The Reality Of Bringing Creative Business Ideas To Life
The key to making creative business ideas work is to know how to effectively run the business and be creative at the same time.
The thing about being creative and running a business is that you have to be able to do both jobs.
Often, highly creative people can be extremely motivated to engage with their clients about the creative aspects of their business.
But there's the rub: you have to remember that it's also a business you are running.
I myself have successfully set up a number of creative businesses using my natural talents to attract, retain and delight my customers.
But the thing that has always distinguished my businesses from others is that I have been able to keep the bank manager happy at the same time.
If you are looking to make your creative business ideas actually work, then you must understand that no business can survive unless you can keep your eye on the profit and loss (well, hopefully just the profits), the balance sheet and the cashflow.
Of the three of these it's amazing how many creative businesses overlook the cashflow issue.
If you can get your customers to pay you on delivery for all your creative products and you can pay your suppliers on 90 day terms you are effectively being lent money by your suppliers for three months at a time.
This is an amazingly powerful tool and works particularly well in a creative business because, by definition, a creative business is usually taking some real goods furnished by a supplier and turning them into a creatively engineered product.
And to make creative business ideas even more successful, it is even better if you can get your customers to give you a deposit on the things you are going to make for them.
This ensures that your cash flow is even better because you are getting money in before you've even had to commit to a supplier to give you the raw goods.
One thing that is worth keeping in mind, however, is that when you do this the customer deposits should show up in your balance sheet as a liability rather than an asset.
This is because you have actually committed to providing them.
Once the creative project is finished the cash transfers from a liability to an asset on your balance sheet and if you manage your cashflow correctly you should be even richer as well as creative.
