From Puppets to Possibility: Reflections on a Day spent with fellow Arts Leaders

By Samantha Lane

Yesterday I had the privilege of spending the day with three inspiring arts leaders, sharing Little Angel Theatre’s journey towards becoming a more financially resilient and enterprising organisation. What began as a simple invitation to “talk about income diversification” became something much deeper: a collaborative exploration of identity, mission, risk, and the future of the arts sector.

We met not just to look at numbers or revenue models, but to uncover the thinking behind the decisions we’ve made at LAT – the successes, the mistakes, the pivots, and the uncomfortable learning curves that shaped who we are today. The session was designed to help leaders interrogate their own organisational identities, discover potential commercial opportunities, and build practical tools for resilience without compromising artistic purpose.

Here is a reflection on what we explored together.

Starting With Identity: Who Are You Really?

We began the day not with spreadsheets or organisational charts, but with a deceptively simple question: who are you really?

It’s a question we too often skip in the rush toward new revenue streams or strategic plans. At LAT, our journey toward financial resilience began only when we stopped to look honestly at who we said we were verses how we were actually behaving.  In the workshop, leaders spent time mapping:

• Mission identity vs financial reality
• What they (some were freelancers) and/or their organisation is known for verses what they want to be known for
• Whether they behave like a charity or an arts business.

This exercise always sparks revealing conversation. Many organisations discover that while their language is charitable, their income behaviours resemble commercial producers — or vice versa. Understanding this gap is essential before attempting to diversify income or build new ventures.

LAT’s Own Journey: Growth, Gaps and Lessons Learned

From there, I shared LAT’s transformation:

• From c£800k to c£1.9 million turnover, with future projected growth
• From 10 to 27 staff
• From having one show and one space to delivering national mid-scale touring, multiple Christmas shows, a commissioning programme, schools partnerships, and community engagement embedded across everything we do.

But the real story isn’t the growth – it’s the thinking behind it.

We explored how LAT made strategic decisions such as:

• Embedding community and school partnerships at the core of our mission
• Developing a commercial team to handle new ventures
• Moving decisively into mid-scale touring
• Taking risks with digital content during the pandemic
• Expanding into birthday parties, puppet commissions, digital resources and broadening our retail offer
• Identifying the point at which opportunity outstrips organisational capacity

I shared openly not only what worked but also what didn’t, like the current co-producer dilution for TYA; the touring strain on staff and systems; our fragmented digital platform; and the perpetual challenge of serving older children.

Diversifying Income: Where Purpose Meets Possibility

We then moved into examining LAT’s income model – not as a fixed template, but as a set of possibilities.

We looked at six distinct revenue strands core to LAT, and I talked about how our Social Impact Loan from Figurative is helping us to develop these further:

• Productions and Touring
• Commercial activity (parties, partnerships, retail, courses and workshops)
• Education (FE partnerships, curriculum focused workshops)
• Digital (pay-per-view, online resources)
• Commissioning and design services
• Individual Giving

Naturally, the conversation expanded far beyond puppetry and together we mapped both individual and wider sector-relevant opportunities, before the leaders then worked on their own Income Portfolio, exploring each idea through the lenses of audience, value proposition, pricing, resources and feasibility.

Risk, Resilience and the Enterprising Mindset

The afternoon focused on what often sits quietly beneath financial conversations: risk appetite, organisational culture, and resilience.  We discussed reserves, governance, scenario planning (Budget A/B/C), and what it truly means to shift from a “funded mindset” to an enterprising one without drifting from mission.

Leaders then created their own 12–36 month resilience roadmap, identifying:

• Their highest-priority revenue opportunities
• Resource and staffing needs
• Potential partnerships
• Risks and mitigations
• Key milestones

This exercise often reveals the real barriers – not money, but capacity, confidence, clarity, and sometimes a mismatch between mission and activity.

Closing Reflections: Staying Mission-Led While Growing

We ended the day with leadership reflections, drawing on insights from my ten years at LAT. I spoke about balancing courage with caution, pace with wellbeing, and ambition with mission integrity; and about the “treadmill feeling” familiar to many arts leaders, and the necessity of stepping off it just long enough to ask the big questions.  In fact, conversely, leading this session actually provided an opportunity for me to step back and reflect (and at one point, we were all brainstorming one of my particular challenges and teacher became student!)  The group finished the day by committing to one tangible change that they will take forward. It’s a simple act, but an incredibly powerful one – and it was a real joy to hear about their next steps (and be a small part of their journeys).

Why Days Like This Matter

What struck me most was how much richness emerged from being in a small group. With only three leaders, the day became intimate, honest and practical – full of real examples, shared frustrations, laughter, and a sense of collective resilience.

Because financial resilience isn’t about becoming more commercial, it’s about becoming more intentional, more mission-aligned and more open to possibility.  Yesterday really reminded me that the arts sector is full of people ready to imagine new futures for themselves and their organisations – with courage, creativity, and community at the centre.

And perhaps the most striking thread running quietly beneath the day was the lingering sense that commercial is still, in some corners of our sector, treated like a dirty word. It shouldn’t be. I was reminded of a moment a few years ago when I told a peer, with genuine pride, that one of our shows was in the West End. His response was, “Oh, Sam, you are so commercial,” as though he was pointing out a flaw. The implication was clear: success that generates income is somehow suspect.

But as yesterday’s conversations proved, commercial simply means viable. It means your work resonates widely enough that people want to experience it. It doesn’t negate mission; it strengthens it. Viability creates the conditions for purpose to flourish: it allows artists to be paid fairly, organisations to plan boldly, and communities to be served more deeply. Behaving like a charity and behaving like an arts business are not opposing identities. They are not moral opposites, and they are not mutually exclusive. They are strategic modes that many organisations move between, often within the same project, the same season, even the same day. Both are valid, both are powerful, and both, in practice, are frequently intertwined.

Financial resilience is not about “selling out.” It is about standing up: for sustainability, for ambition, and for the futures we want to build. Yesterday reaffirmed that when leaders interrogate who they really are, embrace the full spectrum of income possibilities, and let go of outdated fears about what “commercial” might say about them, they step into a place of agency, clarity and possibility. And that, ultimately, is where real resilience begins.