Cashflow: How to Keep Money Coming in While Not Fully Sacrificing Your Personal Work and Style.
Vol. 045
Cashflow: How to Keep Money Coming in While Not Fully Sacrificing Your Personal Work and Style.
When you have a consistent cash flow, your artistic practice is less about “when should” you do personal work and more about “when are you inspired” to do personal work.
A quick bite:
It’s tough to find yourself in a place where you have consistent cash flow, particularly when you’re wearing 8 different hats, balancing both personal and client work, and all the while trying to actually have a personal life. Based on a newsletter-reader’s question submission, below I address a few practices and concepts that can help set you up with a more consistent cash flow in your creative business.
Continue reading below…
I received the following reader response to a survey asking readers like you “what is your biggest creative/business struggle”:
“Cash flow! I have a savings but sometimes it's hard to track when I'll be getting paid. Trying to balance how much time to spend on client work vs passion projects.”
The topic of cash flow is tricky, particularly because EVERYONE’S financial situation is starkly different; however, I definitely have some thoughts on how to help mitigate cash flow concerns.
For the first few years of my attempts at a career as a freelance graphic designer, I was strapped for cash. I would bring flasks of whiskey into the bar (so I didn’t have to buy beer), and I didn’t buy feta cheese or avocados at the grocery store because they were too expensive… My sister still gives my shit for it haha.
But ultimately, it wasn’t necessarily about actual “savings” from not eating those foods or from not buying a single beer, but more so the idea of truly cutting all “unnecessary” expenses. This approach to frugal living allowed me to get by with slim earnings for a while as I fervently practiced hand lettering, found my creative voice, networked and generally navigated the turbulent waters of how to be a freelance graphic designer in Denver.
Looking at the question about cash flow and personal vs client work, regardless of your creative profession, there are some similar considerations.
Consider that in any business (creative or not) there is an imperative need to establish and market your services, have a contract (where you outline the payment terms), work hard, and think and act like a business (not the poeticized starving artist). If you enact each of these, you’ll not only have more consistent cash flow, but you’ll have more freedom in your choice of personal vs client work.
Put in the time.
As I recently noted, you need to be ALL IN on your freelance graphic design or creative career for 3 years to be able to say “okay, I gave it a shot.” There isn’t anything particularly special about 3 years: sometimes it happens quicker, sometimes it happens slower. Accepting that you might have to cut avocados and feta cheese out of your diet for 3 years is a pretty small sacrifice for the reward of career-freedom. Remember, you’re trying to build a self-employed creative career — this is a unique, earned and rare opportunity, not a fundamental right.
In the grand scheme of life, what’s three years of sacrifice and general reduction (of expenses, etc.) in order to potentially spend the rest of your life doing what you love and getting paid comfortably to do it?
Terms of your contract
This is an easy one: the contract that you have your client sign should state the payment terms. A common term would be NET 30 (they must submit payment to your invoice within 30 days of receiving that invoice), a one week grace period if they don’t pay, and then a penalty for each additional week that they are late on that payment. I personally will set a reminder within Gmail (using the Snooze feature) to go off after 20 days. If the payment is not received 20 days after an invoice is sent, I will receive a reminder from Gmail, and I will then follow up with a “nudge email” to my client: essentially — “Hey, just wanted to remind you that your invoice is due in 10 days, please let me know if you have any questions.”
Generally speaking, this process results in timely payments from my clients, thus helping with cash flow.
Don’t stop working when the work stops
I first heard this saying from my buddy, Austin Dunbar, of Durham Design Studio. I absolutely loved his succinct articulation of something I had been unintentionally doing for years. If you don’t have client work, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be working. You need to get in the habit of working hard: you need to make a habit of prolific creative output. I spent 3 years practicing hand lettering and turning words into logos in my spare time. I sat my ass down at my desk 5-7 days a week and tried to make shit happen—most of those days for 10+ hours. At that time, even when I didn’t have an email to respond to or a low-paying client project to work on, I would draw. And, when I was sick of drawing, I would make designs. When I was sick of designing, I’d find ways to sell my drawings and designs. Simply put: even when I had no work, I found work to do.
This approach taught me the importance of persistence, it taught me how to weather the droughts of no work, and it forced me to continue to learn and uncover new revenue streams.
The work you put in now will benefit you later: you’re playing the long game. Get used to sitting down and actually working for full work days, everyday, even when you don’t have full days of client work.
Your creative business is about MORE than just the creative work.
Whether you’re a freelance graphic designer, lettering artist or illustrator, if you’re running your own creative practice, you’re gonna have to wear a lot of hats: you’re the:
CEO: You have the vision/direction of the business in mind
Salesperson: You have to pitch and “sell” your creative services to prospective clients (whether you like it or not!)
Marketer: You need to market your business’ creative services.
Project manager: You need to schedule and coordinate the timing of all steps of the projects, meetings and deliverables.
Account manager: You need to manage the relationship and correspondence of your clients.
Creative/Art Director: You need to establish and convey the high-level creative vision of your projects.
Graphic Designer: You need to execute the creative work.
Production Designer: You need to implement the creative work, work with printers and vendors and ensure it’s properly set up on dielines and set to go to print.
Sounds fun, eh?
Your fate is not reliant on just your raw creative talent. If you learn better business practices, you’ll feel more confident in your pricing. When you’re more confident in your pricing, you’ll be more likely to charge your worth. When you’re charging your worth, cashflow is far less of an issue.
Aside from the contract terms, many of these suggestions aren’t necessarily one-day fixes. They’re long-term practices. A self-employed career in the commercial arts is a marathon, and not a sprint (my boy Scotty Russell of Perspective Collective will tell ya that!)
I hope this helps a bit with issues of cash flow.
If you have a question or something you’d like me to write about, please let me know below!
