THE FINANCIALLY AWKWARD MIDDLE
There is a stretch in most creative careers where the work is good enough to be asked for and the pay has not caught up. What usually runs out in that stretch is the time between payments.
The early work pays badly and quickly. A shift, a session, a wedding, a cover gig: the money is small, and it arrives on the night or by the end of the week. Then the work gets better, and better work tends to come with a different kind of client. A brand, an agency, a production company, an institution. The fee goes up. So does the wait.
The fee is what gets noticed. The wait does the damage. A commission that pays three times what the old work paid, on sixty or ninety-day terms, can leave a person poorer in the meantime than the small, fast jobs ever did. Add the small jobs turned down to make room for it, and the awkward middle has its shape: more money on paper, less in the account, and a gap between the two that nobody budgeted for.
Averages cannot see it
A monthly average hides this. Here is an example, with round numbers. An illustrator has £2,400 she can use. Her costs are £1,500 a month. Two days a week in a shop bring in £600 a month, confirmed. She spends £900 a month more than she earns, so on its own her money lasts about 81 days, or 2.7 months.
Then she lands a commission worth £2,000, invoiced on ninety-day terms. Averaged across her months, the commission says she is fine: £4,400 against a £900 monthly gap is 4.9 months. Walk forward day by day instead, and the picture changes.
DAY 0 DAY 81 DAY 90 £2,400 ────────── £0 · · · · · · · +£2,000 money runs out invoice paid
The money reaches zero nine days before the invoice is paid, at the moment her work is the best it has been.
Measuring the gap
This is why A Runway To counts forward through time instead of averaging. Your runway is the number of days until the money you can use reaches zero, walking through each payment on the day it is due to arrive and each cost on the day it leaves. A payment that lands after that day does not move it, however large. Expected money, the grant applied for or the invoice not yet agreed, is kept apart from confirmed money for the same reason.
The middle cannot be skipped. It does have a length, and a length can be planned against. The question that matters in the middle is whether the money arrives before the runway ends, and it can be answered with a calendar.
The levers are few, and almost all of them move dates rather than amounts. Ask for a deposit on signing. Ask for thirty-day terms instead of ninety. Keep one small, fast source of income running through the first big jobs instead of dropping it the week they arrive. Book the next quick job before the slow one pays.
Some dates will not move. A festival fee paid after the screening, a royalty statement that comes twice a year, a grant released in instalments. When the payment cannot come earlier, the runway has to reach further, and that means more in HAVE before the job starts or less going OUT while it runs. Either is a decision best made before saying yes to the big job, while the small ones are still on offer.
Take the largest payment you are counting on this year and write its real date beside it: the day it reaches your account, not the day the work is delivered. Then count forward from today to the day your money runs out. If the payment’s date comes second, that is the gap to close first.