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...
Blog
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,...
Tax Time for Creative Business
By Monica Davidson Sure, it’s snooze-worthy, but tax is super important for creative practitioners and arts organisations. Learning about how it works is a weird combination of boring and scary....
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...
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...