If you own a creative business, then you are probably an artist or creative and most of us creative people love to do one thing - create! Sometimes budgets and numbers just feel like they’re hindering your creativity and standing in the way of being able to fully express yourself. In this episode I share with you exactly why profit should be your main focus in your business and walk you through some practical ways you can shift your focus towards profitability. When I started my business, I was so excited to start creating for people who wanted to hire me, and I was pouring my heart and soul into every design. And a lot of the time, that meant sparing no expense at the flower market. Of course I’d try to stay on  budget … But most of the time, I was letting my passion win me over and letting my budget go out the window. I told myself this was helping me build my brand and attract my ideal clients. I learned the hard way what it meant to truly market my business and that in order to do that, I needed to make money on my events. Overtime, I've started implementing some strategies to help me stay profitable, and I'm going to share my top 4 strategies with you!Strategy #1 - I shifted my focus away from my own taste and artistic urges, and started paying close attention to the client’s values, so that I could better align my stem selections with their value system.This requires truly understanding your clients values and making design decisions that serve those values. This way, you don't make expensive choices that may not be worth it to your client. And if it's not worth it to them, it's probably not worth it to you! That's because the entire wedding will not reflect the same design quality that you value. So it won't really be a portfolio piece in the end. Which brings me to...Strategy #2 - I started collecting more detailed information from each client, like which other vendors I would be working with, to identify which weddings would be portfolio builders ahead of time.I did this by adding extra questions to my bride questionnaire and doing my vendor research. This helped me to build connections with vendors and make sure my efforts were not in vain! For the weddings that did justify that extra special attention because they were going to truly push my brand forward, I made sure to approach my spending strategically and most importantly, made sure that my client knew when they were getting a deal. It's alright to price competitively as a temporary strategy when you're starting out, but make sure that you reflect those discounts in your pricing so that the value of your work is clear.Strategy #3 - I prioritized getting my markup and pricing sorted, and built in a buffer to mitigate overspending tendencies.That's a mouthful, I know... But basically, I became smart with my pricing and left extra money in my budget to shop! How did I become smarter with pricing exactly? A few of the ways I did this were helping the client to prioritize their needs from their wants, making suggestions for what pieces would leave the greatest impact, as well as being smart with my recipes and flower selections according to the client’s values as I mentioned in step 1.  This helped me to optimize my proposals - in other words - lowering the quantity of items and making sure the quality was there.