The Cash Connection
Quick: What’s the last purchase you made? Odds are, it was today. And odds are it wasn’t with cash. (My last purchase was with a credit card; I bought lunch for my team at a café. Before that, […]
Financial Freedom
Imagine this: You never have to say yes to something you’d rather say no to. We all have those sorts of projects, no matter our creative medium. Perhaps it is a commercially viable print (when you’d rather be doing one-of-a-kind […]
July 2016 Tasks
Happy Independence Day! This weekend I re-watched Empire Records. Naturally, it is the best possible movie to watch circa Independence Day. “Damn the man, save the empire” is dangerously close to what I imagine was yelled in 1776. (Or maybe […]
Straddling Duality
Huge thanks to the Clark Hulings fund for adding this piece to their site! I had the pleasure of chairing a panel discussion in May that featured a variety of artists from across the artistic spectrum. And they all […]
Curiosity versus Fear
My daughter came home from school a few months ago and reported that a classmate’s mother “didn’t like her.” “[Classmate] said his mom doesn’t like me,” she said. I remember he words exactly, along with the puzzling expression she […]
Beautiful Distractions
Small confession: I was interrupted three times during the first paragraphs of Verena von Pfetten’s piece in the Times last month about—you guessed it—being distracted. Twice my daughter asked me to refill her water gun for an ongoing arms […]
June 2016 Tasks
Summer has arrived, in spirit if not in actuality, and this month, our clocks slow down as the mercury rises. We’re slowly approaching the longest day of the year, and yet, there never seem to be enough hours of daylight […]
More Than Math: Part 4
This month we’re talking pricing, and so far, we’ve spent most of our time talking about hourly rates. We’ve figured overall expenses (ish), we’ve estimated billable hours, and we learned that this approach doesn’t really capture the value that you […]
More Than Math: Part 3
In this series, based on April’s pricing workshop at Wild Goose Creative, we’re breaking down the equation approach to calculating billable hours… And talking about why the equation approach isn’t enough. So far, we’ve worked through the equation approach […]
More Than Math: Part 2
Last month, I visited Wild Goose Creative to lead a pricing workshop that started with the “math” answer to the question, “What is your hourly rate?” Then—spoiler alert—we broke down all the reasons why the math answer is incomplete. […]
