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...
Blog
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...
Tax Deductions for Creative Business 2021
By Monica Davidson It’s that most hated time of year again, and as always, creative businesses and professionals are in an interesting position with regard to deductions. Many of us are individuals,...
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...
The Power of a Values-Based Branding Strategy
By Lillie Brown Branding is undoubtedly one of the greatest assets your creative business has. Your distinctive look and feel encapsulates the essence of what you do, elevates your product or...
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
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
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
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
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...
The Art of Coffee
Coffee certainly has the power to help me dress, drive and think in the mornings, or kick on for a big night (how things have changed), but coffee is also an incredibly powerful marketing tool. A...
The Getting of Wisdom
If it wasn’t for unpaid work experience and interning when I was younger, I don’t think I would have progressed as far as I did in my chosen professions. I wrote words without pay, on the promise of...