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…
I frequently find myself buying things because of the awesome packaging. I often buy Truvia brand Stevia because the Truvia packaging is so great (in comparison to the “generic” options). I love Apple’s product packaging so much that I can’t bring myself to throw away the boxes (I have a…
An active social media strategy is not for every entrepreneur. Some people struggle with natural introversion. Other business owners lack the available time necessary for social media to be effective for their business (no doubt, it can be a black hole time suck). And others are not quite sure where…
You’ve been charging a client an hourly rate for several years. You love them. They love you. But you just can’t keep the lower rate anymore. The only problem is that they are a significant percentage of your business and you don’t want to risk losing them. What should you…
We’ve probably all had the situation where the client doesn’t like any of the designs. It sucks when it happens and they are entitled to their opinion. I’ve shared content about this in the past and I have more planned for the future. But that isn’t what this article is…
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…
