Money matters (part 2)

This is the second in a series of blogs we’re publishing about pricing to share different experiences and viewpoints from our community on this hot topic. Continuing the conversation is Claire Antrobus, a coach, facilitator, trainer and consultant based in York.

‘If they ask you anything about finance just remember - cash is king.’

This was my Dad’s advice in 1999 before my interview for a job at Arts Council England for a role now called a Relationship Manager. My dad worked in a wire factory, a proper ‘business’, whereas I was a curator at the time so knew nothing about these earthly things. I’m not sure if his advice helped, but I got the job and it was a turning point: I went from curator to business planning expert, largely because of our sector’s ineptness with money… Very quickly I had to get to grips with business modelling, depreciation, deficits, and reserves policies when a funded gallery went into financial crisis. It had also lost its artistic direction, having ended up chasing grants and trying to please everyone to secure funding…

If you don’t control money, money will control you….

So early on I learned that we can be in control of money, or we can let it control us. It’s a challenge for all of us: artists, cultural organisations and freelancers. As a curator I worked with artists navigating making work with making a living. Later in my career as a museum manager I focussed carefully on how we earned our income to avoid that fate of either doing things for the money, or not doing the things we ought because of the lack of it. When I’m working out my annual plan I try to reconcile these different considerations of earning enough and doing good work.

So if money matters why do so many in the cultural sector find it hard to talk about it?

Fast forward to 2021, as a coach I have many conversations with clients about their future career aspirations. One of the approaches I use to help people clarify their ambitions is to help them generate a list of criteria for their ideal role (please help yourself to this tool). When I ask ‘and how much do you want to earn?’ there is often an awkward silence. People usually know but don’t like to say. Coaching is a non-judgemental and confidential space, I remind them. I even suggest they don’t have to tell me the figure but I encourage them to be specific in their own head. I will often suggest that there’s no need to be embarrassed about needing to earn a living. And I can usually see the relief when I don’t judge them for wanting to earn enough money to stop struggling each month.

Many in our sector carry around an unhelpful attitude to money - that it is somehow unclean or ‘a necessary evil’ – which means we don’t talk about it enough. I remember my embarrassment when an artist asked me what fee we would pay her to exhibit at our ACE funded gallery. To my knowledge my employer had never before paid artists a fee for exhibiting: it was assumed the artists earned their income in other ways and didn’t need it. So as a coach I try to normalise discussing money as one of the many considerations in any decision, because it does matter – and particularly when you don’t have enough of it.

Maybe it is because I grew up in a family that didn’t work in the cultural sector that I feel more comfortable around the topic of cash. It was also a family where not having enough money had massive implications for my grandparents’ and parents’ generations, so I have inherited their attitude of counting after the pennies so the pounds look after themselves. But to quote my fellow Sheffielder Jarvis Cocker, if you’ve grown up knowing ‘if you call your Dad he can stop it all’ then maybe you can afford to be more blasé about your budget.

To be fair, I could always have phoned my own Dad if I’d ever been short of a bob or two. But I’ve always been too careful with cash to get into that position in the first place. Consequently that meant I very quickly moved out of artistic roles, so I could stand own my own two feet financially. The salaries paid to curators in the late 90s meant it would have been very difficult to support myself without depending on my parents or a partner. For example, my then dream role as an Assistant Curator at Tate was advertised at £14,000 (I didn’t apply, I couldn’t afford to) and I was interviewed for a curator role at Whitechapel Art Gallery around that time that paid £16,000. So I took better paid arts administrator jobs which enabled me to get a mortgage’ like ‘normal’ people my age.

Money matters. It is arguably the key contributory factor to the other structural inequalities in the cultural sector workforce. That is why it is so important we are more honest and transparent about pay. But because the cultural sector, particularly at the most senior levels, is very unrepresentative of the wider population in terms of socio-economic we seem to have a collective blindspot around, or lack of interest in pay.

So, what does this mean for us as freelancers?

Firstly, we can take control of our own finances and understand our full costs. That means fully costing what it takes to run a business well including; taking annual leave; the unpaid work that generates and underpins paid work; contributing to a pension (more on that below); investing in professional development as well as all the ongoing costs of insurance, equipment, software licenses etc.

It’s not rocket science but it can mean facing up to some uncomfortable facts. Despite saving from the age of 22, I recently realised my own pension pot was inadequate. Please take half and hour soon to find out whether you are saving enough if you don’t already know (this website is a good place to start). Most of us are not saving anything like enough: the recent Museum Freelancer survey revealed 57% of us don’t save anything towards a pension currently. And whilst I’m not a financial adviser, I’m fairly confident that’s not ‘enough’!

Secondly, let’s talk more openly about money with our clients.  Let’s price ourselves realistically. Again the survey suggests many of us find it hard to be assertive about our day rates when pricing work and/or consistently over-deliver. I don’t find those conversations easy either, but I have found many clients are receptive to open conversations about project scope and budgets. But unless we raise these issues we perpetuate the problem.

And finally many of us are Board members – let’s use that power to tackle pay issues at a strategic level. For example, as Trustee I successfully advocated paying our front of house staff Living Wage not minimum wage, and on proper contracts not zero hours ones. We can also insist on more diversity on our boards. To enable this we need to proactively offer expenses for attendance at Board meetings (childcare, travel etc). Ideally meetings should be scheduled outside working hours, or we can offer to compensate self-employed Trustees for loss of earnings to attend in working hours. Having boards that better reflect ‘normal’ people is a critical step in ensuring fewer blindspots around pay and conditions.

Thanks to Claire for writing this follow-up piece for Museum Freelance. You can sign up for her monthly newsletter about creating change, follow her on Twitter or visit her website.