Blog

Tax Time for Creative Business

Tax Time for Creative Business

By Monica Davidson Sure, it’s boring, but tax is super important for creative practitioners and arts organisations. Learning about how it works, and specifically for you, is a weird combination of...

The Art of No

The Art of No

By Lillie Brown Does saying “yes” rule your life? If it does, you’re not alone—social psychologist Dr. Vanessa K. Bohns wrote in a 2016 research piece “many people agree to things—even things they...

The Habits of Gratitude

The Habits of Gratitude

By Monica Davidson “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris bueller I have had what could empirically be called a ‘shit year’. The...

Find Your Why

Find Your Why

By Monica Davidson “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”Mark twain Sadly, there’s no substantive support linking Mark Twain to this...

Master Your Marketing

Master Your Marketing

By Lillie Brown It’s no secret that marketing can be overwhelming and, in our experience, most creative folks we work with would prefer to spend time creating rather than promoting. We get it. Over...

Imposter Syndrome

Imposter Syndrome

By Monica Davidson "I have written 11 books but each time I think ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’" Maya Angelou In 1978,...

Goals by the Dozen

Goals by the Dozen

By Monica Davidson I’m writing this at the start of a new year, a time when we traditionally look towards the future and speculate about what might be coming, and what we could manifest with hard...

Backwards Into The Future

Backwards Into The Future

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’ By Monica Davidson I fell in love with this Māori whakataukī (or proverb) when I first heard it at...

You, The Expert

You, The Expert

By Monica Davidson Smart creative people have lots of options when it comes to marketing themselves and finding ways of making money, but using expert strategy is a neat way of combining both....

How to Keep Burnout at Bay

How to Keep Burnout at Bay

By Lillie Brown Let me begin with this: burnout is never your fault. It is the product of a frenetic, hyper-capitalist, optimisation-obsessed society that assigns value based on your output,...

LinkedIn for Creatives

LinkedIn for Creatives

By Monica Davidson In 2021, LinkedIn announced that a staggering 756 million people use the site, and yet creatives tend not to focus on LinkedIn as a marketing tool. Monica Davidson (CEO of...

How To Be a Better Ally

How To Be a Better Ally

By Pauline Clague In 2020, we have had highs and lows in the world when it comes to #BLM and #Indigenous rights. It is often a hard space for an Indigenous person to traverse through with the...

The Fear of Advice

The Fear of Advice

By Monica Davidson I started freelancing over thirty years ago, and never considered that one day I would be a ‘proper’ business, until I opened my first production company in the early 1990s. At...

Plan A vs Plan B

Plan A vs Plan B

By Monica Davidson  So many young creatives embarking on their professional career are urged to have a Plan B. Once it becomes clear that their youthful enthusiasm for dancing or drawing or words is...

The Power of Rest

The Power of Rest

By Lillie Brown In a world where being busy is worn as a badge of honour, where needing extra hours in the day and being powered by caffeine is part of the ‘norm’, choosing rest is a radical act....

All Part of the Plan

All Part of the Plan

By Monica Davidson When I started my first film production company about twenty-five years ago, I wrote a business plan for my fledgling company to try and encourage a loans officer from a big bank...