looking for performance beyond the shallow metric of views.
However, I believe it’s more of a mental block/baggage that surfaces when one is presented with new information. But the point of this program is to equip the students with a rather vast amount of tools and methodology within its two months’ course. It’s what it is—just tools.
After the program ended, there was an epiphany. I don’t have to do everything. Actually, the point is not to do everything!
My Most Important Lesson: Learning How to Prioritize
For someone like me who has 10 projects at any given time, my scatterbrain can’t figure out what must be done first and what can be delegated. That leads to stress.
Importance, or value, of doing something versus the feasibility of doing it.
My biggest struggles so far in putting together my portfolio have been precisely that—no focus. I do various things, and I love the idea of being a multipotentialite (the opposite idea of being a specialist). But my advantage was slowly turning against me.
The pandemic brought out so many realizations about how I was pushing myself to work. I was at the edge of a burn-out every step of my journey during the last decade. Not my idea of success lah.
Using Design Thinking Framework to improve ways to communicate with client
How Much Control Do You Exercise in Executing Your Creative Projects?
While I admired the start-up tech industry, I missed out on a crucial part about their business development: The Business Exit Strategy.
As much as I wanted my events, like Art Battle MY, to stand on their own, the ICE program helped me realise I was exercising way too much control. I wasn’t opening myself up for a larger market to invest in my product.
So yes, my media days gave me enough foundation to help me build a strong brand essence, but my business proposition lacked clarity.
While organizing Banana Leaf Capacity Building Workshops, control was a crucial key to my success.
Re-imagining The Creative Experience: What’s The Future of My Work?
Did I get all the answers I needed through this course? No. But I believe the team gave me something far more valuable:
- A path to my own definition of success.
I’ve been so hung up over finances, but hearing that my company needs to generate RM600,000 in revenue before turning it into a Sdn.Bhd brought me some relief. I can now map my way there. I can afford to give myself a more realistic timeline, based on my current capacity.
- Assuring Me that There’s a Possible Path for Every Kind of Art.
The last several years have been a struggle for me in the local industry, because I often felt dismissed. My ideas were often too liberal, border-lining activism, and didn’t fit anyone’s idea of “art”. At times I’m too Indian (I don’t even know what this means) and other times, I’m not Indian enough.
I’ve been jaded—until Joel Santos (Co-founder and President of Thames International) injected a dose of “dream bigger”.
Finding a strategy that can work for cultural projects such as Banana Leaf: A Platform for Malaysian Indian Creatives
At first, I was perplexed about being pushed so far out of my comfort zone, but I realised why he was doing it—because he saw my capacity, and he thinks I can! God knows I needed that dose of confidence.
- The right people to work with means more than the funding.
“For strong companies, financing is a tactic. For weak companies, financing is a goal.” – Scott Belsky, co-creator of Behance Inc.
During the introduction of this course, I posed a question about funding. While most seniors usually give me advice about grants (all the various ways I would have already tried), ICE program’s mentors encouraged me to re-think the role of money in making things happen.
Instead of looking for more money, they told me to look for people who believed in my ideas.
Are You Ready to be an Innovative Creative Entrepreneur?
- You want to acquire a new framework to improve your process & business overall.
- You want access to international professional mentors who can see the future of the creative economy in Asia.
- You want to get connected to local people in the industry, who eventually become your sounding board, cheerleaders, and hopefully future collaborators!
If you said yes to the above, I would highly recommend this program.
Making really good friends through this program, who understood my creative journey was a blessing in disguise during the pandemic
A fair warning: if you are taking up this course, make sure you drop a client/project to give you enough room to study at your own pace and do your homework. I had to dedicate my weekends, and even weekday discussions went on until 12am with my course mates.
Last but not least, this is not a one-way quiet classroom. Contrary to what we have been taught as Malaysians, this program best suits those who have plenty of questions. But also, don’t expect to be spoon-fed with what needs to be done for your business. The mentors are there to guide you to find your own answers.
This is a demanding course, with equally rewarding results. Its value lies in how you apply it to your work for the next several years.
My latest project with GoodKids Malaysia, that I was working through this ICE Program.
Rupa Subramaniam is a visual artist and arts organiser. She believes digital innovation will spearhead Malaysian Creative Ecosystem. Her latest curation, Apa Pandang Pandang, discusses education access for urban poor children.