Grants for Salaries Question

Character_Consultancy

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure if this question fits here or whether another forum would be better. Basically, I'm just about to start applying for a stack of grants to help me grow my business and have  question about grant-application etiquette. If any mod here thinks it should be in another subforum then by all means move it.

To give an overview, I'm an advanced trainee therapeutic counsellor specialising in Transactional Analysis and an experienced creative writer. I use my skills to work with people who have fictional characters (so writers, Dungeons & Dragons players, comic artists, video game designers, that kind of thing) to help them get to know their characters in greater depth. It comes in very handy for helping people to write their characters confidently, and for those characters to feel deep and complex.

Here's my question: my standard grant proposal includes a salary for myself, and I'm not sure whether it's considered good etiquette to go high or low. On the one hand I realise I'm choosing to run a business with all the early-stage poverty that comes with it, so can I really justify applying for more funding amounting to more than minimum wage? If I want more I could always go and take a regular job. On the other hand, I'm highly skilled and using those skills in my business, so renumeration that reflects that seems reasonable. At my current level of experience and qualification in therapeutic counselling I can justify charging up to £35 per counselling session. As it is, my grant proposal asks for a salary of £30,900 (so essentially £15.34 ph plus £900 per annum for a pension).

Does anybody here have advice about how I should go about this?

forgotmyname

£30k salary with a £35 per session cost.  Minimum 4 sessions a day 5 days a week. Is the customer base large enough?

Character_Consultancy

forgotmyname said:

£30k salary with a £35 per session cost.  Minimum 4 sessions a day 5 days a week. Is the customer base large enough?

The customer base of counselling clients? Yes, absolutely. There are many therapists living and working in my area who are very busy.

If you're talking about the customer base for TCC, then I am confident that the answer is yes. I have very little firepower as far as advertising goes (using therapeutic skills to explore fictional characters in this way is exceptionally rare) and I'm still very obscure. However, I have enough workflow to meet approximately 1/2 of my living costs. Marketing makes up a big portion of the basis of my grant application and I'm rotten at marketing myself, so I'm confident that with the right resources and a salesperson on my team I can get this to be very successful.

If it helps, a fair number of people hear what my business is about and doesn't see the appeal. My market research reflects this: people seem to fall into one of two camps. Either they don't find it appealing or they wonder where I've been all their life. There are enough of the latter that I believe there's more work out there than I can handle.