“I’ve benefitted from visionary mentors throughout my career – I know how valuable they can be”

Meet the mentors: Sophie Morgan, Foundations mentor 

As a former Creative Enterprise mentee, BAFTA-nominated producer, consultant, screenwriter and multiplatform content creator Sophie Morgan knows how much difference mentoring schemes can make. Founder of Pontariva, a consultancy providing creative and strategic support to companies in TV, film, digital, audio and games, she helps businesses grow by identifying commercial opportunities and developing outstanding cross-platform content.  

If you’ve ever watched RuPaul’s Drag Race, London Ink or Britain’s Next Top Model, you’ve seen her work in action. Sophie started in the industry as a receptionist and knows what it takes to rise to the top and lead global creative firms in LA and London. She brings a can-do, entrepreneurial attitude to the industry, with expertise covering everything from financing to developing cutting edge creative ideas and is ready to help creative founders identify their niche and move forward with confidence. 

 What motivated you to become a mentor with Creative Enterprise, and what keeps you coming back? 

I’ve benefited enormously from visionary mentors in my own career: winning a place on Channel 4’s Development Researcher scheme right at the very beginning of my career is what kickstarted everything for me, so I know first-hand the value of great mentors. I started delivering sessions and mentoring on development and creative leadership at Creative Enterprise a few years ago, and I’ve been a Foundations mentor for the last three years. 

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? 

Right across the creative industries, everybody is concerned about how a fragmenting audience means business is now harder to win.  But when you’re running a company, you often don’t have the time or resources to be filtering through new thinking on topics like whether your IP could be exploited more profitably across different platforms or whether Gen AI can help not only improve your processes and workflow but also elevate your creative output – you’re just busy keeping your head down and the lights on. That’s when it’s useful having another pair of eyes - somebody who can read the landscape from a different vantage point and give you another way of looking at things. That’s how mentoring helps.  

 Foundations is a business development programme for founders. What’s the benefit of gaining a business development background as a creative?  

Business development and business thinking is very like creative thinking: it’s just problem solving. By harnessing the out-of-the-box creative thinking you use to develop content or tell stories and applying that problem solving to your business strategy, can give you a real advantage. But you need to know what the problems are before you start working out how to solve them, and sometimes if you're really new in the industry, you don't know what these problems are – for your buyer and your audience – so you end up diverting your energy in less profitable ways. 

 Understanding and fully inhabiting your niche, knowing how to diversify your revenue streams and effectively exploit your IP, collaborating smartly, moving quickly to embrace not just new trends but whole new market segments and ways of working is vital right now. Smaller companies need to do this the most because they’re more likely have quite vulnerable revenue streams, but they’re also the ones small and agile enough to do it quickly.  

How would you describe your approach to mentoring and what do you think makes it effective for screen/creative businesses? 

I try to adapt my style to the personalities involved, tailoring my mentoring to the very specific needs of the individual or company being mentored. I have a research chat at the beginning where I listen to what the practical business and creative problems are. At the same time, I’m reading between the lines to see what other problems there might be: maybe you have two MDs who have conflicting views about the direction of the business, or perhaps you’re a new mum with insecurities about re-entering the workplace. I try to make sure there’s a really human element to my mentoring.  

What have you learned from mentoring that’s influenced your own work or perspective? 

Most people go into the creative industries because they’re passionate about discovering thoughtful and imaginative ways to explore the human condition. Not many go into it because they love planning revenue milestones. What I've learned is that you absolutely 100% have to think like an entrepreneur if you're going to succeed in running a creative business in this current climate. It’s not enough to have great creative content; you also have to think really smartly about who you’re going to sell that content to, why an audience will want it and how you’re going to let them know it’s there.  And if you can't sell it in the format you devised, is there another way you can reconfigure it? It sounds a bit soulless, but actually I think it encourages creative thinking. You have to be evolving and reiterating and experimenting all the time: it's not a place for people with a fixed mindset. 

If you could give one piece of advice to any founder starting out today, what would it be?  

Think like an entrepreneur. You've always had to consider your audience, but now you also have to think about how you can find them – how you can meet your audience where they are and why they will watch your content when there is so much else out there. You need to identify your brand very early on too and what makes your approach distinct. It's so competitive at the moment that having a really clear proposition and being really passionate about what you do and why you do it will go a long way in helping win business. 

The final advice I’d give is to lean into your niche. It sounds counterintuitive in a risk-averse climate but finding a clever way to make a niche topic mainstream is more exciting to a buyer than making a mainstream topic even more mainstream.  So don't be afraid of being niche.