by Monica Davidson With state and federal governments preparing to distribute grant money for 2025, many creatives and cultural orgs are creating (or updating) their strategic plans. Some are...
Blog
Tough Times Tips
by Monica Davidson Times are tough. Are you OK? The current economic climate in Australia is challenging for creatives, even if we don’t have mortgages or are lucky enough to not have big grocery...
Over The Rainbow
By Robbi James Why Pride Month Matters, and what you can do this time of year to show your colours. It will surprise no one that Creative Plus Business is a loudly proud workplace (and community)....
Creative’s Guide to Recruitment
Find, retain, and attract freelance collaborators By Monica Davidson Finding people to collaborate with can be a real challenge when freelancing. Sure, there’s always the little black book of...
Creating Care-Fully
By Charley Allanah Artists often talk about our work as a social service; a public good; with value beyond dollars. But are we genuinely making art in a way that merits such a claim? Work grounded...
Be Fit for Funding
By Monica Davidson Funding rounds are being announced and submission deadlines are starting to pile up. If applying for grants and other types of funding are key to your financial survival as a...
The Habit of Goals
By Monica Davidson The start of the year is a traditional time to set some goals, announce our intentions, decide on our resolutions, and set ourselves up for failure. Harsh, perhaps, but we’ve all...
5 Ways to Reflect and Reset for the New Year
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...
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...
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...
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...