Around us the laptops are glowing, lattes and herbal teas are being sipped, and, in all likelihood, some pretty important cultural and media decisions are being made. The coffee shop at Fazeley Studios in Digbeth – the Fazeley Social to give it its proper name – is the kind of place where serious business is done in 2014.

And Sam Slater and I are here to talk business, too: his new business, Stoney Lane Records.

Sam is more familiarly seen behind an acoustic guitar with fellow gipsy jazz specialist Jamie Fekete. They had started out while still students as two-thirds of the all-Spanish guitar Trio Gitano; now they co-lead the bigger TG Collective, a band which mixes jazz, flamenco and contemporary classical elements with that core gypsy sound.

But Sam had realised early on that there needed to be more to his musical career than simply being behind an instrument.

So is “taking care of business” important for a creative artist?

“Definitely, although it’s equally important not to lose sight that you’re still a musician. You don’t want to get completely swallowed up into the business side, otherwise you’ll be lost forever.

“Saying that, you consistently need to do a lot for yourself, so the more flexible and clued-up you can be in different areas the better. You often need to be your own agent, designer, web-coder, promoter, tour booker, video editor, social media expert and press plugger!

And has that become more complicated?

“Music is now consumed over so many types of media and formats that you have to be on top of them all, aside from developing the live side of your career, and creating something dynamic and original to be able to promote in the first place.”

For Sam, the business side of things began to extend beyond his own music.

Together with his good friend and fellow musician Percy Pursglove, he founded Mubu Music, to “produce, curate and programme” a range of music from folk to contemporary classical.

When your children attend one of the Saturday Musical Picnics in the Symphony Hall cafe bar, that’s a Mubu production; if you saw the Invisible Dancing at the International Dance Festival Birmingham, or caught some of the 4 Squares Weekender Festival earlier this year, Mubu was involved with those.

And now Sam has a new project.

“Stoney Lane Records began when we self-released a TG Collective album in 2012. At the time it was only through necessity and for our own music, but I had the idea in the back of my mind that it would be nice to create more of a working record label.

“Over the last year, knowing several brilliant local players and friends were planning on recording or planning new projects, it made sense to come together as a collective support and promotional basis for us all, which helps to shout a bit more about the great – yet sometimes under-exposed – scene and original music we’ve got bubbling away here.”

I know that, upstairs from the Fazeley Social in a small office Sam shares with others, there are boxes of newly printed covers housing freshly digitised CDs piling up, so things are clearly moving on apace for Stoney Lane Records.

“With distribution in place, a lovely press and PR guru, and a great engineer we work with, we’ll be releasing some wonderful music over the next year, with Chris Mapp’s Gambol, Lluis Mather’s Quintet and Nonet, the Mike Fletcher Trio, and hopefully, if we can fund it, an album by trumpeter Percy Pursglove.

That Percy Pursglove project is his suite for jazz players and choir called Far Reaching Dreams Of Mortal Souls, which was first heard to enthusiastic response at a CBSO Centre concert in October. Recording it will be a demanding and costly affair, but Sam is sufficiently experienced in this business of music-making in its fullest sense, as well as quietly determined, to make it happen.

Before all that the Stoney Lane Records logo will be appearing on discs by Chris Mapp and Lluis Mather in spring 2015, and there will be performances by the label’s artists at Kings Place in London.

But the first release from Stoney Lane Records comes even sooner. Called Vuelta, it’s a CD by the Mike Fletcher Trio and hits the outside world on January 26. Those piles of CDs in the office upstairs will not only be going out to shops and distributors around the country but they’ll be accompanying the trio to some of Europe’s finest concert halls – Mike is one of the ECHO Rising Stars, chosen by these concert halls.

Sam Slater has noble but realistic ambitions for Stoney Lane Records.

“It’s not a big profit-making venture… if it helps to push careers, new artistic directions, opportunities and projects, great happenings, more national and international prominence for the musicians and scene here, and it doesn’t lose much money in the process, then we’re on the right track.”

To find out more about Stoney Lane Records go to www.stoneylane.net