Lots of people are going freelance these days. There are plenty of options whether your passion is writing, designing or creating websites, creative people can thrive in the freedom of freelance work.

However, something that catches a lot of people out is the sheer amount of work you need to do to manage and grow your business. It’s the kind of stuff you didn’t really sign up for but is necessary to keep you doing the things you love, like accounting or admin.

You might be great at designing websites but struggle to keep on top of your accounts. It’s a common enough problem. Most people don’t go freelance because they want to manage their bookkeeping and tax returns, but these are necessary to your success if you’re serious about growing a business.

If this applies to you, then here are some tips on how to manage the business side to your creative freelance business:

Outsource

While learning to manage your business is important, that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone permanently. If you recognise that something isn’t your strong point, then outsourcing it might be a good idea. This gives you more freedom to concentrate on what you’re best at.

If you can afford to outsource some of your more tedious or complicated business tasks, then why not?

Many freelancers outsource their accounting to a firm or a freelancer as it saves them time and stress. Some people outsource their admin or phone answering to virtual assistants so that they can free up time to spend on client work that’s actually going to make them money.

Go on a course

You learn a lot going freelance, you have to. So it makes sense to embrace that and teach yourself new skills in order to better manage your business or to improve your services and therefore charge premium rates.

Whether it’s a night class or something you do online, you can do a course in business management, marketing, bookkeeping or web design to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. This will help you feel a bit more confident and able to tackle these tasks.

Automate

One of the key things you need to become successful is the ability to manage your time efficiently. The less time you spend on admin and business tasks the more time you can spend on client work that you can charge for and therefore grow your business quicker.

So try to automate things like marketing, social media and accounting if you can, to cut down the amount of time you spend on these tasks.

Have you ever struggled to separate the creative and business sides of your business? Got any tips to share? Let us know your thoughts!