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.
After I sold my agency in 2015, I stayed working for the acquiring agency for a couple years during my buyout timeline. We were doing close to eight figures per year with a wide variety of client engagements; lots of fixed bid, tons of revenue from dedicated resources, retainers, maintenance…
Many games have been invented during the history of the world. Out of curiosity I did a little research to discover which one originated first. There are a few options in the running and I’ve included the origin of a few other popular games, in case you’re interested. There is…
After a couple years of running my agency I started to find myself not enjoying the end of the year. Actually, I kinda started to hate it. When this started to happen, I couldn’t really pinpoint why I wasn’t feeling too “festive” during the holiday season, but I clearly see…
During my 15+ year agency run from 2002 until the start of 2018, I watched the internet “grow up” first hand. In the early years of my entrepreneurial journey we did a ton of simple promotional micro-sites for a wide variety of clients, mostly Hollywood stuff. I’m not gonna lie,…
I have had some nightmare project disasters. Like the time I waived a $70k invoice just to tell a client, “We are done.” Or that one time I refunded a client $54k to get them out of my life. It is easy to use the excuse, “They are just a…
Esmeralda recently committed the fatal error of letting her client go out of scope. Her original project scope was for the design of a brochure. Part way through the project, the client asked for a “super simple” Powerpoint presentation. “It is just a simple little template that we can use…
I’ve been at this creative entrepreneur game for a long time. I started my agency in 2002 and we executed on more than 2,000 projects during my agency run which ended in 2018 after I left the agency I sold to. It was a lot of pitches, a lot of…
You’re super excited to kick off a new project with an awesome client! As you begin to dig into the work, you quickly realize that the client’s brand and business need more help than you originally thought. Maybe you didn’t do a sufficiently thorough job in your discovery meeting or…
