Artist Speak: Business Plans

With no savings and no assets so to speak and only about $1,000 left on one of three maxed-out credit cards, I wasn’t what you’d call an ideal candidate for a loan.  Yet, I needed a vehicle.  I was in an all too familiar place where I felt like for the amount of work I was doing, I should have been a millionaire. My friends called me the hardest working poor person they knew and I was exhausted from riding my bicycle everywhere.

I really had no idea where all my time went because I didn’t really have a plan, but it seemed like i was always working, at home, in my massage clinic, at my art studio. Armed with my goal to get a vehicle, I bought my first “how-to write a business plan book,” and went to work, creating what seemed like a carefully calculated and well-thought out lie. The financial projections that i shaped into a colorful bar graph seemed like the biggest lie of all. The graph, after all revealed how much i “thought” I might make each month, so in reality wasn’t that a lie? 

Two weeks after turning my business plan in i was approved for a $12,000 loan. a week later, I was tooling around in my brand new pick-up truck, my paintings stacked neatly in the back. I remember thinking, “how cool is this?” and “this planning stuff really works.”