There comes a time when a budding tattoo artist will want to think about working for himself. Most tattoo artists start out by working at their established local tattoo shops. This allows them to accumulate experience and gain much-needed confidence.

Once you’ve decided to go it alone, you’ll need to find a venue, as well as outfit it with the best gear you can afford. There is much more to running a business than this, however, you will need to do enough marketing to ensure you get a lot of new customers through the door, as well as stay in control of your costs and manage your books.

It is very important to make sure that you do not ignore any particular area of ​​your business. If you don’t like accounting, it’s very easy to ignore it and let it pile up. However, if you do this, you will not be aware of the health of your business. Your updated books will show you how successful or not your business is.

There are only 5 numbers that you can affect to improve your business, they are; volume of potential customers, number of sales conversions, number of transactions, average sale price, percentage of gross margin. These are the only numbers that matter to you as a business owner. You can only get more people as leads, then you can convert more of them to customers, then you can sell more to them (more tattoos).

You need to look beyond the operations side of your business and look at the overall health of your business. Investing in the best and highest quality equipment you can afford will help you maximize your gross margin, as you will benefit from the long-term efficiency of using better equipment – that is, the higher the standard of your equipment, the longer it will last, and therefore there will be no need to think about buying again in the short term.