Pay the bills.

If the bills aren’t paid, the business won’t last.

It’s not the sexiest, most passionate or uplifting answer, but it’s the truth. Sure, we can continue to incur more debt but that’s a frustrating and risky place to be.

There are two sides to the equation when it comes to paying bills.

#1 – The bills themselves and, #2 – the money we make to pay them. Of course, we always prefer the equation looks like this:

One way of being able to pay the bills is to make more money. Pretty straightforward, but that side of the equation doesn’t take into consideration the amount of the bills. And we don’t want to get into a situation where the more we make, the more we spend, because we could easily end up not being able to pay the increasing costs.

So, making more money is one part of the answer but when starting a business, sales will likely be low…so we can’t just focus on that side of the equation.

The other side of the equation is cost. What’s it cost to run the business?

The best answer to that question is: As little as possible.

Regardless of how much money we have going in (whether we’re backed with funding, bootstrapping or flat out broke), we should always spend the bare minimum needed to get the business rolling.

Next week, I’ll list a few things that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on when starting your business.