Our free ‘Inventing the Future’ business planning course is NOW OPEN for applications
“Julia thank you for your excellence, it really was a brilliantly delivered workshop with such a great approach to business planning. It isn’t an easy discipline to make time for, rationalise or develop, but your definitions and approach demystifies and clarifies why and how creative professionals should do this!”
Previous business planning training participant
This is business planning training for creatives who hate business planning…
Business planning, but not as you know it! Aimed squarely at Tendring-based artists, creative freelancers and entrepreneurs who think business planning isn’t for them, this playful but super-informative course will see the hub’s Julia Payne share some top tips, tricks and real life examples to help you get clearer – and more excited – about your career and business goals.
Over this 1-day course (delivered across 2 mornings) Julia will help you flex, improvise and think differently whilst sustaining or developing your organisation or career. This is business planning training for difficult times – designed specifically for creatives.
You can APPLY HERE.
Here’s what to expect and what you’ll learn
Over 2 3.5-hour modules, Julia will share a host of useful insights, resources, tips and tricks and real life examples. Playful and creative but designed to make a real difference, there’ll also be an emphasis on small group work, peer learning and sharing collective experiences. You’ll get inside the following:
- Why a plan, and how to make planning less daunting
- What business planning is, and how on earth we can do it now
- Messy thinking and tidied up plans: right brain vs left brain planning
- How to make sure it starts with you, where you want to go, what’s important to you, and what you are for
- Superheroes in disguise – strengths, weaknesses and making a change
- Sketching your landscape and finding your tribe… looking around to get ahead
- The strategy stuff… debunking the strategic jargon and getting the ideas down
- Belt and braces risk… What are the risks? And how would you deal with them?
- Making the money work – how to budget not fudge-it
- Making this work for you…how to turn your plan into action
About your course leader
Julia Payne is Director of the hub, a creative social enterprise she founded in 2002 with an aim of doing innovative work and building the capacity of the creative sector. Known for being curious and generous, she’s worked with hundreds of creative freelancers to help them build their careers and businesses and identify what ‘good growth’ looks like. In 2021 she won the IPSE Wellbeing Freelancer Award for the hub’s Balance programme, which helped 1000+ artists and creative freelancers balance their minds and their books at a time of huge uncertainty, and included a free toolkit packed with 100+ business planning and wellbeing resources, action learning sessions, monthly wellbeing talks and training.
When and where?
Session 1: 13 March 2026
Session 2: 27 March 2026
Both sessions will happen at Harwich Arts Centre, 10am-1.30pm.
To take part, you need to be based in Tendring. You also need to be able to attend both sessions, and also be able to commit to doing a small amount of preparation/homework in between sessions.
Did we mention, it’s FREE?!
This course is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. It’s also funded by the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, Thanks to this investment, this training is free to any Tendring-based creative freelancers or others who work as part of Tendring’s creative community. All we ask is that you commit to taking part in both sessions.
I’m sold! How do I apply?
If you are shouting, ‘yaaasssss this is perfect for me’, you can APPLY HERE.
The application form should hopefully be simple to complete, and take about 10-15mins to complete. The deadline to apply is 1 March, and we’ll aim to get back to you by 3 March to let you know if you have got a place on the course. In the meantime, we suggest you pencil the course dates in your calendar, just to make sure you can definitely make it. We wouldn’t want you to miss out!
