So, I knew the financial class was going to kick my “a double s,” but I also knew this was a weak area for me in my other business endeavors. Artists, let me tell you, making financial statements is both tedious and rewarding. My first pass at the Income Statements and the assumptions therein was lost due to a power outage. The second round was respectfully tossed out by my professor as well, just plain wrong. My ego had to take a few days to rebound, and after a whole lotta whining and “I don’t wannas,” I finally sat down to the tedium and discovered the rewards of creating (mostly) accurate assumptions about my business activities.
The rewards came in the kind of clarity that gave me a glimpse into the future financial standing of the ideas I have been diligently developing over my graduate studies in entrepreneurship. Being a keenly visual person, averse to numbers and math in general, I had no idea that numbers could create an image of a company. But indeed they do, and I feel as if I have been baptized through fire trying to learn this lesson.
I cannot say I would drop my dreams of being an artist to pursue financial planning, but I can say I have a newfound respect for those who relish spreadsheets, balancing acts, and crystal balls full of excel equations. In the future, I will certainly employ someone with those proclivities to help me make sense of my business’s financial picture.
Worthwhile Studio 
It’s a different kind of art, right? As someone who is a visual thinker, it is definitely helpful to see the numbers laid out and read the story that they tell. That said, this class has been kicking my butt, too and I considered myself pretty good with numbers before this semester. What I wasn’t anticipating was the projections and scenario plans involved with these spreadsheets. I don’t like filling out numbers that are hypothetical.
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Numbers make or break your vision. It is easy to project success for an idea when it is based on a dream and your own skills. It is another thing entirely when you run the numbers. We have done this several times with business ideas that we simply realized were only solid in thought and not in actuality. It is a serious money and time saver doing a business plan.
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Hey Joy!
From the start I was intrigued. I thought your own take on what your going through with developing your various financials spreadsheets and coming up with all the numbers in such a tedious manner was helpful for me to read. I know that I experienced some of the same feeling your wrote which is why I connected with this post so well. It’s like what Beth said, there are tons of people who have gone through the motions of developing their businesses to find our that solid concepts that they thought were polished were not fully developed in all actuality.
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I must say I am glad that when we finish this course we should have at least a good start to having financial reports we can use after the course. I never would have been able to create them without this course or some master spreadsheet guru assisting me. It has been eye opening for sure. Once they are set up it is nice to see how you can check to see what would happen if a variable happens to change. Visual cause and effect is definitely helpful to see when planning ahead.
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