It takes far more than just design skills to find success as a creative entrepreneur. Your success hinges on your business management: marketing, sales, client relations, people skills, delegation, ambition, vision, and numerous other nuanced skillsets. Perhaps one of the most daunting aspects of finding success is actually selling your…
During my 15 year agency run, I rebranded the company four times. If you’re reading this, perhaps you are exploring thoughts of a rebrand, but you’re a bit nervous about a potential downturn in work. Will the clients remember me? Will my SEO plummet? Will my workload decline? Will it…
You landed the pitch meeting! Excitement fills the air! Now, all you have to do is close the deal, easy peasy. Getting the potential client to say “yes” to working with you requires more than just showing them your fancy portfolio and talking about your Photoshop wizardy. It requires getting…
When it comes to the dilemma of aligning with your cheap clients on a more realistic rate for your freelance design services, the problem is just that: alignment. If you have a cheap client you are struggling to get up to your rates, it’s because they don’t understand the value…
I’ve seen some advice that a creative entrepreneur should ALWAYS require first payment to be made PRIOR to starting a project. While I understand the positive intention behind this advice, I don’t agree that it should be a required policy for your business. Here are few things to consider when…
It is easy to get frustrated when a potential client asks for a meeting to discuss a project and in that meeting they start fishing for your solid gold ideas to solve their problem. You, being helpful like you are, offer up strategies for their challenges, free of charge in…
Should you charge clients a licensing fee for your design work? How about royalties? These questions have come up to me a few times, so I thought I’d address them once and for all in this article. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about this when I started freelancing…
Sometimes I feel like my content exists to refute questionable advice you might find elsewhere. This article may be one of those cases. Some design advice floating around recommends that you submit just ONE logo option for your client. (This could also apply to any design deliverable: one brochure design,…
If there is one thing I could teach you to dramatically improve the success of your creative business, it would be ALWAYS present your proposals. I have been a broken record on this topic in tons of different pieces of content. I’m sure you’ve heard it from me before. I’m…
You check your email in the morning and, BOOM, there is a message from a potential client sitting in your inbox. You don’t know them. They don’t know you. But somehow they found you like the needle in a haystack of other creative vendors. It is always exciting when a…
