College students often joke about driving themselves to the point of exhaustion to get a good grade on an exam. Looking back, many of us remember sleepless nights spent cramming so that we could achieve our dreams.

As it turns out, that “respect the grind” mindset followed many of us into the professional world.

Whether you’re running a startup built out of your garage or at the helm of an older organization, you need to stay on top of your budget.

If you don’t, you may find that the dreams and ambitions that brought you to your position will remain just barely out of reach.

But how do you go about measuring the financial health of your business?

You’ve got your business off the ground – congratulations! Now, you’re staring down the potential of an engaging client base, future sales, and your first content marketing campaign. Content marketing campaigns are only as complicated as you make them. The benefits of using them, however, are many.

Investing your time, money, and resources into creating a startup takes a lot out of a person. That’s what makes a startup’s failure all the more devastating. No matter how hard many people try, over 70 percent of startups in the tech industry alone will fail to meet their creators’ goals. Those statistics, however, aren’t meant to say, “don’t ever invest in a startup.” Instead, they’re meant to represent the challenges that await anyone who does – and the safeguards you’ll have to invest in if you want to see your startup dreams come true.

Interpersonal communications are as strange as they are wonderful. When you’re around the same people five days a week, eight hours a day, you build up a bond that’s relatively indisputable. Unfortunately, that means there’s plenty of potential for drama, even as there’s potential for friendships. So, what can you do to – if not entirely prevent arguments in your office space – make sure that your startup’s team can work together peacefully?

A business can’t thrive without an audience, and business owners can’t thrive without friends. The power of a diverse professional network is stunning, when you think about it. The people you know in your industry are more than people you say hello to at a conference every few months or so.

The business you build up can often feel like your baby. You naturally want to take pride in it and enjoy the limelight that it brings you, whatever that may look like.

More often than not, though, your business’s accomplishments don’t belong solely to you.

They belong to your employees, your business partners, and sometimes even your industry peers, as well.

Your dreams keep you going all day, every day. They’re the motivation behind your hustle, the fuel in your tank. These big dreams are essential to the creation and success of businesses everywhere. That said, no matter how hard you work, you’re not going to easily be able to achieve your biggest goals right off the bat. Meeting ambitious business goals can take years of work.

It’s natural, as a business owner, to be ambitious. There’s a difference between ambition, though, and stretching yourself too thin. You may feel as though you have to provide for all of a client’s needs, regardless of whether or not they’re within your wheelhouse. However, this kind of attitude can lead you to over-commit to one of your clients, neglect others, and give up too much of your already limited time.

In an ideal world, you’d be able to onboard all of your clients within one to two weeks of first contact. In reality, the onboarding process, or evening convincing a client that your business can be of benefit to them, takes time. To secure your stream of revenue and maintain a clientele base, you have to make yourself present for clients without rushing them through the onboarding process.

Project management is as much about completing a task to the best of your ability as it is about improving on your business’s ability to meet the needs of its consumer base. Your business can’t improve, though, if you don’t take stock of your previous clients’ opinions of your work. Obtaining client feedback, though, can be a little difficult if you don’t maintain a relationship with your clients.

Word around the office space nowadays is that apps primarily lead to distracted employees, not increased productivity. What would you say, though, if we told you that wasn’t true? Employee productivity – or lack thereof – is based on a lot of things, including humanity’s ability to focus. The number of hours which a person is actually able to stay productive for might actually surprise you, as it’s much lower than the prescribed eight hours a day we’re supposed to be working.

No one wants to admit that a client may be too difficult to deal with. That said, you shouldn’t overwork yourself when a client decides to be cantankerous. Learning how to manage your professional relationships takes time, but with practice, even the most unusual of partnerships can become long-term, mutually-beneficial projects.

Burnout is never a fun feeling. You go to resume work on one of your projects, and no matter how pressing its deadline is or how passionate you felt about the work when you started, you just can’t bring yourself to complete the job. Don’t fall prey to any feelings of inadequacy, though. Project burnout occurs when you look at a project too closely for too long, and it can arise in anyone.