Somebody gets in touch, and somewhere in the message they mention, quite pleasantly, that they’re getting three quotes. There’s a particular drop in your stomach at that. It’s the same drop that arrives the moment you start taking your own value seriously. You begin to see everything that sits inside your price beyond the finished […]

There’s a sentence I’ve heard so many times, from so many brilliant creative business owners, that I could probably say it along with them. “But I can’t charge more for that. It comes easily to me.” Last week I wrote about the four layers of what your clients are actually paying for, and what happens […]

It’s early September, and I always find this the proper new year. Not January. January is dark and everyone is tired and nobody really means it. September is the one where something shifts. The light changes, the mornings have an edge to them, and there’s a feeling of everybody going back to their desks at […]

This is about a small, quite specific thing that makes an enormous difference to how much help you actually get. And it’s all in the way you ask. Picture the situation. You feel a bit stuck on something in your business, so you do the sensible, sane thing, you ask someone. A friend, a peer, […]

This is about the single most powerful way a creative business grows. And it’s not the thing you’ll hear almost anywhere else, which is rather the point. It isn’t posting more. It isn’t being everywhere, all the time. It isn’t finally cracking the algorithm. It’s something much quieter, and something, I think, you’re already rather […]