Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin
It occurred to me some time in 2021 that something about making a new show every year for Fringe, and a new company to go with each one, wasn't quite right. It didn’t feel like the most responsible use of time and effort to just leave a project behind with no larger plan for it within a few months. Surely the art you put your blood, sweat and tears into making can have a life longer than one season? Surely not everyone in Wellington would have seen the show and there are more audiences to share the work with, more tickets to be sold? If the art I was a part of creating was as good as I thought it was, and had the audience reaction it did, wouldn’t it make sense to keep going?
I was under the impression that if I kept making new show after show then one of them was bound to be a hit and my life would be sorted forever. I just had to keep churning out new stuff until the hit came along.
I am no longer under that impression.
The intention of this piece is to give an insight into my experience settling my theatre company Ruff as Gutz (RAG) as a Charitable Trust and, since I am the way I am, there will inevitably be pieces of unsolicited advice during tangents. I enjoy this conversation and understand articles can feel one-sided, but please don’t hesitate to contact or contradict me at [email protected]
What is a charitable trust and why make one?
There’s a lot more information on the New Zealand Companies Office website, but I would also ask around after reading this if you’re interested in founding one. People on the RAG team used our connections and asked friends at Red Scare, WITCH Theatre, and others, about how and why they did what they did to figure out what’s right for us. We ended up putting together a deed to found the Charitable Trust on (we copied a lot of the WITCH Theatre deed, thanks WITCH!), gathered evidence of use of the company before its official registry (all the shows we’ve done before), and then had an Annual General Meeting (AGM) to elect a Board of Trustees who signed the deed. Then, we sent the deed off to the Charities Services of New Zealand alongside all the answers to their questions, most importantly what the purpose of the Charitable Trust is. This information will be put publicly on the NZ Charities website here, and you can use the menu on the left to go to Purpose & Structure, as well as the Charity Documents section to see our deed and our amendment.
The way you run the company may change and if so you’ll need to write up amendments. During the AGM we changed the structure from 4 Trustees to 7, including changes to the title of each role, and instead of having to write out a complete new deed you just have to create an amendment which outlines the changes. Both are publicly available. Then: you wait! If they deem your purpose fit for the type of legal structure you’re applying to register (here is a page with a list of different structures), they’ll approve you.
What happens then? To be registered on the Charities Services it means that the Charitable Trust is a legal entity that publicly discloses finances at the end of every financial year. The benefit of this is that larger funding bodies like Creative New Zealand (CNZ), Wellington City Council (WCC), or private funders can see evidence that you will be held accountable for your finances and activity by the law. This, in theory, makes you a safer bet for funding since you are tied legally to an entity that must fulfil its function and not a company with no ties to the law which could take the money and run! We have noticed an increase of support from show to show with ratKing garnering something over $6,000 across multiple funds, Milkoween getting $5,200 from one WCC grant, and Celebrity Trevor Island getting just under $8,000 .
What is the Board of Trustees?
The RAG Board of Trustees is made up of seven positions and these amazing people are in those roles as a Board of Trustees. The Creative Producer(me!), the Secretary (Emma Rattenbury), The Treasurer (Jacob Banks), Kaitiaki Hauora (Jeremy Hunt), and three Wet Rags (Anna Barker, Mia Oudes, Rebekah de Roo). Wet Rags? I’ll get to that.
The Treasurer handles the companies finances and will need the co-signature of the Creative Producer in order to access the bank account for reimbursements, payments, all that money stuff. The Secretary takes minutes and handles agendas for the meetings. Kaitiaki Hauora has the responsibility for the general well being of the company and its members. Recently, that took the form of organising a BYO for all RAG members which was heaps of fun! Now to the Wet Rags. This role was created so that we could have more voices in Board meetings, and a wider range of skills to draw from as a team. Most importantly, every project under Ruff as Gutz gets assigned one of these Wet Rags to sit separate to the production but is known and available to all team members so that they can contact this person if they don’t feel comfortable going to other members of the team within the production. So if the director or producer or whoever is making cast members uncomfortable, but they are also the person who the cast are meant to go to about problems like this, then you can approach the Wet Rag who can operate with the board in order to resolve conflicts.
What have you learnt?
I’ve learnt that it's our company and we can do what we want. There was a piece of intellectual property (IP) that began as an idea and was developing into a show between members of the Board of Trustees. The group couldn’t decide if they wanted it under the RAG banner since it seemed so different to what we’ve done before (which was only MILKs and a ratKing at the time) so they seriously considered creating another company to house this new show. They didn’t necessarily want people who were expecting another MILK or ratKing to come to this and be disappointed. The reality is we can have the show under our umbrella, using the model we’ve created to apply for funding with a better chance of getting it, but we don’t have to market this new IP on RAG socials. It can have its own marketing campaign separate so that it can diversify the RAG portfolio and not confuse potential audiences. To think about it another way, I would think about Restaurant Brands which is the large overarching company for heaps of restaurants like Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Carls Jr, etc. They are all distinct businesses but under the same umbrella company. Instead of Pizza Hutt “doing burgers now!”, there is another entity that consumers can differentiate. That’s the vibe we settled on.
Something else we learnt early on is that it really is a volunteer position to be on the Board of Trustees and it has to be realistically treated as such. There are seven people on the Board and each of them work for a living, some freelance, but mostly full-time work and art in time left over. This means that things that need actioning might take a while, since there are two other pretty important things in each of these people's lives which take precedence. That’s the reality and I’m glad I had the foresight not to enter into this thing hoping to rush through stuff and hassle people for not doing work for a job that they weren’t getting paid for. It is a slow-moving beast but at least it’s moving!
Works under RAG that aren’t Sean
The first things we did when we elected the Trustees at the AGM is: apply for the charities register, open a business bank account, and launch a new IP (Celebrity Trevor Island) which has nothing to do with me. I get asked the question a lot: “how do you feel about your company doing a show that’s not yours?” and it feels great! I work at a school and the principal of 22 years resigned at the end of 2023. Grant was an awesome principal and he articulated his perspective on the role, elaborating that it’s a manager’s position and you know you’ve done a good job as a manager if someone else can come in and pick up where you left off. The dream in my head for Ruff as Gutz is that we lay the groundwork so well that people can come in and pick up where we’ve left it and continue to make distinctly Ruff as Gutz shows without any one of us.
My greatest challenge is working MILK towards a place internally where we can start feeding in younger performers to each season, keeping new blood flowing, but also to a place where I don’t have to be showrunner. It’s our company and we can do whatever we want with it. How can we continue to grow and make more and more high quality content for audiences if we’re always bound to my schedule?
Trusting People
One thing I didn’t do when I was younger was trust people. I spent four years in Auckland and for two of those years I was on the executive of the University of Auckland's Stray Theatre Company. Anybody who shared those terms with me could tell you that I wasn’t cut out for it. Since wiping the slate clean and moving to Wellington at the end of 2019, letting myself work on other productions and learning more about myself and how I want to work, by the time we changed the name of New Zealand Theatre Live to Ruff as Gutz (thank god), I had a much clearer idea about my personal kaupapa and how I wanted to lead teams. I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, I know that, but I do have pretty good people skills. I never took full advantage of just how well my mother conducted herself in parliament- she was an MP for nine years- until around this point in my life. I think Mum is a genius and there’s a reason she’s respected by both sides of the House. I learnt from her that the leader doesn’t have to have all the answers, that’s what the team is for. The leader needs to know who to have on their team and to trust them to do their job. I don’t need to know about lighting design and equipment because we have lighting designers on the Board of Trustees. The fallacy that the most talented should lead is something I used to see in retail work before I was a teacher, where the best sellers would be made managers. That doesn’t make sense because you’re taking the best sellers off the floor, away from selling, to try and do admin and people management which you’ve seen no evidence of. I used to want to be a leader because I thought I was the best creative. Now, I want to be a leader because I know my friends are.
The Biggest Challenges
It took 10 months to set up the company bank account. We first tried to go with ANZ but after the malarkey of trying to organise the first meeting, when they close early on weekdays and are not open weekends, and finally getting Jacob (Treasurer) and me (Creative Director) in chairs with a bank advisor, we got 40 minutes into the meeting before they revealed we actually needed all seven Trustees here in person to register the account. The Trustees are all really busy so that ended our relationship with ANZ. Kiwibank was an extended process of emailing backwards and forwards, amending and replacing supporting documentation, and yeah it gets frustrating but patience is a virtue, I guess!
Another challenge could be that, yes, I love my Trustees and I trust each and every one of them but there is always the worry that they won’t do it the way I would have done it. But again it comes down to having patience and grace and letting go of ego. With both of these things, I remember advice my old principal had given to the new principal replacing him: “You have two ears and one mouth, that’s the ratio you need for this job.” I think anyone from the company would tell you that I definitely have one big mouth, but hey! It’s aspirational and at the end of the day they don’t do things the way I would have done it but that’s because they are them and I am me. Of course they are going to do things differently, but that’s no reason not to trust someone.
Another challenge I don’t know when I will have to face, but know I will have to, is how to say no to my friends. There are some ideas that just don’t fit under the RAG umbrella and it feels bad to leave them out in the rain. Sometimes people come to me with offers trying to shoulder tap me for their productions and every time I sit them down and have a coffee where I grill them for an hour or so about them, their work ethic, their kaupapa and the themes and questions of the show. After these chats I get everything I need to know in order to accurately make a call about whether the show is right for me or not. On a larger scale, the company also gets approached like this. Sometimes, I can see that a person is not ready to lead a team. I’m not an expert, I would say that I’m still emerging, I would not say that I’m a pro, so it does feel weird and presumptuous of me to think I know what makes a good leader but I try and hold fast to what I believe a leader needs to possess.
Sometimes people come to me and I don’t see those qualities in them or the process they’re pitching me. Saying no to people is a hard thing to do because art is so personal and if you say no to someone’s show it’s easy for it to be misinterpreted as you not liking them. There is a great pressure here since the theatre community is so well connected. I’m lucky I’ve had a schooling context in order to have difficult constructive conversations with learners, but also in a reviewing context with Art Murmurs. My goal when starting with Art Murmurs, the reason I wanted to review in the first place, was to become better at communicating constructive content in an accessible way in a one-way conversation.
I don’t always nail this. The best you can do is hope that the other person understands where you’re coming from. To be perfectly honest, if someone hears me articulate why I don’t think I should be involved in a project, or why I don’t think it should be under RAG, and they take it badly, it’s immediately affirming. If right from the get go you don’t like not getting your way and you don’t handle set-backs with grace, it’s a big red flag for me and means I made the right decision not working with you yet.
Leading a project is a compromise and rejection is a huge part of my experience with it. For me, having to lead devising processes, the leader must always come in with enough ideas for the entire rehearsal and be prepared to forgo all of them. You must facilitate a space where your team feels safe enough to create, communicate and even challenge you as a leader and you must have the grace to understand that the only person in the room whose job it is to be patient, and not get upset, is you. Everyone else has the right to be held except the leader who must hold others. As much as we all hold each other through the relationships we’ve built, the reality is if the project lead starts to have a bad time, everyone has a bad time. Notice I said “yet” at the end of the paragraph before? The theatre scene in this town is so small you actually get to see people grow from afar and I don’t think people take advantage of this as much as they should. I say no to people, yes, but I don’t write people off. We’re constantly learning and evolving and people do come around. People do learn and change and sometimes I do end up saying yes to someone years after saying no because I’ve heard that they’ve changed their ways and have grown as a creative and a leader.
In Conclusion
Think about what you want. The success of Ruff as Gutz so far is due to the teams of people in its multiple productions and the Board of Trustees. Be honest with what you want and your own skill set. People are all we’ve got and they are much more important than any show or any product so I try to surround myself with people that think the same way. To create a Charitable Trust or a company you are going to be under scrutiny - and that’s a good thing. It’s frustrating, things take ages to happen, there will be parts you do not understand and you mustn’t lose your cool. You must be open to listening to, and learning from, anyone. It will be your fault and you mustn’t shy away from responsibility. Creating a Charitable Trust has been an extremely rewarding process, watching the team grow, the support grow, and myself grow. Not everyone can hack it and, hey, come back to this in another year and see if I’ve burnt the whole thing to the ground!
I am no longer under that impression.
The intention of this piece is to give an insight into my experience settling my theatre company Ruff as Gutz (RAG) as a Charitable Trust and, since I am the way I am, there will inevitably be pieces of unsolicited advice during tangents. I enjoy this conversation and understand articles can feel one-sided, but please don’t hesitate to contact or contradict me at [email protected]
What is a charitable trust and why make one?
There’s a lot more information on the New Zealand Companies Office website, but I would also ask around after reading this if you’re interested in founding one. People on the RAG team used our connections and asked friends at Red Scare, WITCH Theatre, and others, about how and why they did what they did to figure out what’s right for us. We ended up putting together a deed to found the Charitable Trust on (we copied a lot of the WITCH Theatre deed, thanks WITCH!), gathered evidence of use of the company before its official registry (all the shows we’ve done before), and then had an Annual General Meeting (AGM) to elect a Board of Trustees who signed the deed. Then, we sent the deed off to the Charities Services of New Zealand alongside all the answers to their questions, most importantly what the purpose of the Charitable Trust is. This information will be put publicly on the NZ Charities website here, and you can use the menu on the left to go to Purpose & Structure, as well as the Charity Documents section to see our deed and our amendment.
The way you run the company may change and if so you’ll need to write up amendments. During the AGM we changed the structure from 4 Trustees to 7, including changes to the title of each role, and instead of having to write out a complete new deed you just have to create an amendment which outlines the changes. Both are publicly available. Then: you wait! If they deem your purpose fit for the type of legal structure you’re applying to register (here is a page with a list of different structures), they’ll approve you.
What happens then? To be registered on the Charities Services it means that the Charitable Trust is a legal entity that publicly discloses finances at the end of every financial year. The benefit of this is that larger funding bodies like Creative New Zealand (CNZ), Wellington City Council (WCC), or private funders can see evidence that you will be held accountable for your finances and activity by the law. This, in theory, makes you a safer bet for funding since you are tied legally to an entity that must fulfil its function and not a company with no ties to the law which could take the money and run! We have noticed an increase of support from show to show with ratKing garnering something over $6,000 across multiple funds, Milkoween getting $5,200 from one WCC grant, and Celebrity Trevor Island getting just under $8,000 .
What is the Board of Trustees?
The RAG Board of Trustees is made up of seven positions and these amazing people are in those roles as a Board of Trustees. The Creative Producer(me!), the Secretary (Emma Rattenbury), The Treasurer (Jacob Banks), Kaitiaki Hauora (Jeremy Hunt), and three Wet Rags (Anna Barker, Mia Oudes, Rebekah de Roo). Wet Rags? I’ll get to that.
The Treasurer handles the companies finances and will need the co-signature of the Creative Producer in order to access the bank account for reimbursements, payments, all that money stuff. The Secretary takes minutes and handles agendas for the meetings. Kaitiaki Hauora has the responsibility for the general well being of the company and its members. Recently, that took the form of organising a BYO for all RAG members which was heaps of fun! Now to the Wet Rags. This role was created so that we could have more voices in Board meetings, and a wider range of skills to draw from as a team. Most importantly, every project under Ruff as Gutz gets assigned one of these Wet Rags to sit separate to the production but is known and available to all team members so that they can contact this person if they don’t feel comfortable going to other members of the team within the production. So if the director or producer or whoever is making cast members uncomfortable, but they are also the person who the cast are meant to go to about problems like this, then you can approach the Wet Rag who can operate with the board in order to resolve conflicts.
What have you learnt?
I’ve learnt that it's our company and we can do what we want. There was a piece of intellectual property (IP) that began as an idea and was developing into a show between members of the Board of Trustees. The group couldn’t decide if they wanted it under the RAG banner since it seemed so different to what we’ve done before (which was only MILKs and a ratKing at the time) so they seriously considered creating another company to house this new show. They didn’t necessarily want people who were expecting another MILK or ratKing to come to this and be disappointed. The reality is we can have the show under our umbrella, using the model we’ve created to apply for funding with a better chance of getting it, but we don’t have to market this new IP on RAG socials. It can have its own marketing campaign separate so that it can diversify the RAG portfolio and not confuse potential audiences. To think about it another way, I would think about Restaurant Brands which is the large overarching company for heaps of restaurants like Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Carls Jr, etc. They are all distinct businesses but under the same umbrella company. Instead of Pizza Hutt “doing burgers now!”, there is another entity that consumers can differentiate. That’s the vibe we settled on.
Something else we learnt early on is that it really is a volunteer position to be on the Board of Trustees and it has to be realistically treated as such. There are seven people on the Board and each of them work for a living, some freelance, but mostly full-time work and art in time left over. This means that things that need actioning might take a while, since there are two other pretty important things in each of these people's lives which take precedence. That’s the reality and I’m glad I had the foresight not to enter into this thing hoping to rush through stuff and hassle people for not doing work for a job that they weren’t getting paid for. It is a slow-moving beast but at least it’s moving!
Works under RAG that aren’t Sean
The first things we did when we elected the Trustees at the AGM is: apply for the charities register, open a business bank account, and launch a new IP (Celebrity Trevor Island) which has nothing to do with me. I get asked the question a lot: “how do you feel about your company doing a show that’s not yours?” and it feels great! I work at a school and the principal of 22 years resigned at the end of 2023. Grant was an awesome principal and he articulated his perspective on the role, elaborating that it’s a manager’s position and you know you’ve done a good job as a manager if someone else can come in and pick up where you left off. The dream in my head for Ruff as Gutz is that we lay the groundwork so well that people can come in and pick up where we’ve left it and continue to make distinctly Ruff as Gutz shows without any one of us.
My greatest challenge is working MILK towards a place internally where we can start feeding in younger performers to each season, keeping new blood flowing, but also to a place where I don’t have to be showrunner. It’s our company and we can do whatever we want with it. How can we continue to grow and make more and more high quality content for audiences if we’re always bound to my schedule?
Trusting People
One thing I didn’t do when I was younger was trust people. I spent four years in Auckland and for two of those years I was on the executive of the University of Auckland's Stray Theatre Company. Anybody who shared those terms with me could tell you that I wasn’t cut out for it. Since wiping the slate clean and moving to Wellington at the end of 2019, letting myself work on other productions and learning more about myself and how I want to work, by the time we changed the name of New Zealand Theatre Live to Ruff as Gutz (thank god), I had a much clearer idea about my personal kaupapa and how I wanted to lead teams. I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, I know that, but I do have pretty good people skills. I never took full advantage of just how well my mother conducted herself in parliament- she was an MP for nine years- until around this point in my life. I think Mum is a genius and there’s a reason she’s respected by both sides of the House. I learnt from her that the leader doesn’t have to have all the answers, that’s what the team is for. The leader needs to know who to have on their team and to trust them to do their job. I don’t need to know about lighting design and equipment because we have lighting designers on the Board of Trustees. The fallacy that the most talented should lead is something I used to see in retail work before I was a teacher, where the best sellers would be made managers. That doesn’t make sense because you’re taking the best sellers off the floor, away from selling, to try and do admin and people management which you’ve seen no evidence of. I used to want to be a leader because I thought I was the best creative. Now, I want to be a leader because I know my friends are.
The Biggest Challenges
It took 10 months to set up the company bank account. We first tried to go with ANZ but after the malarkey of trying to organise the first meeting, when they close early on weekdays and are not open weekends, and finally getting Jacob (Treasurer) and me (Creative Director) in chairs with a bank advisor, we got 40 minutes into the meeting before they revealed we actually needed all seven Trustees here in person to register the account. The Trustees are all really busy so that ended our relationship with ANZ. Kiwibank was an extended process of emailing backwards and forwards, amending and replacing supporting documentation, and yeah it gets frustrating but patience is a virtue, I guess!
Another challenge could be that, yes, I love my Trustees and I trust each and every one of them but there is always the worry that they won’t do it the way I would have done it. But again it comes down to having patience and grace and letting go of ego. With both of these things, I remember advice my old principal had given to the new principal replacing him: “You have two ears and one mouth, that’s the ratio you need for this job.” I think anyone from the company would tell you that I definitely have one big mouth, but hey! It’s aspirational and at the end of the day they don’t do things the way I would have done it but that’s because they are them and I am me. Of course they are going to do things differently, but that’s no reason not to trust someone.
Another challenge I don’t know when I will have to face, but know I will have to, is how to say no to my friends. There are some ideas that just don’t fit under the RAG umbrella and it feels bad to leave them out in the rain. Sometimes people come to me with offers trying to shoulder tap me for their productions and every time I sit them down and have a coffee where I grill them for an hour or so about them, their work ethic, their kaupapa and the themes and questions of the show. After these chats I get everything I need to know in order to accurately make a call about whether the show is right for me or not. On a larger scale, the company also gets approached like this. Sometimes, I can see that a person is not ready to lead a team. I’m not an expert, I would say that I’m still emerging, I would not say that I’m a pro, so it does feel weird and presumptuous of me to think I know what makes a good leader but I try and hold fast to what I believe a leader needs to possess.
Sometimes people come to me and I don’t see those qualities in them or the process they’re pitching me. Saying no to people is a hard thing to do because art is so personal and if you say no to someone’s show it’s easy for it to be misinterpreted as you not liking them. There is a great pressure here since the theatre community is so well connected. I’m lucky I’ve had a schooling context in order to have difficult constructive conversations with learners, but also in a reviewing context with Art Murmurs. My goal when starting with Art Murmurs, the reason I wanted to review in the first place, was to become better at communicating constructive content in an accessible way in a one-way conversation.
I don’t always nail this. The best you can do is hope that the other person understands where you’re coming from. To be perfectly honest, if someone hears me articulate why I don’t think I should be involved in a project, or why I don’t think it should be under RAG, and they take it badly, it’s immediately affirming. If right from the get go you don’t like not getting your way and you don’t handle set-backs with grace, it’s a big red flag for me and means I made the right decision not working with you yet.
Leading a project is a compromise and rejection is a huge part of my experience with it. For me, having to lead devising processes, the leader must always come in with enough ideas for the entire rehearsal and be prepared to forgo all of them. You must facilitate a space where your team feels safe enough to create, communicate and even challenge you as a leader and you must have the grace to understand that the only person in the room whose job it is to be patient, and not get upset, is you. Everyone else has the right to be held except the leader who must hold others. As much as we all hold each other through the relationships we’ve built, the reality is if the project lead starts to have a bad time, everyone has a bad time. Notice I said “yet” at the end of the paragraph before? The theatre scene in this town is so small you actually get to see people grow from afar and I don’t think people take advantage of this as much as they should. I say no to people, yes, but I don’t write people off. We’re constantly learning and evolving and people do come around. People do learn and change and sometimes I do end up saying yes to someone years after saying no because I’ve heard that they’ve changed their ways and have grown as a creative and a leader.
In Conclusion
Think about what you want. The success of Ruff as Gutz so far is due to the teams of people in its multiple productions and the Board of Trustees. Be honest with what you want and your own skill set. People are all we’ve got and they are much more important than any show or any product so I try to surround myself with people that think the same way. To create a Charitable Trust or a company you are going to be under scrutiny - and that’s a good thing. It’s frustrating, things take ages to happen, there will be parts you do not understand and you mustn’t lose your cool. You must be open to listening to, and learning from, anyone. It will be your fault and you mustn’t shy away from responsibility. Creating a Charitable Trust has been an extremely rewarding process, watching the team grow, the support grow, and myself grow. Not everyone can hack it and, hey, come back to this in another year and see if I’ve burnt the whole thing to the ground!