If you’re part of the Wolverhampton Creative Industries, you’ll no doubt be inundated with offers of support, yes, this is the place to be should you wish to paddle in any one of many funding streams.

There’s a plethora of business advice and guidance on offer, countless training opportunities, a wealth of funding (but if you’re talking about real money, most business grants come with critieria that it would take the most supple of contortionists to slot in to) and if you were to attend every training scheme and networking event that was on offer you’d have little or no time to sit down and actually be creative.

For real, practical support which comes in the form of a desk, phone, Mac/PC and a software (which goes a long way towards keeping your overheads low until you’ve found your feet) the incubator scheme at SP/ARK offers invaluable assistance for fledgling businesses. We’re right up there when it comes to singing both their praises… and the fact that we recently worked on their rebrand.

So you’re good at what you do, you’ve tapped into this funding and you’re well established, you’ve taken onboard sound advice, you’ve had your business plan picked over with critical attention, your diary reflects the perfect home/life balance, you’re motivated and know your target audience better than they know themselves. So now what? You need clients.

Wolverhampton’s creative industries scene is clearly overshadowed by those of the larger cities, and there’s an irritating knee-jerk reaction when it comes to some of the larger Wolverhampton-based corporates sourcing or outsourcing creative services. There are talented creatives, with skills and experience that equal those based in the larger cities, right here in Wolverhampton and there’s no reason to believe otherwise. But that’s the thing about a knee jerk reaction it’s unthinking. Habitual.

The irony of it all is that, not to mention any names, many of the corporates with the knee-jerk ‘big city’ bias when it comes to sourcing creative services are the very people who stream all this funding into developing the creative industries right here in Wolverhampton.

They go to great lengths to develop us, and then they take their business elsewhere.