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,…
It is no surprise that there are some concerns about short term economic health of the world. The stock markets are down. Energy costs are soaring. Inflation rates are the highest in decades. And the news media loves to tell you about it 24/7 because it will capture your clicks,…
If you haven’t been there yet, you will be. You’ve gone through the full design process and just when you think you are heading for final approval of the final, final, final version of the design, the client says, “Actually, we don’t really like how this turned out. We want…
With inflation soaring and recession rumors proliferating from every “news” source, I have had several people ask me, “I want to start freelancing full-time, but if there is a recession coming, I feel like I need to stay in my job to keep my paycheck coming. What should I do?”…
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 are rockstar agency for Acme Bank, your local financial institution. Word gets around and now a competing local bank reaches out to you. They want you to do for their bank what you did for Acme Bank. You are left wondering, “Can I work for both banks? Isn’t that…
If you’ve followed a significant volume of my content, you’ve undoubtedly heard me mention the book, The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber. I read this book around year 2 or 3 of growing my creative agency and it had a profound impact on me. In fact, I can probably say…
Proposals take freelancers and creative agency owners time to create, no doubt about it. Sure, you can speed up the process by repurposing past proposals and using templates, but most often a proposal requires time to explore and craft custom ideas. Since time is required to craft a custom proposal,…
