The pit-in-your-stomach fear of looking stupid can be eliminated if you accept the fact that what you’re doing is public service. It’s closer to driving a bus than it is to shredding a guitar solo.

Cheap doesn’t usually deliver on time, respond quickly, or have great ideas. Expensive does those things. 

If a client doesn’t know who you are, you have to do a lot of selling to win their business. There’s a better way.

Clients don’t care if your creative concept or campaign idea is the best idea in the world.

Do you ever wonder how photographers and videographers with half your talent are booking jobs twice as big as yours? Hint: It’s because they know how to pitch. 

Selling consulting is hard. Selling strategy and knowledge and soft skills is not as easy as selling products or services. 

This is what I learned growing up just a chainlink fence away from a vicious Rottweiler named Rufus. 

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.

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. 

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.

“You will save yourself from yourself by learning to just state the number and shut up.”

You got ghosted by a client again. Let’s talk about why that might have happened. 

If you’re a freelancer or a creative, and you don’t know where to find new clients… I got you. Here’s a list of seven places you can find new clients.

Even after publishing over 700 articles on my website since 2018, writing 465 days in a row, and writing over a quarter of a million words…the resistance was still strong. The imposter syndrome was still there.

You know the difference you can make for someone’s project in a day, or even just a few hours. Yet we have a hard time believing other creatives could do the same for us. This is walking. This is the left foot and the right foot of commanding larger budgets for your projects: invest in quality, then get more money.

There’s a study in which different people were tasked with interpreting an email. Those deemed in “high-power” positions were much worse at understanding the perspective of the email sender than those in “low-power” positions.

You lost it. You worked overtime to put together a last-minute pitch for a client, and then…nothing. You’re not alone. I’ve lost and won hundreds of freelance pitches throughout my career. I’ve taken notes and I’m sharing my top 5 lessons with you.

I had walked too far to turn back but wasn’t sure how much further I had to go. Then, a woman driving a golf cart (decked out with neon lights and a speaker playing house music) rolled up to me. “Want a ride?” She said. “$20.”