Episode 34: Building a Resilient Creative Business

   📍 Welcome to CreativeMind Smart Money, the podcast where creativity and business smarts collide. I’m your host, Samantha Eck, bookkeeper, business coach, and your go to guide for building the creative business of your dreams. Whether it’s mastering your money, streamlining your systems, or growing your business, I’m here to share insights that empower you to thrive.

Plus, I’ll be bringing in industry experts to dive into all aspects of entrepreneurship, so you can turn your passion into profit without losing your creative spark. Let’s get started.

  You’re listening to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast, and today’s episode is going into a little bit of a gray area, but we all know that sometimes these things happen, so it’s talking about how to recession proof your life. business. Now they say that tough times don’t last, but tough businesses do.

So we always want to make sure that your creative business not only survives during an economic downturn, but is able to thrive during this point in time so that you can come out stronger on the other side. So let’s dive into the ultimate playbook for recession, proofing your creative business.

Obviously, slower periods and recessions can really feel like a creativity killer, but But they really don’t have to be.

If you’ve ever worried about how like an economic downturn might impact your income, this episode is for you. We want to turn that confidence into a really smart strategy so that you’re ready for anything that comes your way. When I first started my business, I was in a state of sink or swim and I like to mention this a lot because I think it’s a very good personal story about weathering a challenge and making sure that I’m staying really tight to my budget and everything like that.

When I first started my business, my husband was working a job and I had no job. I quit my job because I was like, I can’t build a business without being fully involved in it. So we only had a couple of months savings and we were in this space where it was like, I have to be careful because if we overspend, then we’re going to be in a really big amount of trouble.

So definitely not a recession. But at that point, it’s talking about how I really buckled down and made sure that I was watching any of my expenses that I had and made sure that they were advantageous to me in my business. Even as someone who was in The early stage of the entrepreneurship, I was heard a lot of people saying, you know, you need to hire a social media manager right away.

You need to hire all these other roles and positions. And every time I looked at those numbers, I looked at what I was bringing in because it did take me a while obviously to gain some clients. But I looked at what I was bringing in and thought, can I afford To bring on these people, can I afford to have this sort of subscription?

Can I afford to have this service that I want to pay for? And if I couldn’t, then that’s when I really looked at it and I said, you know what, I’m going to have to wait. I’m just going to have to be patient. I’m going to put it on a list and hopefully I’ll be able to get to it at some point in time. When we think about recession proofing our business, the first thing that we want to think about is getting intimate with our numbers.

We really want to know our numbers on that intimate level where we know what’s going on in our business. You already know I’m all about tracking income, expenses, and knowing your cash flow because we’ve talked about this before, but you know that it’s so important, especially in these uncertain times.

And I want to make it clear, nobody really knows when the next recession is coming. Obviously, there are a lot of economic people that try and figure it out. Say that there is a recession coming or something is going to be happening But if you know your numbers, you know your expenses, you know your income and you know your cash flow it’s gonna be so critical during those slow times because you’re already gonna know if you can manage it or if it’s going to Stress you out to the ninth.

So just knowing and staying on top of your numbers is so important Now, as an example, I’ve had loads of clients who’ve come to me and have had those rougher periods again, not necessarily recession, but where they know that they need to cut back on expenses. So they cut back on subscriptions or they cut back on.

buying meals with clients or things like that because they know that they need to keep that money in their bank account so that they can weather the storm as you would call it. So something nice to kind of have that clarity would be to Have some sort of financial dashboard that you can create that shows you your income versus your expenses and obviously QuickBooks does this but there’s tons of other programs out there that do this as well where you can create a financial dashboard and see what your cash flow is, what your income and your expenses are so you can feel kind of some sort of piece that you can look at it really quickly and gain at least a little bit of clarity.

The next thing we want to think about is diversifying our income streams. Now, I’ve mentioned this before in the episode where I talked about what to do during slow periods. Now, this is not something you have to do. A lot of people don’t want to diversify their income streams. They’re like, this is what I’m good at.

This is what I want to do. And as an example for myself, I don’t really want to create digital products. I have created some digital products, but that’s not something that I’m good at. I’m good at the bookkeeping part. I’m not good at the digital products part. So now.

Relying on one revenue source is risky when it comes to relying on this volatile economy because if you are, let’s say like me, you’re just a bookkeeper and the economy has a downturn and nobody can afford a bookkeeper anymore, that’s the first thing they’re going to drop. So that’s what you want to think about.

And I, as a creative, we know that we’re, they’re the first people that. you are going to drop. So the copywriters, the website designers, things like that, because they’re looking at that and they’re saying, well, I could probably run my own website, or I could run my own social media for a while. So they’re going to say, well, the economy’s downturned.

I just can’t afford your services anymore. We’re going to have to cut ties. So if you had a different revenue source that can kind of keep you afloat during these more difficult times. Now obviously there are many different income sources like I mentioned digital products, but there are also other things you could do like teaching workshops or offering a retainer based service.

So if you are a web designer instead of just offering one off web design websites, you could offer a sort of like a package or something like that where you are available at their beck and call if they have any website issues or you check their website on a monthly basis to make sure that everything looks good, something like that.

When you have all of these service offerings, it really does just cause you to have different avenues so that even if it’s slow, you have some form of revenue coming in, especially if you are adamant about keeping your business alive, especially in this world where so many businesses close every single day.

After we’ve kind of thought about getting intimate with our numbers and diversifying our income streams, we want to think about doing an audit and trimming any sort of fat. So you guys have heard me talk about this again so many different times, but especially when we have this sort of recession, we want to do like a business health checkup.

We want to cancel any unnecessary subscriptions. We want to negotiate with vendors to see if there’s any way to reduce costs. And we want to revisit our marketing budget to see if we should cut back on them. Just doing that will obviously help you to retain some more money in your business and help you to stay afloat during a recession period.

During a recession, a lot of people are very cautious to buy. Like a lot of people aren’t going out and just saying, Oh, I’m just going to buy it right away. They’re more, even more cautious than they are usually. We know as business owners in this day and age, What’s very important is people getting to know you as a business owner.

If they want to work with you, especially as solopreneurs and small business owners, they want to get to know you as a business owner. So during a recession, imagine how much tighter they’re going to be and cautious they’re going to be, especially if they don’t know you or they have no relationship with you.

So that’s really something you want to think about as well. Then the, the fourth thing you want to do is like lean into those client relationships. So you already have clients, think about how do we keep them. Over deliver. Create that loyalty with them So they become those clients that want to just stay with you forever Because during challenging times those clients who have already been with you forever are more than likely to not look at you as someone They can just drop they’re more than likely to look at you and say that’s someone I want to stay with for a very long time So send a personal email to some of your top clients and ask them like how can I support you right now?

I know that we’re going through a recession Is there anything I can do in addition to what I’m already doing? It’ll just show them that you care about them and it’ll help strengthen that relationship and it’ll really give you that edge when you’re looking at like who they’re keeping if they are maybe making cuts themselves and trimming fat themselves.

Then the final thing you want to do is just upscale and learn new skills. So during a recession it’s obviously a new time during these slow periods to refine either. What you’re currently doing and add things to it or learn something new. So do like free webinars, there’s YouTube tutorials, or you can barter systems with fellow creatives.

Again, that’s an episode I’m going to circle back around in. I know I mentioned that in March I’m going to talk about bartering and how that kind of goes down. I’m not 100 percent sure on the tax implications of it, but I know how you should record it. So I want to make sure that that’s something that we talk about.

So what you need to do today is create a three month financial safety plan that includes saving goals and necessary expense cuts in the event there was a recession. This is just going to be so helpful to you to know exactly what you need to do to take the steps to protect you and your business. If it’s important to you to make sure that you do stay afloat, brainstorm a way to bring in a new income stream.

Think about how you can diversify your income so that you don’t have to rely on just one source.

Check in with your top clients and just find ways to add value or create some sort of customized solution for them so that you create that loyalty and that feedback from them. so that they don’t leave you during these points of recessions.

Recessions really don’t have to spell disaster for your creative business and with the right strategies you can get your finances in order to diversify your income and strengthen client relationships. If you build resilience you’ll come out on the other end stronger.

📍 Tough times really do reveal what we’re made of as business owners because they test us. And we’ve got you. innovation and grit in spades as creatives. So your next big success could come from navigating any sort of a session with a really big purpose.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and leave a review. If you know someone who could really use this episode, especially if they’re going through a slow period, please share it with them so that they can also experience this episode as well. I appreciate you so much for listening. As always, have a great rest of your week and we’ll see you next week.

Farewell, fellow travelers.