Creative Sanity Snippets is my weekly newsletter with quick 1–5 minute reads on pricing, sales, proposals, systems, processes—the real stuff it takes to run a profitable creative business. Join thousands of creatives who get a weekly dose of sanity in their inbox.
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…
Let’s get one thing straight, you are not a pixel monkey. The sooner you break the habit of pushing pixels around like a well trained chimpanzee and begin offering strategic insights that can move the needle of your client’s business, the better. This is the key to unlocking bigger budgets…
This week I decided to tackle how “Trying to sell $10,000 logos might kill your business.” This topic comes as a response to those of you who have heard a favorite thought leader tell you that you are not charging enough and you need to dramatically increase your prices… 10x……
