I am Michael Janda, an executive level creative leader with more than 25 years of experience in both in-house creative departments and agencies working with some of the greatest brands in the world including Disney, Google, Fox, ABC and NBC. I create books, courses, workshops, lectures and other training materials to help creative entrepreneurs run successful businesses.
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,…
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…
You worked hard to get your proposal “just right” for this amazing opportunity. The presentation to the client could not have gone better and they gave you the formal, “We’ll get back to you soon.” Now what? What is my follow-up strategy? How much follow-up makes me look professional? And…
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…
