There are a few scenarios in which doing free work makes sense. Here they are. 

Anchoring isn’t just about price. It’s also about quality, speed, and status. Here’s how to do all four.

If you sell creative services, the first thing you have to do is turn your prospect into a buyer. Generally speaking, this is the easy part.

Last November I joined my friend Ben Gluntz on his podcast Created to Create. I hope you enjoy this one!

We all spend time going down rabbit holes. This is the experience of being on social media. Social media, however, is usually not very productive. 

Public speaking is like driving a car full of people. For the next few minutes, you’re going to take them somewhere. How you do it matters. 

When I was 21 years old, I found myself in Washington D.C. for a day alone. I wandered around, looked at some stuff, met a friend for lunch, and scalped a ticket to a baseball game. In the middle of it all, my father told me to meet a colleague of his who ran a recruiting firm. 

Can you call a business a success if it closes its doors? Can you say you are successful if your small business isn’t growing? If you have to shut down or sell or leave a business, can you really call that successful? 

I think you can. 

If you’re lucky, your clients understand about 10% of what you do. Most of them probably only understand about 5% of what you do. 

The things I’ve failed at in the past are better indicators of a future path than new things. If I’ve failed at them before, that means I’ve already gotten far enough to fail. 

Building a business takes time. Not because it takes a lot of time to create all the things that a business needs to run, (like a product or a service or a website or a marketing campaign) but because every business is built on trust, and you can’t rush trust. 

Sure, on paper, you could make an argument that your assets are a better value, or higher quality than your competition. But if the experience of service is not up to the client’s expectations, it doesn’t matter. 

We never feel like we have enough time. We watch the months and years go by, seeing our dreams get smaller and smaller in the rearview, never finding a moment to make them happen. 

If you’ve ever wondered how these advertising agencies and production companies get away with charging more than $100,000 for a 30-second Instagram video shot on an iPhone, I’m about to tell you. 

Every aspect of Martha Stewart’s life came together to make her empire possible: gardening, hosting, modeling, Wall Street, publishing.

If you don’t keep your finances organized, freelancing will challenge that. If you aren’t comfortable networking, pitching, or negotiating, freelancing will force you into uncomfortable situations.

Friction can be a good thing in sales, assuming you have a good product, because it forces the customer to think about you and to make a decision.

When you find yourself in a moment of stress, there are two prevailing pieces of advice. Some people will say, “just be present.” Other people will say, “this isn’t going to matter in five years, so stop worrying about it.” Neither one feels particularly helpful when you’re in a moment of stress.

When I started my career, I didn’t even know the rules. I made simple mistakes, stepped on toes, and missed easy opportunities. This was just the path I had to take to learn the “rules.”

We try to focus on everything: making good work, and making a lot of money, and treating our clients well, and finding work-life balance, and having a good brand. When we focus on all of it, we aren’t really swinging that hard at any of it.