Museum business planning consultants
Museums face growing pressure to diversify income, compete for visitor time and spend, all while managing their collections and playing an increasingly important community role. Whether you’re a charitable trust, a volunteer-led organisation, or a museum embedded within a local authority, having a realistic, deliverable plan is essential to securing long-term sustainability. We often work alongside activity planners, interpretation designers, conservation architects, and collections and archives specialists.
Our work with museums focuses on business planning, income generation, assessing commercial opportunities, and reviewing the market: everything that is needed to create financial resilience and sustainable development in today’s challenging environment.
What we do
Planning Solutions Consulting has worked with a wide range of museums and heritage visitor attractions across the UK, from small independent and volunteer-led museums through to larger local authority-run museums. We specialise in the business planning and income generation side of museum development: appraising strategic options, testing financial assumptions, and producing plans that your team can actually deliver, in line with your values and the stories you want to tell. Our services include:
- Business plans to support National Lottery Heritage Fund and other grant applications
- Feasibility studies for new facilities, cafés, retail and visitor spaces
- Market assessments and options appraisals
- Governance evaluations and organisational reviews
- Income generation and commercial development planning
- Operational reviews and marketing action plans
- Business resilience and sustainability planning
Clients we’ve worked with
- Carmarthenshire County Council: Parc Howard Museum
- Chichester District Council: The Novium
- Somerset County Council: Blake Museum
- The Kent Mining Heritage Foundation: Kent Mining Museum
Please see all of our museum sector projects here. We also work across the wider heritage sector – see example projects here.
Added value: Direct operational experience
Our sister company, Planning Solutions Limited, directly manages heritage and other visitor attractions, including Kent Life Heritage Farm Park and CONKERS Discovery Centre. In 2010 they openned the National Brewery Centre (formerly the Bass Museum) which they managed until 2022. That means our advice is grounded in hands-on knowledge of the real challenges museums face, not just theory.
What our clients say
“Planning Solutions Consulting Ltd were our preferred supplier following a highly competitive procurement process and demonstrated an edge in their knowledge, experience and insights throughout the whole consultation. The combination of operational and business development knowledge, the expert team, and a really proactive approach to engaging with our stakeholders resulted in a robust and credible Feasibility Study (for Parc Howard Museum) that will become an essential tool for taking our project forward. We were listened to but also encouraged to consider new ideas, shown how these could work and the benefits they could bring by better meeting our long term goals.” Morrigan Mason, Museums Development Manager, Carmarthenshire County Council.
Talk to us about your project
If you’re considering a feasibility study, business plan, income generation strategy, or operational review for your museum, please call Richard Linington on 07866 742628 or email richard@pslplan.co.uk for an informal discussion.