At RightsZone, we have identified three key steps that we believe can grow a rights business: Workflow, Data and Strategy. The steps are based on the work we have done with many different rights departments and professionals, across an array of publishers and agencies.
We will take you through each of these steps in this series of blog posts, looking at common difficulties, approaches you can take to overcome them and how in doing so you can grow your rights business.
In our first blog post, we looked at the impact streamlining your workflow could have on your rights business, freeing up time that you could spend more productively.
In our second post, we examined how you can use data to understand your rights business and prioritise growth actions.
In this, our third and final post, we will focus on the important step of a strategy to growing your rights business.
Thinking strategically
With a streamlined workflow and a more in-depth understanding of the opportunities for your rights business you can start to build out a strategy that meets your organisation’s unique requirements.
Defining strategy and your goals
There are lots of different definitions of strategy, but here’s a nice simple one from Britannica:
“Strategy: a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time.”
Goals are about establishing long term aims for your business, the best ones are aligned with the vision and values of your organization. For instance, you could set a goal to double the value of rights deals agreed over the next 3 years. Or, you might set a goal to increase the number of rights deals agreed in a particular market, if your values are more focused on extending the reach of your licensing.
Mapping out your strategy
What should your strategy look like if you want to grow your rights business?
We recommend 3 elements to help form a coherent strategy:
1) Set short term objectives
These objectives should be short SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) steps that will take you towards your goal. For example:
“Identify and make contact with 25 new buyers of Romantasy books in Germany by the end of Q1.”
2) Think about your tactics and actions
Identify what you need in order to be able to deliver each objective. In our example, we might need to:
- Do some research to locate potential new rights buyers of Romantasy titles in Germany
- Record details of any promising contacts with information about their interests
- Send them an introductory email with details of our new Romantasy books.
3) Consider your resources
Decide what you have and what you need to carry out those actions. Continuing our example, this may be:
- Human resource – someone to carry out the research, who has enough time to do so before the deadline
- Budget – you might need budget, for example, if you needed a subscription in order to do your research
- Systems – you will need access to systems where you can manage and maintain the contacts identified, and to send out the emails
Working back from your overall aims and identifying the building blocks that you need to help you get there, will give you a really good sense of how realistic your goal is.
You can flex your strategy as you go, changing up objectives and tactics depending on what’s working and in accordance with the available resources.
If you are part of a team, doing this collaboratively will help ensure that everyone is aligned with the overall vision. Articulating and documenting your plan means that you can also use it if you need to persuade those holding the purse strings to find some budget for additional resources.
Keep focussed on future growth
Strategy is not a “one and done” activity. To give you and your team the best chance of achieving your growth goals, embed your strategy into your everyday activities and decision making. Reflect, refine and review as you go to keep things on track, don’t just stick it in a drawer and forget about it until year end.
In an independent report produced for the Book Industry Study Group , a Case Study on one of our clients revealed that using RightsZone enabled them to realise their strategic goal of aligning different parts of their business, with impressive results:
“The largest gains from implementing RightsZone have stemmed from the company’s new ability to optimize pricing for subrights sales, enabled by a more global view of market conditions and better visibility of joint customers […] Licence renewal rose by 180% during that period”
BISG – Case Study results
3 Steps to Rights Growth
This post brings us to the end of our series on growing your rights business using our tried and tested 3 step approach to optimise workflow, data and strategy. We hope that it has given you some things to think about in relation to your own rights business.
We built the RightsZone system with this 3 step approach front of mind, and the evidence from our customers tells us that it is working, enabling the brilliant rights professionals who use it to free up time, deliver actionable business insights and plan and realise growth within their businesses.
If you’d like to chat about how we could help you grow your rights business then please do get in touch.
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