By Lillie Brown The end of the year is a fertile time to pause, breathe, and take stock of the last 12 months before visioning for 2024 and beyond. It’s easy to get swept up in the busyness of...
Blog
Trading the Real for the Dream
By Grace Davidson-Lynch Here’s a question that most frustrated artists have asked themselves - When is the best time to start my creative freelancing journey? It was 2019, and I’d been working in...
Don’t Try This: Anti-Marketing
By Lillie Brown Marketing is just as powerful when it’s driven in reverse. Anti-marketing is a guerrilla marketing approach underpinned by principles of reverse psychology that deliberately goes...
Athlete Thinking
By Monica Davidson A few months back I was watching the news, and towards the end of the broadcast there was a significant amount of attention paid to some young man’s leg. Apparently, he had...
Package Pricing Pointers
By Monica Davidson Creative businesses are often very resistant to setting a fixed price for their services. Goods and products? Sure. It would be weird to put your jewellery or garments on Etsy...
Negotiation for Beginners
By Grace Davidson-Lynch When I was first starting out as a freelance creative practitioner, I was prone to indulging in feelings of doubt. The questions in the back of my mind got louder the longer...
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
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...
Monday Morning Meeting
By Monica Davidson I first started having the Monday Morning Meeting (MMM) when I was still at university, and discussing the idea of setting up a film business with two friends. Every Monday the...
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
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
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...
10 Tips to Prepare for a Kickass Market Stall
By Carmen Hawker (she/her) Who doesn’t love a market? So much to see, sift through and score. Thankfully, after a few years on the backburner, markets are back as eager crowds once again spill into...
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,...
How to Combat Decision Fatigue
By Monica Davidson For the last two years, some days have required a minimal effort when it comes to decision making. Should I wear black tracksuit pants or grey? Should I have soup or toast for...
A Letter from a Recovering Perfectionist
By Lillie Brown Allow me to begin this article with a confession. As I, a hard-line perfectionist, sat down to pen these words, I felt paralysed. The great irony of a perfectionist writing an...
Networking Tips for the Rusty
By Monica Davidson Now that things are going ‘back to normal’ and we’re getting used to living with COVID, events and workshops are happening again. People are slowly going back to gatherings,...
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
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
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
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,...
Creating Client Characters
By Monica Davidson Back in the days when I was still running my production company TwoShotMedia, I had a client called Margaret. She was in her mid-fifties, female, and a middle-manager in her...
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...
Getting Organised for Disorganised People
By Lillie Brown Work. Family. Friends. Partners. Pets. Creative expression. Home maintenance. Eating well. Moving your body. Hobbies. Yikes… It’s a lot. As a clever, creative person, you...