Discovering a winning formula

In October 2006, the board of The Courtyard in Hereford made the decision to appoint an outside business consultant to take a fresh look at the business and address the financial problems it had been facing – many dating back to an initial construction overspend in 1998. Respected arts management consultant Clarie Middleton was contracted to create a five-year recovery plan, setting objectives for cost management and deficit reduction. The emphasis was on managing costs, which would lead in turn to increased net profit. With the plan accepted by board members and major funders Herefordshire Council and Arts Council England, the senior management team set about implementing deadlines for the recommendations.

The Courtyard is a mixed producing–receiving arts centre, with a busy portfolio of professional, community and youth theatre productions. The recovery strategy, however, stipulated a dramatic reduction of all in-house productions, with the exception of the annual Christmas pantomime. This, together with strict cost and planning management of the 2007 pantomime, Snow White, resulted in an almost 50% deficit reduction in just one year. The panto itself, despite much tighter production values, went on to become the best attended and most financially successful in The Courtyard’s ten-year history. Co-productions have also been a successful outcome of the recovery plan, with last year’s jointly produced autumn musical, ‘The Hired Man’, delivering high quality theatre with both reduced costs and an increased profit margin for the venue. This is a winning formula which will be repeated for future projects, and The Courtyard is currently building strong relationships with other arts centres and touring companies to deliver this objective.

Now, two years on from that initial business review, staff are excited about their future. By taking control and actively implementing change, The Courtyard has managed to turn around all aspects of the organisation within a comparatively short space of time. It now works from a plan-based business strategy and has gone on to review all business areas to create its own operational plan – so that what started as a recovery strategy is now at the heart of how the organisation functions. Along with this new approach to planning and financial management, The Courtyard is recruiting new board members as well as senior management posts from outside the arts sector to bring a fresh outlook to the organisation and inject new ideas.

Chief Executive Martyn Green is keen to point out that there is no shame in bringing outside help into an organisation: “Facing the problems that The Courtyard had head-on allowed us to take control and turn it around ourselves. We have a responsibility to the people we employ and the community that we serve to do all that we can to create an exciting and successful arts centre. As an external consultant, Clarie allowed us all to take a step back and understand what we do best, and how we could build on that. As an organisation, we had become too caught up in the expectations placed on us by other organisations and funders. Now we realise less is definitely more, and we’re a much stronger organisation because of it.”