Meet the mentors: Aiwan Obinyan, Screen Launchpad mentor
If you’re looking for a dynamic mentor with experience, energy and a can-do attitude, look no further. The Nigerian-British Executive Producer, Filmmaker, Musician and BAFTA award winning Sound Designer Aiwan Obinyan has been a mentor on the Screen Launchpad programme for the last two years. With experience spanning film, TV and the music industry, she crafts stories and sounds that disrupt the status quo, for clients as diverse as gal-dem, BBC, GAY TIMES, Amazon, Audible and The UN.
In 2013 she founded AiAi Studios, a creative production company which has grown and developed to house a highly respected team of podcast experts. Her documentary about community wealth building in disadvantaged communities, The Phoenix Way, opens next year. Aiwan’s experiences as a working class sound engineer entering the creative industries at a time of great change inform her highly adaptive approach; as a mentor, she’s ready to challenge your thinking and help you take your work to the next level.
What motivated you to become a mentor with Creative UK, and what keeps you coming back?
I had been on the investment readiness program and I thought it was really well put together. The mentors were very knowledgeable but also personable and adaptable in terms of working with our particular circumstances and were able to push us in the ways that we needed to be pushed. That really inspired me. When I was approached, I said yes, absolutely.
In your experience, what are the biggest challenges screen-based founders face when trying to create and grow sustainable businesses – and how does mentoring help navigate these?
The biggest thing I see time and time again is that they've got massive amounts of creative skills, expertise, knowledge, creative genius, and innovation – and terrible business skills.
I had the exact same thing when I started at AiAi Studios: I just didn't know, and nobody really teaches you. When I think about my experiences studying music, the emphasis was on your skills. They don't go into things like cash flow, or how to manage your money.
You can have big blue sky dreams, and that's great, but if your business is not sustainable it doesn't actually matter. Your dreams might as well be built on candy floss. Your systems, creative, financial, and operational are very, very important for those difficult times ahead.
As a mentor, we build those robust creative financial and operational skills together. They don’t have to be complicated. I find that when people give business advice to creatives, they start at a really complex level and the creative brain just shuts down. But if you talk about it in really simple terms and make it instantly accessible and easy to action in the now, you are more likely to do that thing and sustain it.
When working with all my mentors, I also make a point of getting rid of this myth of the struggling artist. That is a mindset that you do not need. You have a right to live off of your art, just like a plumber has a right to live off his plumbing, and an accountant has a right to live off of their accounting.
What are the specific challenges you see for founders coming from underrepresented communities, and how can you help?
You probably already know that only around 16% of people working in the UK’s creative industries are from working class backgrounds. It was actually better in the seventies. There are issues with accents: where you’re from affects how you’re perceived, and acts as an indicator of your class. These things affect access to jobs; despite initiatives to bring work out of London to the north, unfortunately most of the work happens in London.
From an ethnicity perspective, we’re always emerging, never emerged. We get fixed in junior positions.
My advice is that for a little while, you're probably gonna have to build your own thing. It’s what I did: I created and directed a feature film off my own back; it took over two years but in the end I made the thing I wanted to make that was aligned with my values. And then things started to shift. I know it’s not ideal, and I’m not saying it’s right, but you may have to use your initiative to create the thing you want to make on your terms.
How would you describe your approach to mentoring and what do you think makes it effective for screen/creative businesses?
I take a four-pronged approach to it, starting with discovery. I'm really interested in what makes us tick, down to the roots of what drove us into the creative space in the first place, because I find that in that is the true essence of your business and your creative approach.
After three months, you should walk away with a better understanding of where you’re positioned within the industry so you really understand your unique offering to the space. I want them to come away really confident: this is who I am, this is my niche, and why I'm the best person to serve that niche. The rest will fall into place.
What’s one thing you’ve learned from the founders you’ve mentored that’s influenced your own work or perspective?
A lot of them are deeply collaborative. In the industry I came up in, it was about keeping your cards close to your chest. There’s something new about a very integrated collaboration that's at the core of how they think about things. It's instinctively collaborative and I find that really inspiring.
If you could give one piece of advice to any creative entrepreneur starting out today, what would it be?
I can tell you right now: there's no straight path. It's spaghetti junction. You are going to have to adapt, pivot, and be flexible – and it doesn't mean that you failed.