Loans are a good thing

I am fully in favor of loans. I think that the loans are a good think. I speak as a small business myself which is that what happens in a small business and a small enterprise is that your ideas are often ahead of the cash-flow. And that can be for number of reasons. It could mean that you are expending a lot of time developing the idea and therefore do not have a time to bring in the customer and the support or it just could be that it takes you so long to work with the funder or financier or a client to do negotiating a deal that you have an immence cash problem. So I think that loans are a briliant way of bridging that gap between time to develop idea themselve and time it takes to actually monetise it.

For example at moment we are developing our business in China and that means that we have to spend a lot of time and efford talking about our ideas to people. We have negotiated a couple of contracts but it is going to take 3 months for us to get to the point where those contracts can be turnet into invoices, can be turned into cash. So we are looking at taking a loan from the British Government Export Scheme. It is a great idea because the amount of loan is 80% of the value of our contracts. And it just means that we can have that money in the bank, pay our staff, develop new ideas and then we can pay that back with the small amount of interest once the bills come through from the clients.

And I think the idea of investing in creative ideas and cultural organizations on loan basis where they can go and generate a cash and generate their ideas and pay it back I think that is actually a quite good approach. That does not obviously apply to every single cultural organization and cultural idea but it seems to me to be a good idea. And it is also innovative because there is not really a long tradition at serving a public funding system of doing loans a lot because you know loans there is all the economy itself and it should be encouraged. The Art Council of England is currently experimenting with a loan scheme for a small creative and cultural organizations. And we are hoping to work with them on that in next three months. And that is the departure for The Arts Council because it mostly gives grants and it seems to me to be a good think to be trying out to new approaches.

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Paul Owens

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