Cash flow, or lack of it, is possibly the single most important aspect of surviving in business. Without it, everything stops. For the freelancer or small business, cash flow is the only way to enjoy any sense of stability, to be able to safeguard against or plan for the future, and to be able to measure the success of your business or talk to your bank manager about taking a loan some day.

Despite this, we all know it’s something which almost all designers, from freelancers to established design firms continually struggle with. Why is that? Certainly a starting point may be to recognize designers and consultants as providers of a service. This differs from people who provide a product, in the first instance because consumers pay for products up front, but also because products tend to be a fixed, predetermined outcome. When you’re a service provider, particularly when you’re providing a service that is largely based on subjective judgement, dealing with intangible things, it’s expected that you will be paid, once your client is satisfied with the result, and all aspects of your agreed scope have been completed.

Obviously there are many different ways of thinking about cash flow so we won’t be able to cover them all, besides we probably don’t have all the answers anyway. What we do have are our own experiences on this topic.