The Art of Staying Alive: Sustainability (But Not That Kind)
I’ve just wrapped up sessions 4 and 5 of the DCMS Create Growth programme at The Studio in Bath. It was a double-header focused on a word that gets thrown around a lot: Sustainability.
Usually, when I hear “sustainability,” I think of eco-friendly materials or carbon footprints. But Richard Freeman (from Always Possible) framed it differently. He challenged us to see sustainability as “the ability to keep going in a way that protects both the business and the entrepreneur behind it”. It’s not about staying still or stable; it’s about the balance of continual innovation and adaptation.
Here is what went down…
I Am The Risk
The hardest pill to swallow came early in the first session. We explored the reality that as founders, we are “both the company’s biggest asset and its biggest vulnerability”.
It makes sense. Right now, Octopus Immersive lives in my head. If I stop, the business stops. We learned that true scalability only happens when you let go and allow the business to become bigger than you. A healthy business is designed to reduce that dependence on the founder over time.
We also dug into the difference between a customer and a user.
- Customer: The one who pays.
- User: The one who experiences the product.
They aren’t always the same person, and confusing them is a classic trap. It made me rethink who I’m actually pitching to—is it the person enjoying the immersive experience, or the budget holder signing the cheque?
The “Staple DIet” Part 2: Data over Instinct
If the first session was the wake-up call, the second session (Session 5) was the toolkit. We moved past the philosophy and into the frameworks.
We discussed how creative businesses often rely on instinct. But to be sustainable, we need to root our decisions in data. We were introduced to a few tools to help us answer the terrifying question: “How do I know this is actually working?”.
Three frameworks stood out to me:
- The Balanced Scorecard: A one-page strategy tool that forces you to look at your business from four perspectives: Financial, Internal Processes, Customers, and Learning/Growth . It’s about connecting your vision to actual evidence.
- Theory of Change: This is a structured way to map your long-term goals back to the specific inputs and activities you are doing today. It tests whether your daily grind actually aligns with your big purpose.
- Founder Energy Balance: We did a self-assessment to see where we spend our energy. Are we leaning too hard into “Creative Leadership” (design, innovation) and ignoring “Commercial Discipline” (finance, systems)? .
Creative vs. Commercial
One of the slides that really stuck with me asked: “Can a business be Useful, High Impact, Loved, Fun… and make lots of money?” .
The answer, obviously, is yes. But there is often a tension there. We talked about how “creativity is not the opposite of commerciality”. In fact, innovation is inherently creative. The risk usually comes when we treat the “boring stuff”—systems, data, governance—as the enemy, rather than the foundation that lets us keep being creative.
My Takeaway
I walked away with a lot of homework. I need to complete the “Problem, Value, Evidence” exercise to prove that I’m solving a real need, not just building cool tech because I can.
The goal is to build a business that doesn’t just survive me but thrives because of the systems I put in place now. As Richard put it, long-term success is when you are no longer needed. That’s a scary thought for a founder, but also a liberating one.
Next up, I think we are finally getting into the nitty-gritty of investment readiness. Time to sharpen the pitch again.
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