Set aside at least half an hour a day to work on the business side of your design business

Being a designer is interesting, creative, and fun. But running a design business is about making money. And making money isn’t always fun, sometimes we must do what must be done to bring home the bacon.

Doing the invoices is more important than creating a new design idea

An exception to the rule are the ones that already made it. Designers and artists who are on top of the industry can afford to be designers and artists only, but everyone else can’t.

A mediocre designer that takes the business part serious will be more successful than a top-tier talented designer who irregularly writes invoices, never calls clients back on time, and doesn’t keep track of his costs and money flow.

Besides creating ideas, marketing and finding clients, running a business is also about the boring stuff: Getting permits, calling your accountant, checking your bank account for unpaid invoices, and tracking your metrics with an Excel spreadsheet.

The fun stuff makes you a designer, the boring stuff makes you a businessman.

Set aside half an hour, it’s enough

Keep a to-do-list in your OneNote business file. Use Excel to keep track of payments, costs, contact information, and create checklists for client replies.

Work your way through that to-do-list first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening. If you do it every day, it only takes 30 minutes. Half an hour of daily boredom is a price everyone can pay to run a business. But if you never work on such small “business” things, they add up, and by the end of the month you’ll have so much boring stuff to do, that you might feel overwhelmed by it – you might even give up on running your own business altogether.

Be a free businessman, who works for only himself, and live with the 30 minutes of boredom a day. Or be a corporate slave, who works for everyone but himself, and live with a lifetime of dependence.