MyCake.org is an innovative attempt to bring solid benchmarking services to small businesses within the creative industry.
First established by Sarah Thelwall in 2007, MyCake.org set out to bring benchmarking to small businesses in creative industries. The online application offers analysis tools to help creatives organise and understand their finances and most significantly, compare their finances with others in the industry.
MyCake is based upon an agricultural benchmarking system, Prime Numbers, which has operated for more than 20 years. Combining her experience in the creative sector with two decades' worth of development work by Prime Numbers has helped Thelwall to fashion a benchmarking solution suited to smaller businesses. Her goal is simple: “I really want to change the way the creative industries handles finance.”
The bulk of MyCake’s subscribers are microbusinesses with two or three employees, recruited via a partnership with the KashFlow web-based accounting system. The relationship means that MyCake benchmarks are drawn from recognised accounting environment - a far cry from the shoeboxes of receipts that is the industry norm. The decision to link with Kashflow was an easy one according to Thelwall: “We work with Kashflow because it’s a highly functional system; it’s fairly straightforward to use. Duane [Jackson, Kashflow founder] knows a lot of creatives himself and it was designed for people who weren’t finance folks. That’s what matters to us most. It’s a finance system, but you don’t have to be an expert to drive it.”
According to Thelwall, creatives are more likely to use the web for communication, e-commerce, and project management and are therefore more willing to use online accountancy solutions than other sectors. “If you look at the sort of tools that small businesses use, they use things like 37Signals’ Basecamp; they use Skype; they use Twitter; they use blogs... it’s not an enormous leap to use other forms of web apps,” she comments.
While KashFlow is committed to MyCake as its sole benchmarking partner, MyCake could work with others applications such as Sage if and when demanded by subscribers. “We could work with others, but we haven’t found a need to, but who knows what the future holds,” says Thelwall.
Similar benchmarking attempts have failed in the past because they couldn't draw a big enough community to make data both accurate and comprehensive. So far, MyCake has more than 300 subscribers, and the number continues to grow. The organisation has issued two quarterly briefings to subscribers, one focusing on general profile statistics, the other looking in more detail the users’ profit and loss information. Subscribers to MyCake can also compare themselves to each other in greater detail using anonymous stats and breakdowns.
However all data submitted to MyCake remains the property of the individual user - Thelwall is keen to avoid a Facebook-style revolt - and the system makes it difficult for overly nosey competitors to dig into the performance of a single company: “If you’re a user and you happen to know that I’m a user, MyCake wants to make very sure you can’t look at my data. We have some checks in place so that if you try to drill down to something you know is me and it’s too small a number of data sets, we just won’t show you the data,” explains Thelwall.
“Users trust MyCake to give them a useful comparison, without giving away that which is really private.”
Looking to the future, Thelwall eagerly anticipates providing year-on-year breakdowns to her subscribers. Achieving a milestone of 1,000 users is also on her list of goals. For the medium term Thelwall is continuing to focus on her core market in creative industries. But this hasn’t stopped the MyCake founder from keeping an eye on other potential sectors: “You could use MyCake benchmarking in any sector that’s highly fragmented and full of SMEs... We could do something fantastic to electricians and plumbers, because who do they compare themselves against? It’s just a question of how fast we grow or how thinly we spread ourselves,” says Thelwall.
“So it’s not that I don’t want to talk to a wider community in the accounting world, but at the moment I have to go and get business!”
Jon Wilcox
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