5 Non-Negotiables of Building a Creator Business That Actually Works

Are you 'winging it' when it comes to the business side of your creative life? 

In this episode, Allen C. Paul walks through five essential questions every creator must answer to move from simply doing creative work to running a real business. Whether you're just getting started or thinking about next-level growth, these five pillars will help you protect your work, simplify your life, and free up mental space for the creativity that matters.

What You'll Learn

• The difference between a side gig and a legitimate business — and why it matters legally and financially
• Why a fictitious name (DBA) isn't enough — and what you actually need (LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp explained)
• How to separate your creative business from your personal life — protect your personal assets and assets
• The three tracking systems that keep you sane — bank accounts, revenue/expense tracking, and why the IRS cares about both
• What a business plan actually looks like — it doesn't require a loan officer's approval; it requires your clarity
• Standard agreements that prevent partnership disasters — real examples from podcasting and how to get them without reinventing the wheel
• Why "organization" is the greatest tool for creativity — less friction = more freedom to create

Don't Build Your Creator Lifestyle Alone. Join the Community! 

In our 360 Creator Community, you get focused encouragement, guidance, and training on how to thrive as a God-centered creator. 

Joining gives you access to our app, workshops and community conversations, so you can stop being isolated and frustrated and start enjoying creative confidence! Join today!

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Transcript

Tell me honestly, if this is you, you're already making money from your creativity, but you're not even sure if you're actually running a business or just trying things out. In the back of your mind, you have this nagging worry that one audit, one contract dispute, one missed deadline could take down everything that you've built. Now, if that describes you, you have to listen to this episode of the God and Gigs Show.

Because here's the thing, most creators never get formal training on how to actually set up your business. You just jump into the creative work because that's what you love. But without the right foundation, the legal structure, the systems, the agreements, your creativity itself could become vulnerable. Your assets could become vulnerable and worse. You could spend energy worrying about the business side instead of doing the creative work that you were called to do.

Now here's the good news. Setting up your creator business in the right way is one of the greatest tools that you could possibly have. It's going to remove friction and create more freedom. Now, if you're new to the podcast, thank you for joining us. My name is Alan C. Paul, and this is the guiding gig show where we help you to become the creator that you were created to be.

And by the end of this episode, you're going to understand the five essential questions that every creator needs to answer to legitimize and protect your business. And we'll tell you how to tackle them starting.

today.

Allen C. Paul - God And Gigs (01:24)
in the month of April, we have decided to focus on business basics. We last week talked about taxes and finances and just the fact that at April 15th, most of us are really awakened to the fact that we actually are running a business, that the IRS cares about our income, that

We need to be aware of what we're tracking, what we're saving, what we might owe. And that rude awakening shouldn't happen right at the deadline when we realize that, my gosh, if I don't pay this bill, or if I don't file, or if I don't know this tracking, then I end up in a hole really, really damaging what could be a lot, not only my financial life in terms of paying money, but actually the creative business that I'm trying to build because let's be honest,

If you build an asset or a business or have things that the government can take away, that's the worst case scenario. It's a scary one, but it's also very possible and it has happened where your actual creative assets They are taken away from you because those assets are valuable and the IRS says, okay, well, if you have this, this, this, let's say you have a piano, a keyboard, you have an art studio, you have whatever.

and this worth money and you owe the IRS, they could take it because you owe and it represents value in a business. Or perhaps, and again, I'm saying all this not as a lawyer or a financial expert, but someone that just knows that I've heard this, it also can be the case where because you have not separated your business from your personal life, things can be taken from your personal assets as well because the IRS did not recognize any difference between your business and your personal life. That's the negative.

Let's talk about the positive. The positives are, if you are running your business and organizing it effectively, it is the greatest tool for creativity you could possibly have. Even as a creator who wants to work and stay busy and stay inspired and do only the creative things, you will find the most freedom when your business is set up correctly. You will find the least amount of friction between your life and your creative life if you have your

creator business set up effectively. That's the goal of today. That's what we're going to talk about. these five questions will help you. Let's see. There we go. These five questions will help you to really stay focused on what really

matters in terms of your career to business.

so let's start with first question. The first question I'll pull up right now is the question that you probably, if you haven't answered this and you don't know the answer, you probably need to figure this out right away, okay? And the question is, did you set up a legal entity

for your creator business. Now, that might sound like a long word entity, or it's a legal entity. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I can tell you basically an entity is a setup, a container, a actual structure for your creator business. So if you have not set up a legal entity, which could be an LLC, Limited Liability Corporation, could be an S-Corp,

which S corporation, it could be a C Corp. Both of these, you can see are corporations, right? But they are things that exist outside of you. You are a person, you are a creator. And then the business has another name and it sits outside of it, is its own entity. It is its own person as you will. So that's the first question that you have to answer. Now, if you don't know the answer to that, most likely you have not set up a legal entity.

or what you did, and a lot of creators do this, what you did was you set up or answered on a form a fictitious name for your state. So maybe you did go in and say, hey, I want to, what's called a DBA, do business as. So you're doing business as artists, amazing artists, right? You're doing business as producer extraordinaire, whatever your name is, whatever you're doing business as that name.

That's a pretty simple form. A lot of people do that as creators. say, well, I don't want to be going to my, my own name. want to have this business name. Here's the problem with that. A fictitious name again, change this for whatever country or state you're in. If this is incorrect, but to my knowledge, fictitious names do not actually equal having your own business separate from you. That still makes you what most people would call a sole proprietor, which means

You're doing business, but you're still doing it as a person, as an individual. You are not doing it as a business that is separate from your own personal assets and income. So again, if someone wants to correct me on this one, I would love the correction because I want to make sure I don't mess up anything. But I do believe that this is where a lot of creators get mixed up. And I did this too. I did this because I thought all I needed to do was do a fictitious name and then I would have my own business.

But again, that's not necessarily an entity. So when I looked at, I think at the time it was 88 Keys Music Studio or Piano Studio, and I was doing business as. But I wasn't filing separately for that business. I wasn't tracking the income, honestly, for that business. And so all in case of purposes, it wasn't really a business. It was just me having a different business name, but simply doing things under my own name as a sole proprietor.

and no structure. Now, let me be clear, I do believe a sole proprietor is a structure, but it's just the least protected structure. It's the least organized structure because there is no structure other than it's just you, okay? So this is why it's so important for us to talk about these legal entities. And again, I wanna make sure that you get into the deep dive, because we'll be able to bring in some people to make sure you get an answer to that question if you're wondering which legal entity

you should pick, should it be an LLC? Should it be a corporation? Can it be a partnership? What exactly are those legal entities? So I just named three of them right there. The question is, which one is best for you? We can't answer that and most likely you'd want to go to a financial planner, but our deep dive will help you to answer that specific question. So that's one of the questions you have to answer to have a properly set up creative business. You got to know what's your legal entity. For us,

It's Paul Creative Solutions, it's a LLC, and we did not do this again a long time ago, we just did this. So even in the chat right now, if you're watching live or in the comments, you can answer this question, I yes or no, do I have a properly set up legal entity right now for my creative business? Because if you don't, you can't have it set up correctly because you're missing a vital part of having a business. Okay, the second question you need to answer.

Do you have a separate bank account for your creative business? Yep, this is hitting home. We just talked a bit about this with the taxes and we're gonna talk about it again because it's one of those things that if you are not paying attention to can be a huge issue. A separate bank account for your creative business basically says that your business expenses and income and your personal income and expenses are separate. Sadly,

Many creators do not take this step and it does two major, it creates two major problems for you. One is the tracking is impossible. You can't track from your business to your personal if you have it all mixed up in one account. Yes, there's software that kind of tells you, oh, this was from this place, this was this place, you bought this from McDonald's, then you bought this from Walmart.

and you can keep receipts and everything, but the problem is is that the IRS and other tracking ⁓ entities or institutions like credit agencies, all that stuff, they do not separate for you. You have to separate it for them. So if you do not have a creator business account, some banks have both personal and business, so you can go to the same bank, but you gotta open up a business account.

Now, do most of these business accounts have fees? Some do, some don't. I've got a business account that does not have any fees. But more importantly, that business account is strictly for income from my creative work and expenses are paid from that business. And every single thing, I can say this clearly without having any particular knowledge of tax law. I can tell you this, it's clear.

When you mix up your business and your personal, you are creating an issue that the IRS can easily say, okay, well, this is not a real business because you are not treating your business and your finances with that kind of wall where one stops here, this is where the expenses and the income stops in this big account. And over here is where he or she spends their personal money, their personal income.

One question I used to have a lot was paying myself as an independent creator. You don't, maybe you like me, don't have a team and you're like, well, the money just comes to me anyway. Again, the key is documenting that when you get paid and you pay yourself, I pay myself a percentage based on a profit first model. And I use relay or bank to transfer that money back and forth, but it is documented as an owner's draw is

Document it when I am transferring is documented that this is actually an expense because I'm technically an employee of Paul creative solutions You do not want to be in a place where you are not tracking this income One-to-one making sure that you are not allowing that to happen to just let those finances go back and forth So I'm to pull that question up one more time Do you have a separate bank account for your creative business because if not again?

Big issue that could actually cost you in the long run, but also cost you in the short run because you really aren't able to track and measure and grow when you do not have these accounts separate and you are clearly looking at your business expenses, knowing what they are month to month, week to week, to year. And of course, as we mentioned, the tax implications are also super important. The third question, let's get into this third question, because this one also, if you answer this one, no.

You definitely need to get this figured out right away. And it kind of goes along with question two. Do you have a system to track revenue and expenses? Because businesses have to track revenue and expenses. I know as creators, a lot of times we just want to get into it, just start. The tracking, the bookkeeping, all of that stuff feels like it's an extra weight, an extra job. But as I mentioned earlier, the more that you are focusing on the right things in your business,

the more you can focus on the right things in your creative work. You won't have that monkey on your back that's telling you, a minute, do you have enough money to buy those sort supplies? Do you have enough money to go ahead and upgrade that camera? Can you pay for that out of the expenses? Have you worked enough gigs? Do you have the income for the month? And if you're not tracking that through financial software, through QuickBooks, through a service like I have, which is, I just forgot the Hurdler.

are you're not using a hurdler because I use that for both my mileage tracking and it helps track my income and expenses. And I'm also using other tools like nav.com that's helping me build credit by tracking my income and giving me something where I can build up trade lines and pay net 30 for certain things. Everything I just mentioned is a new discoveries for me, but it's because I absolutely realized that without a accountant or a bookkeeper that's keeping up with everything.

I'm not going to be able to keep track of these revenues. More importantly, if I'm not tracking it, I can't grow it. If I'm spending money willy-nilly on my creative work, but don't know how much I really have left, am I really being a good steward? Like that's where a lot of us creators get really messed up because we want the shiny website. We want to buy the coolest things, the coolest materials, the coolest equipment. But then you realize,

Do I have the budget for this? Am I budgeting for this? Do I know how much I need to make in order to upgrade, in order to get the editor, in order to get the person that I need to work on this? And how do I actually make sure that once this is measured, that I can upgrade it, that I know where to go next? So I want to go into talking about marketing plans and business plans and things like that, which I will in a second, because it all kind of goes together. But if you do not have a system for tracking revenue and expenses, let's be honest again,

you probably do not have a functioning working business because businesses have tracking systems for revenue and expenses. Not only that, they have profit and loss statements. They have things like that. Again, I used to think I don't need all that. I don't need P &Ls. What's a P &L? Well, it is hugely important because once again, it is a way to document what's actually happening in your business, whether you're making sales, whether you're getting clients.

whether that money is just going in one place and then immediately going out, it's because you're not tracking it and not keeping an eye on the actual profit that you're making. You're just going out there and selling things or making money on gigs, but you're not actually tracking whether or not that is adding to the bottom line of your business. And here's one big thing, I'll just say this out loud. You could be making money and not growing your business.

Matter of it's really easy to make money and not grow your business. Cause the problem is if you are growing your business, that means money is being funneled back into it. That means that there's investment happening in the business that's helping it to grow as a creator yourself. You know that if you do not invest into your skills, you're not going to get better. The same thing is true with your business. If you're not taking revenue and expenses and then actually putting it back into your business, it's not growing. It's just,

You're making money here, making money there, check here, check there. And then after that, you have nothing to show for it. So, systematically building your business requires you to systematically track revenue and expenses. So once again, this could be QuickBooks. We're gonna talk about this a lot in the Biz Deep Dive. So that's why I wanna go ahead and get you guys signed up. But if you don't have a system, you've gotta fix that, okay? All right, because you don't have a functioning business if you don't have this. All right.

Question four hits home for me as well because I didn't like this question, but I do have to ask it. Have you set up a business plan for your creator business? Do I like business plans? Absolutely not. I struggle with this so much because I have been just in the five year, 10 year plans with.

both my personal vision and my business and it just feels like it's over and over again. my gosh, I got to write all this stuff out. I'm not applying for a loan. Why do I need a business plan? But here's the problem. If you don't have a business plan, you don't have a plan on how to run your business. It sounds simplistic, but it's also super practical because a lot of us are just out here just trying stuff. We'll write a book here or we'll go do a gig there, but we don't have a systematic plan on what we actually want to do.

Where will money come from? Who are your competitors? If you have competitors, what can you learn from them? How do you plan, some people say scale, right? I'm not a scaling, I'm not trying to scale my business, but that needs to be written down so that I know what are my goals for the next two months, three months, five months, a year, for five years. Without a plan, the Bible tells about without vision, the people perish, right? For lack of knowledge. They do not have a plan.

and they are just running here and there, because I don't know what to do with it, because there's no guiding principle, there's no guiding plan. And we're going to talk about in the next section where to find a tool that can help you do a business plan. But a lot of people get caught up in, does the business plan have to have all the things that a loan officer would look for if you were trying to get a business loan? I'm going to say no. Some people write a business plan on the back of a napkin. The point is,

It's a plan, it's a choice deciding that you are going to either write down, hey, this is what my revenue goals are. This is where I see us growing. This is where I would like to add different things to my business, whether it be a physical location, whether it be a different product line, whether it be whatever it is, those things have to be in your plan. So I am not gonna go all the way to saying you have to have a specific kind of business plan that is.

Just as thorough as a CFO would write, a CEO would write. But if you don't have the details, and again, this is where maybe some of the tools I'll talk about would be really helpful for you. And I want to give them away because I want to make sure we get to the next section. But that's the fourth question you have to answer. Do you have a business plan? If not, is it possible that you're not really running a business but that you're just trying things out?

But let's put it this way. I shouldn't say you're not running a business. You're not running your business effectively because you haven't organized that part of the business. So let's be honest about that and help each other to get that done. All right, question five. We made it through all five questions. I wasn't sure if I could break it down to just five things, but this made sense and it seems like we're on time right now. So the last question. Do you have standard agreements ready for partners and clients? This is a big one, y'all.

because I know when we first get into creative work, we tend to think of everyone as our friend or the people that we're working with tend to be our friends. We don't tend to have a bunch of people that, know, we may be getting like clients outside of our circles, but let's be honest, most of the people that you work with inside your creative circle, you don't think of them as being, this is my business partner, so we got to have a contract. Problem is, once again, it's what...

the lack of that can cause in your life, in your career business. The lack of written documentation and systems and contracts between you and your coworkers, you and your partner, you and your co-writer, you and your client, whoever it is that you're working with when you do not have systems in place and standard agreements. The most likely thing that's gonna happen is somebody's gonna have a question that you guys have to answer mid partnership.

and it's gonna be a mess because you're gonna have to work it out while you're trying to work together. You don't wanna have to try to work things out while you're working together. You wanna have things figured out in terms of who's gonna share the money, who's gonna buy this, who's responsible for what. So if you have not gotten standard agreements for your partners, for your clients, for the people you work for, for the people you work with,

that is going to create a bottleneck in your creator business that again will eventually affect your creative ability, your inspiration, your ability to stay focused on the task and the goal. It's just gonna sap you because when these things come up, trust me, they're the most frustrating, ⁓ most uninspiring or de-inspiring I should say. They uninspire you, right? They despire you. I don't know if I just made up a word, but.

Instead of inspire, they uninspire you. They take the life out of you, especially when these issues affect your relationships. Especially when it comes to somebody that you've worked for a long time, worked with a long time and you realize you've got something that you're not on the same page. And if you do not have these standards agreements, now what are some of these standard agreements? I'll give you some examples for podcasting. I have a standard guest release through PodMatch who we are a part of the PodMatch network. Because we have...

a standard agreement, I no longer worry about when a guest is on, what if they don't like the podcast? What if they tell me to chunk it down? I have a written contract that covers that. I have a written agreement they signed. It has arbitration in it. I know I never want to go to arbitration, but it's in it in case there was a necessary for us to figure out a dispute. That thing is off my back. And you can find that you'll see that a lot of these

Questions as I'll go back to all five in a second Simply are about getting issues taken care of before they ever become a problem for your entity before you ever get Worried about hey am I a corporation in my firm you've already answered that question before you get the business planning You've already answered the question. What kind of business am I trying to build here? What do I need to know who's I need to ask? You've already done this same thing here with standard agreements and contracts

Many times there are boilerplate, very simple, generic things online. I would always advise getting a lawyer to look at contracts. But the thing is, it's not out of reach. You don't have to reinvent the wheel to get standard agreements or partners. And if you want to tweak something, you can hire someone as like a lawyer to look at something and make sure that it's legit. But make sure that you don't go into agreements just on the handshake.

the oral agreement. Because again, even among Christians, this thing can come back to be a huge issue and could affect your ownership of your creative work. So let's go back over the five questions. Let's ask yourself, ask your business, ask your business partner, have we set up a legal entity for this creative business? Do we have separate bank accounts for our creative business and our personal finances?

Do we have a system to track revenue and expenses? Have we set up a business plan? And do we have standard agreements ready for partners? If you have those five things, I'm gonna go ahead and just say you probably have a legit business. You're not just out here flying by night, you're actually doing business. And you are probably looking at other things that you can add to fix your business and make it even better. But those elements, I think, having a business plan.

Having revenue and expenses tracked. Having a product that obviously you are playing or sharing or doing whatever it is, this is where you have to track it. How do you know how many you did? How many you sold? Unless you are tracking it, okay? So we talked about that. We talked about having a separate bank account for your expenses. We talked about making sure you have a system for...

You have a business plan already set up and then you have a system or standard agreements. So if you have all those things, you have a legit business, you're probably working out really well, but you've probably got some areas that you can improve. So even if you have answered all five in the affirmative, I would still suggest you go check out our business deep dive. Because if you get to the deep dive, you'll be able to get answers to all the other questions that we didn't get to today.