Finance, with real clarity.
Creative and cultural leaders should never have to choose between artistic ambition and financial confidence.
Too often it feels like exactly that choice, because finance becomes the thing that worries you rather than the thing that helps you decide. That is the gap we work in.
Money in the creative sector moves differently from anywhere else, and it does not move the same way twice. A touring company lives on fees and box office, grant cycles and tax reliefs. A screen or games studio lives on milestones, advances and recoupment. A digital studio lives on utilisation, work in progress and the gap between winning the work and being paid for it. An investor-backed business lives on runway, covenants and the next round. What they share is money arriving and departing on rhythms that generalist finance often does not recognise.
It is why creative organisations can end up being advised by people who understand the compliance but not the ambition, and holding sets of accounts that are perfectly accurate and answer no question anyone was asking.
The Clarity Studio exists to close that gap. Not more spreadsheets, and not jargon, but finance that backs what you are building rather than constraining it.
Support that meets organisations wherever they are:
- Team training, to give your people the confidence to read the numbers
- One-to-one coaching, for leaders who want to feel genuinely on top of the finances
- Fractional finance leadership, when you want an experienced finance director alongside you, or end to end finance support for your business
Group programmes are on the way, for ongoing support and perspective.
The founder
The Clarity Studio is led by Sara Vening, a Chartered Management Accountant, Fractional Finance Director and EMCC-accredited coach at Practitioner level, with three decades in finance.
Looking back, there is a synchronicity to those three decades, which started somewhere very different from where they led. A lifelong love of music, and a belief that finance should serve purpose and not just profit, were always there underneath the early banking career, waiting for the roles that would finally bring them together.
Sara was at Northern Rock through the collapse, nationalisation and restructuring, and one of the specialists in the data room when the bank was sold to Virgin Money, the kind of years that teach you what numbers mean when everything is genuinely at stake. From there she led finance for Virgin Money Giving, the not-for-profit fundraising platform built to challenge for-profit rivals that took a cut from donors and charities alike, and helped set up and run the Virgin Money Foundation. Then came a CFO role at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music, and these roles are where the two threads finally came together, and where she found the work she cares about most: bringing real financial rigour to organisations driven by something other than money.
The Clarity Studio is where that work continues.
Whether you need end to end finance support or a sounding board, someone a leader can think out loud with and talk the numbers through without judgement, the aim is always the same: less worry, clear decisions, and the confidence that you are not missing anything.
If that sounds like what you have been looking for, we would love to hear from you.