Selling yourselves

Products and venue for sale

Your museum is your product. Are you making the best use of it? A good business exploits every opportunity available to it. There are two ways to develop your product further:

• By extending the offer on site
• By extending the ways people can reach the museum – probably off site.

Can you hold different types of events from those that you currently hold?  Can you use the building and the land surrounding the museum for other money making purposes such as:

• Fetes and fairs
• Meeting rooms
• Concert venues
• A film location – contact www.em-media.org.uk to find out more about this
• Car boot sales

Sometimes the opportunities seem to be diverting away from the original intention and that is where the good judgement of a business comes in. You have to decide if such a diversion away will add to the museum offer, extend the museum offer or distract from it. You may decide to put a time limit on a trial for a different use of your building as you try something out.  You may decide that you need to try something and then canvas opinion with a questionnaire to see if you should continue along this path.

When thinking about how you might be able to extend the ways in which people can reach the museum, you should consider;

• Can you take items from your collection out to potential customers?
• Can you put the collection or part of it on your website?
• Can leaflets on the collection be produced?
• Can you think of other ways to use the existing collection in new ways?

Running retail and /or refreshments

You may have space on your site and think that retail (a museum shop) and/or refreshments will be a good idea.

• Whatever you choose should be planned as part of your business plan.
• Consider whether the different elements of the business rely on each other or if they will operate separately. E.g. with you staff your café and your museums from two separate teams with separate managers, or expect individuals to do both?
• Do they need separate business plans with separate targets?

Catering

You may need to take specific advice on running a catering operation on site. There are rules and regulations regarding food hygiene, storage and production. Talk to a Business Link advisor specifically on this. www.businesslink.gov.uk

Some venues have decided that their specialism is not running a catering operation and so have franchised out the operation, taking a percentage of the income and/or rent. If you have decided to allow a franchise operation then the negotiation of the terms of the franchise need to be approached carefully. The franchisee will have plans and ideas for the site and your negotiation should lay down the position between the museum and the franchisee on minimum opening hours, maintenance, overview of type of menu, space available etc. Remember that a franchisee will be providing part of the offer of your museum. If something goes wrong, then it will be the reputation of the museum that is hit generally as the location of the refreshment venue not the name of the franchisee is usually what is referred to in reporting a situation.

Retail

You may look for further advice and guidance from the Association of Cultural Enterprise
www.acenterprises.org

Like the overall business planning for your museum your retail operation will need a business plan. All of the elements in the business plan section will apply to your retail operation. You will need to decide:

• What products are sold
• Who the customers will be
• What the profit margins will be
• How you will promote the shop to customers
• How the finances of the shop will be managed – how will stock be obtained and stored? etc

Take each stock item as a single element. Decide upon your market and what they might want to buy following a visit to your museum.

• What is the ‘shelf – life’ of each element?
• Do all the elements rely upon each other?
• What can be produced to get a quick win? (such as selling pencils which are sold in volume to visiting children, or putting on a popular exhibition and selling related merchandise)
• What are the costs of producing each element of the products in this museum and what are the related income levels with each part?