Thriving in uncertainty

We have news. We are going to enter a new phase as a company – to lie fallow. 

The last three months have been very difficult for us. We have only survived this long thanks to government subsidies. 95% of museums have closed, schools and teaching akimbo. The cultural sector is in survival mode and it’s not at all clear how long this will last. So, we’re going to shrink our operations to conserve energy, and we’ve laid out the plan below.

If you have questions about this or if you’d been thinking of doing a big project with us, please get in touch. We’re hoping existing customers won’t notice, but we’re trying to let everyone know.

You might think we offer a great fit for the scenario where physical visits to museums are not possible. We think that too, and hope museums who have considered using Museum in a Box for their outreach will still consider doing that. The thing is though, for now, we cannot afford to wait out the survival mode in our current configuration. The company has happily skated along so far by its bootstraps, but that meant we were immediately vulnerable when the virus arrived and the world was turned upside down. We must conserve energy instead. 

We have a strong foundation. We know how to make boxes efficiently, even if it’s done in a front room in London for now. We have a working web platform that’s basic, but gets the job done. We are practiced at opportunistic iterative software improvement and will take any chance we get to bring in a freelance developer to help on that. We have a great network of writers, actors, and producers who we can call on if/when a commission comes around. This is all good.

Our Plan

• Our online shop will stay open. You can still purchase a Make Your Own kit. We have 16 15 boxes left in the current 100-box batch at time of writing. We hope to arrange the next 100 boxes, but it will require a capital outlay, so needs to be carefully considered. Making boxes is the part of the business we can control.
  
• Our “Heart” platform will stay online. We acknowledge this approach will mean development on the platform will lag.
  
• We will still hang out on Slack, tweet cool things when we see them, and send occasional proof of life newsletters too.
  
• The team will seek other work. We’re not sure how this will play out, but we are committed to this plan even if the pace slows because we shrink to one person in a front room working on it when she can.
  
• For existing customers, I will happily provide customer support, and will respond to general enquiries, though I might need a bit more time to get back to you. (Imagine a kooky museum only open on Tuesday afternoons?)

We don’t want to cease trading. This is a protective, positive plan for the next stage of Museum in a Box while the market is well beyond our control. We plan to assess our status in detail every three months, and plan to be fallow for 12 months and then reassess, unless a project comes along we can take on without sacrificing stability. If you have been considering a partnership with us, do please get in touch. We will consider all possible projects – especially if you have already secured funding. At the very least we will make a note that you’d like to work with us for the future. 

Our thinking on this has been inspired by Thriving in Uncertainty, written in what seems like an age ago – 2015. This analogy of ‘lying fallow’ is useful: an intentional phase where new initiatives are deliberately not started but we restore our strength instead, and avoid surplus spending. It is intended as a quiet, hand-crafted, restorative phase, that helps us find personal stability elsewhere, at the moment. It will be interesting and helpful to reduce our costs deliberately. We’ve never tried doing that actively before, perhaps because we’re geeks and dreamers, not MBAs?! As we sell Make Your Own kits during this period, we aim to build up capital, putting us in a good position to realign when the world rights itself. 

Thank you kindly to Charlie Cattel-Killick and Adrian McEwen, and advisors Gill Wildman, Abira Hussein, Tom Flynn, Ben McGuire, and Matt Webb, who have helped me think through this phase change.