The goal of Artilect is to be self-sufficient and stable financially. In the first 10 years, it focused on teaching its community to make things differently with new technology. The funds from local authorities and the income from our activities could barely cover all the expenses. With the change in the financial program of the government, the budget that is used to support small businesses was decreased by years. To maintain our Fablab, we need a new strategy.
Artilec just celebrated its 15th birthday this February. During these years, students come for their projects, teachers organize a visit with their students, start-ups build their 1st prototypes, and freelancers products in Fablab. Many people consider Artilect as their second home. We need more revenue to keep our promise to our community (a place affordable for prototyping) and to maintain its conviviality (friendly team with competence). In September 2020, we moved to a new location in downtown Toulouse. We decided to launch new activities/services in our new location. The new activities are events, professional training courses, and team building.
We definite the target audience for each activity. Our clients for and the team building are B to B. For professional training courses, our clients could be professionals who want to train their employees, individuals who need to extend their skills for professional reasons, or unemployed who hope to obtain a new competence to find a job.
Now
In our Fablab!
We set up action plans for each activity. For the event, in our new location, we built 3 spaces that the client can rent for meetings, conferences, or after work. Each space has the facilities the clients need for their events. Furniture, audio, visual video, and lighting system. Thanks to the skillful members of our community, we had these systems installed at a very reasonable price.
The administration in France is long and complicated. An official certificate is required for any structure that wants to propose professional training courses. An audit every 18 months is obligatory to maintain the certificate. For this part, we work with our partner who helps us to build up documents and explains to us all the regulations we need to follow as a certified center.
The team building programs we propose are based on our “savoir-faire”, the digital fabrication. We propose different programs to adapt to the level of our clients. During the game, the teams learn how to work together and make things with the machines in Fablab by themself.
We have the catalogs for each activity. Each activity has its channels for communication. In our team, we have a reference for each activity. We are a small team. When one reference is not available, other team members can take over right away.