But sometimes projects are doomed from the outset, regardless of how well a creative delivers. There are bad clients out there—clients that don't engage in good faith, who'll use any excuse to blame creatives, just to save money. How can you avoid toxic clients? When should you run away from an opportunity as fast as you can?

Creatives work hard for their money. And not just in the studio. It takes a lot of work just to find projects in the first place. We have to build portfolios, market our work, make presentations, and write proposals. Only then do we pour ourselves out to produce our work. After all this preparation, anticipation, and energy is spent, it can be extremely frustrating to have to wait for that all important check to arrive that keeps it all going.

Being a creative entrepreneur involves making decisions, sometimes risky decisions. Wise decision making requires having good information to guide you. And one of the best sources for good information is your money. But in order to "hear" what your money has to say, you have to maintain an ongoing conversation with these numbers. One way to keep this conversation going is to do your own books, a skill and that pays dividends.

You may have a budget for your money, but what about your time? As important as financial budgeting is, I would argue that a time budget is more important. After all, you could inherit a windfall. But you can never add even one hour to your days. Both you and Bill Gates get 24 of them in a day. So managing your most valuable, non-renewable, and limited resource is an essential skill.

Among the many points of failure in business, there is one that hurts the most. The failure to accurately price our work, so that we end up taking a bath on our projects. When we underestimate our work, we are forced to either damage the client relationship by asking for more money, or—more commonly— we absorb those costs ourselves.

When a creative has launched out on their own, they've entered the path of entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. Entrepreneurship involves risk. Even a simple solo-preneur freelance practice assumes all the risks associated with being in business for yourself. If you're going to make it as an entrepreneur, you'll have to overcome your fear and courageously face the possibility of failure.

If you're a fine artist, or illustrator, or designer who prefers the freelance path you're going to need to build a freelance practice. And that means running a small company, even if it's a company of one. You think of yourself as an artist, not an entrepreneur. And so you end up being cast into the world of entrepreneurship without ever considering whether or not you're even cut out for that path.

This week we wrap up our Shark Tank series by considering a flaw that the Sharks often point out to founders as they seek an investment—the serious challenge of customer education that can present barriers to effectively marketing their products.

It's common for partnerships to fail. And so considering the kind of partner you're looking for, what their buy in costs will be, and working out how you'll handle a possible future dissolution is critical before you make a deal.

With the investor path closed, creatives sometimes look for help in the form of a business partnership. Not only can a partner provide business or marketing skills that we may be lacking, partnerships often appeal to creatives simply because of the loneliness of being a solo-prenuer—but before you go down that path you might want to think about this major decision like a Shark.