Hi, everyone. Here’s a little hot tip for this week. This is number 8 in the series of 10 things that I learned that you need to do to have a successful arts business. Oops, didn’t mean to do that. Right. The things you need to do it to have a successful arts business. So, seven and eight are money and finance. So, last week we talked about managing the money. And the key to that was you cannot manage what you do not measure. So, it was all about learning to measure stuff so that then you can manage it. And measuring the money coming in or money going out is key.

Well, this week is about to understanding your business in terms of the financial view of it. So, I tend to say to all artists that talking about your business in terms of numbers is just a different way of describing it. It’s just a different way to describe your business. There are some people that you’re gonna work with, that are gonna be partners to you, that are gonna be suppliers for you, that are gonna be people that are gonna be jump on board to help you. And while they need to understand what the art is, they need to understand the kind of business you have. And for some of them, the best way they can understand that is if you describe and in terms of numbers, right?

So, if you are a small business or a micro business, you would say, you know, I have $100,000 turn over, or I want to increase my revenues to $200,000 this year, or I wanna grow my Instagram following by 3,000 followers. Using numbers helps certain people understand your business, understand your goals, and understand the kind of business that you have, right? So, being able to talk about the amount of money that your business generates, the amount of money that you want it to generate, the amount of money that you need it to generate is one of those ways where your gonna start talking about your business from a financial perspective. And you’re gonna be looking your financial health because that’s what you’re gonna grow as the CEO and chief artist. You’re gonna grow the business financially.

So, it’s about understanding some of the finance terms. And being able to talk about your business in terms of money. So, I’m gonna give you a quick little exercise this week because I want these tips that we do here to be really short and simple. So, if you’re gonna look at your financial health, there is sort of five things that I want you to be able to write down. Number one is the amount of money that you need per year. So, write down the amount of money that you need per year. And that’s not the amount that you want, it’s the amount that you actually need. So, item number one. Write down the amount of money that you need per year. You need to know that number because we’re good manifesters, once you’ve know that number, the chances are you can start measuring how close you’re getting to that number. You can course correct, when we create art, we course correct all the time. We know where we heading, you have a vision of where we heading. And then, as we go we add a little bit of that. We take off a little that, we, you know…

So, we’re really good at intuitive course correcting. One the financial side of your business, you’re gonna course correct as well. I just start to go forward. Once you’ve measured, once you’ve had a vision which is this number that you’re gonna create, you’re gonna start to course correct as you go toward achieving that. So, that’s number one. The second thing you’re gonna write down is the total amount that you earned last year or in any year from all sources. How much money did the business…did you and the business bring in. So, from all sources how much was that, you gotta know that number, right? Then I want you to go inside that number. So, number four is I want you to…sorry, number three. Number three is, how much of that did you earned from art and your creativity? And number four, is how much did you earned from another source? Say, a part-time job, or a day job, or shares, or investments. I want you to start to look at your financial health by saying, “That my financial have comes from a series of sources. This is how much my art and creativity bring in, this is how much other things bring in, this is how much I need.” And then lastly, item number five is a financial goal for this year. Okay. But it’s about this idea of learning to manage what you measure. So, we’re carrying on with that.

But I want you to just do this quick little financial health diagnostic. The easy way to get started on tackling the financial side of your world. Now, the other thing we talked about really briefly last week was that sometimes you need in measuring this stuff, you need some help. So, I would encourage you to talk to an arts accountant. Don’t talk to a normal accountant, talk to an arts accountant. Is they’re gonna help you look at your business from the financial side. They’re gonna be able to talk to you about fixed costs, variable costs, they’re gonna talk to you about increasing revenue, reducing costs, right? So, it’s about learning how to manage it from looking at the financial side of the picture. All right. So, we always want to make these really, really brief so that it’s one quick thing that you can do to help your arts business. If you want to go deeper into this topic by all means, checkout the ASAP program. That’s where we go into greater depth and members work with us every month to go deeper and further into these concepts and get their arts business really cooking along.

The other thing I should probably mention is enrollments are open for the artist transformation school. It will probably be kicking off toward the end of October, so, get a hold of us if that’s of interest to you and we can send you an application form. All right. There we go. All for now. See you next week.

Right. So, here we are, live once again. This week, the point is to bring you up to speed with important thing number seven. So, this again is the series of “10 things that I learned to create successful arts businesses.” So over the years, I’ve created many, many successful arts businesses. And the idea of this is to give you these 10 things that I learned. So, they’re part of what I have in the book as the 10 parts that the book is divided into. So, this section of the book is called money and finance. And I think it’s an important section because once, if you follow all the things that I learned across the 10 things, you’re up to the point now where you’ve got a business that’s up and running, you’ve got customers, you’ve got products that you’re putting out into the world and money is starting to come in. And we feel really good that money is starting to come in, but also money is starting to go out. So, you’re at that point now where you’ve gotta start to measure the money coming in and the money going out and start to manage the money coming in and the money going out.

So, there’s a really important adage and I think that if I could tattoo something, you know, I don’t know if it’s a tattoo, but it certainly is something to post big on the wall and it says, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” right? “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” And it’s true. The minute you start to measure something, you become consciously aware of it. And the minute you become consciously aware of it, your subconscious mind kicks into gear and starts to help you, right?

So, money is one of those things for us as artists that we would rather somebody else sort out, right? We’re like look, I’ve got lots of really incredible creative skills. My accountancy, my bookkeeping skills, not so good. And you kind of defer to someone else or, which was in my case, I ignored it. I did. I just ignored all the money stuff. Like, “No, I’m just gonna ignore that.” As a theater director, you know, you’ve got other people to manage this. And, you know, I ran a very large theater company. So, I did. I had bookkeepers on staff and I had a general manager and they could deal with all the money stuff. But here’s the thing. The minute things started to go really, really well and we had a surplus, it was up to me to figure out what to do with that surplus. And similarly, when things went into shit, it was back to the artistic director to figure out what we were gonna do to solve them. So, at some point, it’s all gonna come back to you. So, I think that getting on top of understanding the money is important.

So, this section of the book and these tips are gonna be divided into two tips. The first tip is about managing the money and the second tip is about finance and getting you to be a little bit more financial literate than you were before. So, if this idea of these hot tips is to be really, really quick, right? So, we’re gonna give you one challenge to work on this week and be really, really quick so that you can get on with making your art, but make a little bit of progress. So, I think if you understand this idea of needing to manage the money, I think let’s get on top of that.

So this week, what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna start to have a little expense diary. So, if you’ve never done that before, come on, let’s go. Let’s do it for this week. The real goal is you’re gonna do it for a month and then you’re gonna do it for three months. But let’s just be simple this week. And you’re gonna start to track every single dollar that goes out and every single dollar that comes in, right? So, you’re gonna create a diary. You can get an app if you want to do it on your phone, you can get a journal and write it down, however you wanna do it, do it in whatever way you’re gonna have success. If it means that you’ll be successful if you hand write it, do that. If it means you’re gonna be successful because you have an app on your phone, do that. Okay? There’s no right or wrong, just getting the diary done.

So, you’re gonna just write down every single dollar that goes out, so that you understand two things. One is, what does it cost you to be an independent artist, right? What does it cost you to make the work that you make this week? So, if you can, divide it into expenses into two columns, money that’s going out that’s personal. So, you know, lunch today, right? A coffee, a bottled water, whatever it is. And another column that says this is the money that’s going out for the business. So, if you have to top up your phone, if you have to pay a bill, if you have to go buy some materials or some supplies.

All right, so this week… sorry, a little bit of a frog in my throat today. This week, it’s about making an expense diary of every single dollar that goes out the door, and then also every dollar that comes in. So, you’re gonna have maybe two kinds of money coming in. You might have money that’s coming in from a day job, and you might have money that’s coming in from sales of your art, all right? So, again, try to differentiate between the personal money and the business money. And that’s what I want you to do for this week. Because what’s gonna happen, if you start to get ahold of this money and you start to manage your money, you’re gonna overcome the emotional triggers that we have around money. And we have them, right? So, there’s an emotional game that snares us as artists when it comes to the money and we ignore it. We pretend it doesn’t happen. We bury our head in the sand. Because we don’t want to have those feelings. But here’s the thing that I’ve learned. When you actually start to manage the money, when you actually start to measure the money, then you’re not a victim of the money. The money is just the tool, right? And you start to look at it, and you go, “Hmm, wow, I spent a lot this week on hmm” and you’re gonna make some adjustments and some changes.

So, the emotions that we have around money tend to be because of our ignorance, not our knowledge, okay? So, let’s get a little bit of experience. Let’s get a little bit of knowledge around the money. You’re gonna start to measure it. And the minute you start to measure it, I guarantee you it’s like almost on automatic pilot. You’re gonna start to manage it. All right, that’s what I want you to do.

Now, if this is really something that you need to get ahold of, maybe you need to jump into the ASAP program because the extended version of this hot tip takes you into a couple other things that you can do to try to manage the money. But for now, just let’s keep it simple and let’s try to achieve that. Okay?

Hello, Phil? Phil is a perfect example of the power of managing money. He’s on top of it. He’s learned that you have to be able to manage the money. He’s had a couple of creative businesses where the success of those businesses is because he started to manage the money and be aware of the money that was coming in and the money that was going out.

All right, so this hot tip was number seven in the list of 10 things that I learned that’s gonna make a successful arts business. So, seven and eight are money and finance. This has been number seven, managing the money.

All right, I’ll see you guys next week. And good to see you Mr. Phil. I sent you a package in the post. I hope you got it. Okay. See you all next week. Ciao for now.

This week, I wanna help you fill up your year with reliable easy work. I’m John Paul Fischbach, I’m the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. You know, it’s really exhausting as an independent artist to continually look for opportunity after opportunity, gig after gig. You know, I kind of have a image of us as independent artists that we’re kind of trained to be opportunity heat seeking missiles, right? We pop our head up and look around for an opportunity and, you know, we’re really good at scanning, we see an opportunity, we go for it. Right? Well, now it’s time to leverage all those opportunities that you had last year and be a much better, smarter, creative entrepreneur. I want you to create opportunities not just seize them.

So here’s how. Right? People who work with us in our advanced program say that the biggest relief is to know where their money is coming from for the next year or maybe the next three years because we teach you how to create opportunities, how to take charge of your workflow. You can’t just sit at home waiting for the phone to ring with the next opportunity. You’re a successful artist. You have people that bought you and bought your art. So I invite you to figure out what it was that they needed and how you met their needs and then go create an opportunity to meet the same need for someone else.

So here’s two ways to start to do this. Look back over the past year. Number one, what can you replicate? Right? What can you repeat? What was so successful that you could easily just do it again? Okay? How can you serve more people with the same product or service? The question you have to answer is, why did someone buy it or why did someone buy you to do it? Right? What need of theirs did you meet? The second thing, again, looking at last year, who were your best customers last year? What need of theirs did you meet and are there others with the same need?

So, this year is gonna be better if you create opportunities not just seize opportunities. The most successful businesses are the ones that serve the most customers. So how can you serve more? So this week, just examine last year or the last couple of years. Who else needs you to do what you did? What else do your best customers need from you? Right? It feels better to be in control of the opportunities to earn more from your art and your creativity than to wait around for the next opportunity. It’s in your history. Just go figure it out. Okay, we’ll see you next week. I dig into this a little bit deeper in the ASAP program, you might wanna check that out. Okay.