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.