How do successful creative businesses grow? Creative business life cycles

Thank you so much for taking the time to help me with my research into the success and growth of small creative businesses. I am aiming to get more than 500 responses to this survey, and the results will be used for my conference presentation at the micro-business conference Small is Beautiful in Edinburgh in June this year, as well as creating practical tools, ebooks and blog posts for creatives like yourself.

The research is done in two stages: In the first survey I looked at what success means for creative professionals. You can still do that survey here: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2726422/What-is-success-for-creative-professionals

This questionnaire is the 2nd survey, which looks into more depth into how small creative businesses (from soletrader to 10 employees) grow. I especially want to find out:

• What impacts on the growth of a small creative business? And when and where do they get 'stuck'?
• Growing and slowing down are natural processes in each small business, but can we predict these so called life cycles? Are there logical steps of growing (with specific challenges and questions at each stage that you need to overcome to get to the next stage), or is it more organic and unpredictable?
• What are the milestones to take your creative business to the next level? Is it possible to create a checklist of the challenges and what to work on to move to the next stage?
• Sole trader businesses in particular are very vulnerable to changes in the life of the business owner too, so how does life in general impact on the growth of small businesses? 
• What have ‘successful’ creatives got that less successful ones don’t have or do? What can we learn from what is really going on in successful businesses to teach the knowledge, skills, behaviour and mind sets required to grow our business (if you would wish to do so)?
• Would it be possible to create a 'MOT' to check the health of small creative businesses, or at least a check list of the various stages of development?

This second survey is aimed especially at UK-based businesses, who create, design and sell visual creative products or services, e.g. a wide range of designers, craftspeople, visual artists, and more commercial creative businesses working in homewares, giftware, stationery etc. You need to have started your business and sell your products or services regularly, so this is not aimed at pre-startups. I need to get businesses at different stages of their career, but to get enough data of successful businesses I am especially looking at creative businesses who have a turnover of more than £25K.

This questionnaire will take about 25 minutes. There are 14 questions in total: 7 main questions and 7 quick 'quantifying' questions to be able to compare individual responses against each others criteria.

I hope that you enjoy doing this questionnaire to reflect on your current creative business and practice, and as a checklist of where you and your business currently are.

The deadline to return this questionnaire has been extended to Bank Holiday Monday 30th of May. Feel free to invite other creative professionals too.

Kind regards

Patricia van den Akker
Director of The Design Trust