Have you taken time to look at your financials? How can you know where you are or what adjustments you need to make if you don’t? I know, so many artists say they aren’t interested in numbers; it’s such a left brain activity. I don’t buy that argument. Organizing your work space so you can create art is a so-called left brain activity; so is putting together that list of art supplies to order. You do those anyway because you want to create art.

You should have that same thought about your numbers. You want to create a profitable business – and you definitely use lots of right brain activity in that – knowing your numbers is part of the picture to get you there. And, if you don’t look at the whole picture, well, it’s like a half-finished quilt. You don’t have the complete story.

What do you need to look at? Here are two specifics: your profit and loss statement and a cash flow statement. We’ll talk more about those in an upcoming article.

You’ll note I titled this article “Your quilt business is like a restaurant.” When you own a successful restaurant, it’s divided into two areas: front of the house and back of the house. Front is what the public sees, ie., the host/hostess, the waiters, and the dining room. And back of the house is where the work takes place.

For creative artists, I see the front of the house as our completed art. Most of the real work takes place back of the house, whether that’s our creating or our looking at our books or our efforts to get our art seen. Restaurants have staff both in the front and the back of the house. So do our creative businesses. We might have reps to market our business and we might have bookkeepers to input the numbers into our financial software. We don’t have to do that work that doesn’t fit our skill level or that seems too “left-brained” to us. It does, however, fall to us, the business owner, to look at the big picture. Part of that is looking at those numbers and becoming creative about how to grow our businesses.

Please share your thoughts below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2012 at 5:55 am and is filed under Business, Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.