Reviewing the past is helpful for analyzing your business, but seeing ahead helps you make timely decisions to avoid serious cash flow crises. And so maintaining a cash flow projection system is critically important to your creative business.

When a creative strikes out on their own as a freelancer or small business owner, there are some financial basics that they need to master. And one of those basics is understanding your bottom line. And to get that, you have to crack the code of understanding your balance sheet.

One of the most fundamental parts of managing a business is accurate budgeting. There’s nothing worse than surprise expenses that throw our operations all out of whack. While we can’t plan for every possible contingency, there are some business expenses that surprise us, that we should have seen coming a mile away.

Running a business requires keeping a close eye on the ins and outs of your money. If you ignore this life blood of your business, you may soon find yourself out of business and deeply in debt. Learning to read your profit and loss statement can keep you out of debt, and give you insights into where your financial pressures are coming from.

Your money has a voice. And that voice will never lie to you. It won’t flatter you either. Your money has important things to say, and you need to learn how to listen to it, if you’re going to run a sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable practice.

As you keep track of all the time you spend in your work, everything from the work itself, to your administration time, financials, and marketing you’ll be building a valuable resource. Drawing upon this data can have all sorts of benefits for your business.

In order to make the best use of our time we have to budget it, just as we do our money. But we can’t even begin to budget our time if we have no data to work from. That’s why it’s so important that we track all the time we spend working in our creative practices.

We generally keep better tabs on our money then our minutes. But really it should be the other way around. Because while we might wish we had more money, it is possible that this wish could come true. But no matter how hard you wish for more than 60 minutes in an hour, or 24 hours in a day, it’ll never happen. Time is a constant, you can’t ever expand this resource. And when it’s gone, you never get it back.

Marketing your creative service starts with narrow-positioning. This is followed by crafting content that demonstrates and validates your message. Then you need to build a list of fitting prospects, and stay in touch with those people until the time is right. But as a busy creative professional, especially if you’re a freelance solopreneur, finding the time to maintain contact can seem overwhelming.

The ability to easily build a targeted list is a key test of whether or not your positioning is narrow enough. When your target market is anyone who needs creative services, then practically anyone could be added to your list. And when everyone is a target, no one is—at least as far as building an actionable list goes.