A technical skill and a business are two different things, and the gap between them is where most talented graduates stall. The good news is that the fundamentals are learnable in a weekend, not a degree.
Pricing comes first: know your cost per hour (materials, time, overheads) before you ever quote a client, and revisit it every few months as your skill — and your demand — grows.
Cash flow is the quiet business-killer. A deposit on every booking, paid before work begins, protects you from the single most common failure mode we see: finished work that a client delays paying for.
Client management is simpler than it sounds: a clear scope in writing, a realistic timeline, and one weekly update if the project runs longer than two weeks. Most client relationships break down from silence, not from mistakes.