Business Acumen for Artists (BAA) is a short course that has been designed to teach artists the basics of business so that creative professionals can sustainably create and run their own creative enterprises. Run for the last twelve years at UCT’s Graduate School of Business, 2019 signals a new home for BAA at the Cape Town Creative Academy for this life-changing and transformative programme.

BAA runs once a week in the evenings over 13 weeks. Delegates develop key business skills from how to manage their finances to negotiating decisively when pitching a product and pricing an idea. This is a profound and practical investment for artists and creative professionals who will emerge more confident about their creatively commercial aspirations and be much better equipped to work creatively without being as vulnerable to exploitation.

The course is practical in nature. After all, the power in entrepreneurship is the “ship” part. Without a product or service to take into the world as an offering, it remains at the level of a dream. BAA works with each creative to hone and develop their offering into something which can be shipped and sold by the end of the programme. The course will culminate in a formal pitch of the idea that you have developed and concretised into a viable business offering on the programme. Delegates will be taught a product/service generating methodology which will help them concretise their idea into a sustainable offering by the end of the programme.