5 Essential Things You Need For Your Creative Biz

Today we are talking about the five essential things that you need for your creative business! And some of these might seem a little obvious but bear with me here… even the most obvious things are often completely skipped over! 

So here’s what we’re covering today:

1. A product or service
2. A website & digital presence
3. Policies & processes 
4. Proper materials and tools
5. A basic understanding of bookkeeping and taxes

Check out Monique Bryan’s podcast The Juicy CEO for more about your digital presence https://www.moniquebryan.com/thejuicyceopodcast 

Check out Melissa Houston’s podcast The Business Society for more on your business finances https://thebusinesssociety.co/podcast/ 

My amazing accountant can be found here if you’re in need of one! https://www.mlhc.info/ 

That’s all for now! If you liked this episode and want to hear more, make sure you follow me on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts! You can also find me on TikTok and YouTube. 

If you’re interested in starting your own creative business, in the new year I’m launching an exclusive program to help you get started! It’s limited to 5 people and I’m developing this program RIGHT NOW! FOR YOU! So if you’re interested, click here to sign up for more info! 

Instagram: @the_ultimatecreative and @emily.milling

Transcript

[00:00:00] You're listening to the ultimate creative. I'm your host, Emily milling. I am a multi passionate multihyphenate entrepreneur, comedian, podcaster, musician, filmmaker. You name it. If it's creative and it has something to do with business, I'm probably in on it. If you're looking for a way to earn money through your creative passions, or if you need help finding your creative side, you are in the right place.

[00:00:35] Welcome back to the ultimate creative podcast. I'm your host, Emily milling. Why is there a Christmas tree still behind me? Well, it's because I batch my content and I am. All over the place right now, it is the new year. And likely at this point I have been to BC and back, and we are now packing or still in the midst of packing all of our stuff from our apartment.

[00:00:56] Cause we're moving and pretty soon I'm going to be in a new studio. So it won't be so Christmas tree heavy anymore. It's going to be fucking sweet, man. I'm very excited about this today. We are talking about the five essential things that you need for your creativity. The first thing you need for your creative business is very obvious.

[00:01:13] All right, I'm not going to beat around the Bush here, but you need a product or a service. You need something to sell just by virtue of being creative is not going to make you money. I've tried it. I've tried it many times. Um, but people don't seem to go for that for some reason. I'm not entirely sure why, because I am an epic human being and I create lots of really awesome things.

[00:01:33] But anyway, you need a product or service you need to sell maybe designer cakes, maybe. Put together. Blu-rays like my partner, Justin, excuse me, my fiance, Justin, like golden and Joe video. Maybe you are opening a vocal coaching school. Maybe you have a macrame business, all of these different things, but you need to have something to sell people and you need to be really confident that you can replicate what it is that you're doing to scale it.

[00:02:03] And that means you can grow this business over time because. Well, okay, look, you could have a goal that is like, I don't necessarily want to grow the business. I want to make enough money to pay my bills and enjoy my life. And that is 100% a thing, a way that you can operate your business. I would recommend thinking about ways to scale the business though, because a lot of us get into our creative businesses.

[00:02:28] So we have more time to actually be creative and do the things that we love and not spend all of our days doing things that were good. And we do have the creative capacity to do, but it becomes a little bit of a soul suck. So I started my podcast production company a couple of years ago. And at the time I was like, hell yeah.

[00:02:47] Thing that I can do all the time. All day, every day, over time, it started to wear on me and I needed to start hiring team members because, Hey, I could not keep up with that workload. And I wanted more money cause who doesn't want more money. And B I started getting burnt out. We're going to talk about burnout and your creative business a little later as well, not today, but in the future, because this is my planned list of episodes that we're going to talk about.

[00:03:13] You might get to the point where you burn out on the thing that you once really loved doing. So having the ability to. Give it to somebody else and say, here you need to now take what I've created and run with. It is really, really important. So whatever product or service you decide, you want to put out in the world to sell, make sure that you can sustain it and that you can replicate it and train other people on how to do it at a later date.

[00:03:37] If that is what you choose to do your online presence, you need to have a website, an email list, some sort of social media presence. I haven't tried it, not doing a social media presence. Didn't go super well. I mean, like mentally I felt a hell of a lot better, but I did stop getting more clients because I wasn't putting myself out there.

[00:04:00] And if it's not social media, I mean like, okay, first of all, choose the one that you really liked doing. Obviously I'm enjoying being on Tik TOK, which is why I'm here, but. If it's something that just drains your soul, like the Instagram, Instagram, Instagram algorithm, and it's like constantly changing. And you're like, I have no idea how I'm supposed to compete with all of these different things.

[00:04:20] Like just choose one, just choose one. Or maybe you do Pinterest or you do something either way. You need to have an online. And if you want more information on how to have a really great online presence, I highly encourage you to check out the juicy CEO podcast. One of my clients, Monique Brian is amazing at explaining exactly how to clean up your digital house.

[00:04:38] She's got workshops on it. You got to go check her out. So if you don't have these things, like these are really bare minimum essentials that you need to have for people to take you seriously, because otherwise they're gonna think like this is a scammer. I don't want to give you my money. They just won't.

[00:04:53] So that is super duper. Now I want to talk about having policies and processes. So I alluded to this a little bit earlier. Policies and processes are what is going to make your business sustainable over time. If you don't have a policy about returns or refunds, if you don't have a policy about making changes to an order after it has been placed, you're going to end up in a black hole of doom and misery and clients yelling at you.

[00:05:25] They are being jerk Karens, and they just think they can push you around. Well, guess what? They can't. You want to know why? Because you'll listen to what I had to say. That's why you should have policies to make sure that people aren't taking advantage of your business. You need processes so that you can easily replicate what it is that you're doing in a way that is mentally sustainable for you.

[00:05:47] Talked about this a little bit earlier, but really important to have these pieces in place so that you don't totally lose your fricking brain. When you're trying to just do your creative thing, the policies. We'll make it so clear, like clear as I never understood clear as mud, but clear as day, it's going to make it clear as day or clear as my eyeballs are clear as my new engagement ring.

[00:06:11] I don't know one of those things, it's going to make it super clear to anybody who is purchasing from you, that they need to abide by these policies that you've set out, because guess what? You're not here to make people's lives like better. Because they're making yours worse. I don't know. You're here to make money.

[00:06:30] That's what a business is about. And if you compromise that you're going to end up in a crappy situation where you. Man, should I even be doing this business at all? Like I just feel like people are walking all over me all the time. I feel like I have no autonomy in my business. Where's the freedom that I was hoping for.

[00:06:44] You need to have these things in place. The processes are also there to help with this time, freedom thing and make sure that you're not overdoing it. You understand what your capacity is and then you stick to it so you don't lose your brains. K. The next thing I want to talk about is having proper materials and tools.

[00:07:06] Don't assume that you can bootstrap with free trials of things. Okay. You need to have a little skin in the game and by skin, I mean, you got to put some money down to make. Successful and doable. Okay. So don't go for just like the free version of Gmail. Get yourself a G suite account that has your domain name on it.

[00:07:30] So it's like emily@theultimatecreative.com, by the way, email me, if you want to talk about how I can coach you in your creative business at Emily, the ultimate grade of.com, not@emilygmail.com. That's not actually my email address. I'm not going to tell you what it is cause I'm secretive when you cheap out on really important.

[00:07:48] Materials or tools it's going to show people are not going to pay high value top dollar for your amazing products or services. If you are making them do a dance and like send you any transfer or go through PayPal, or like all of these. Things that could easily be remedied by just setting up a $10 a month wave account or a freeway account, even like they, you can do it for free, but I'm just saying like, don't skip out on.

[00:08:21] Things that make your business look professional that make your product or service look professional because people can see through that. And they're not going to pay you the money that you want to make. You're just going to end up finding customers that are looking for a deal that don't actually value what you're doing.

[00:08:37] So do yourself a solid and like put a hundred bucks a month aside for like the apps you're going to need or other tools or materials. Maybe you need to find a way to invest in a new sewing machine so that your stitches don't get all like bunched up. Like they do in mine. I would not sell anything from my sewing machine.

[00:08:56] Let me tell you it is a bit of a disaster, but then again, it's also like 15 years old, so maybe I should get a new story. You got to have a basic understanding of bookkeeping and taxes, and this is going to be different wherever you are located in the world. I am in Ontario, Canada, Toronto. Oh. Here's what, okay.

[00:09:16] First of all, check out Melissa Houston's podcast, the business society podcast, and her website, the business society.co, because she is a treasure trove of understanding how to navigate all of this stuff. She is a CPA, she's an accountant. She's also my financial coach. She's one of my clients. She has a podcast with us at the ultimate creative.

[00:09:37] You got it. For bookkeeping, you need to create a whole bunch of categories of things that your business purchases are going to fall under. So for example, apps and software, uh, maybe you need office supplies. Maybe you need office equipment. Maybe you need rentals. If you're renting stuff to produce videos, all of these.

[00:09:55] So categorize them out. Okay. That's going to be your chart of accounts. And then what you're going to do is like I use wave. So I'm just going to say, go ahead and use. There is a free version that you can use as well. I use the paid version and you're going to link up your bank account with that. And you're going to categorize every single transaction, by the way, you should absolutely have a separate bank account for your business.

[00:10:18] You really, really need to do that because otherwise you're going to be alive. I have no idea what I was paid for, or who's paying you or what have a separate business bank account. Okay. You have that, you connect it to your wave account, categorize it, just take like five minutes a week to do this.

[00:10:35] Another thing that you need to do is if you're planning on making more than $30,000 a year, at least in Ontario, I believe this is across Canada. It's going to be different in other countries. At least $30,000 a year. At that point, you need to have an HST number that is harmonized sales tax in Ontario and other parts of the country it's GST government sales tax, or PST provincial sales tax, or maybe it's a combination of both.

[00:10:59] And sometimes it's just a fucking clusterfuck because that is just like what the stupid CRA seems to think we need to do. You need to consider this. If your business is going to make more than $30,000 a year, you have to collect that HST or PSE, whatever in Ontario, it's 13%. And then whatever you buy that has that sales tax on it, you can deduct that from what you've collected every quarter, you need to.

[00:11:26] Remit that you need to file a return and HST or PST return, whatever. And you need to send the government that money that you collected. That's not money for you to keep. And I would highly recommend doing this every single quarter so that you don't end up with like, holy fuck. I accidentally spent $10,000 of HST that didn't ever belong to me.

[00:11:49] Just like, just don't even just don't make it part of your operating budget. Okay. Other things you should know about bookkeeping and accounting, find yourself an accountant who will actually like give you details of what's going on in your business. Uh, my accountant is awesome. I will drop a link to her in the show notes as well.

[00:12:10] Michelle is so good. And finally, depending on the type of business that you have, if it's a sole proprietorship, you're going to file your taxes. One way. If it's a corporation like I have, you're going to file your taxes a different way for corporation. If you are below $500,000 in Canada, I believe. And don't quote me on this because I'm not an accountant, but this is what I've been doing.

[00:12:32] You need to put away a approximately 13% of your profit. So the revenue that you've made is the money that your clients have paid you, not including the sales tax right after that. How much money? Are you using for the business? So anything you spent for office supplies for subcontractors, anything like that, the amount that's left over is your profit.

[00:12:57] And that's what you need to calculate your taxes on that 12, 13% that you need to save or remit monthly to make your life a lot easier. That's what you are calculating that on. So let's say you had profit of $10,000 for. Wow way to go. That's a massive amount of profit. So you got profit of $10,000 in a month.

[00:13:20] You need to put, oh God. Now I have to do math in my head, $101,300 into another account, or just immediately pay it into your CRA account so that you don't get dinged for that. Or you don't like have a massive tax bill at the end of the day, you can listen to a ton of. On Melissa's podcast where I discuss just how fucking chaotic my tax situation was before she came into my life.

[00:13:50] And I go into much more detail there. But anyway, these are the things that you absolutely need to know for your creative business. I don't care what kind of business it is. You really need to have your money stuff. That's it for this episode, if you're interested in learning more about starting your own creative business, you need a crash course.

[00:14:11] I do have a new program starting up, email me@emilyattheultimatecreative.com. Basically it's like a super focused couple of days where just you and four other people are going to come together and we're going to create all of the planning you need to do. The basics, the fundamentals that you absolutely need to get your creative business started and set you up for success in the future.

[00:14:33] We're going to talk about mindset. We're going to talk more about bookkeeping. We're going to talk about marketing. We're going to talk about policies. We're going to talk about so many different things. Anyway, I really want to help you with this. If you're interested in that, if that's something that you would be able to use, like I said, very limited spots.

[00:14:47] I will be running again. I will be running it again in the future as well, but I want you to be part of it. So you can find that. By emailing me. I'm only@theultimatecreative.com and I'll talk to you next week.

[00:15:02] Thanks for listening to the ultimate creative. If you heard something today that helped you get one step closer to building your super awesome dreams, I would love it. If you shared a rating and written review on apple podcasts, that helps more people just like you, that want to break into their passions and build a life they love with creativity and entrepreneurial.

[00:15:21] And if you know, someone that needs a boost of inspiration and this episode will help please share it and spread the love. I truly believe that the more we encourage each other to take steps towards building our dreams, the better our lives will be. And the happier we will become. Pretty awesome to learn more about how I can help you build your.

[00:15:41] Through podcasting, more coaching, head over to the ultimate creative.com or follow me on Instagram at V underscore ultimate creative and let's chat.