The 3 ingredients we need for a great sandwich (generation)
It’s finally happened; I am a sandwich. One minute I’m rolling in at 3 a.m. after a night out of with friends for drinks and the next minute I’m groggily looking at the child standing in front of me saying; “It’s 3 a.m. – get you’re own drink.” Between raising kids, figuring out our-not-so-assured financial futures and surfing medical sites to figure out...
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A little free advice…about free services
I’ve got one rule about free services: Don’t kill your business with kindness. Having a creative job is cool and odds are you know people who: (a) think it’s really great you’re doing what you love; (b) don’t know how you make a living at it, and, (c) wonder if you’d be willing to donate your services to this great project they’re working on. Tis true. Creative...
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Living on the Edge
On April 30th, I was the opening speaker at Tech SouthEast‘s Innovative NB conference at the Hotel Beausejour in Moncton. I was asked to share some of the stories I wrote about in Saint John’s Smart 7 application, the third New Brunswick city to earn the designation. Fredericton and Moncton were named to the Top 7 in 2009. Below is the story I told. ______ There’s an old tourism slogan that...
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The 3 things you need to know about yourself… to land a great client
I’ve covered a lot of elections and over the years I’ve heard all sorts of strategies for how to win. There is one simple truth that has stuck with me. It was offered up by one of New Brunswick’s card-carrying characters – political operative, cabinet minister and now senator, Percy Mockler. He likes to say that the most important part of a campaign is what happens at a voter’s...
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The Artsy Entrepreneur: On becoming a number & other stuff
Dry cough, wet rain. Ugh. Home office couch beckons me. Monday blogs are hard. It’s the last week of April, which means its time to haul out my envelope marked ‘Q1 receipts’ and put together my HST return for the Canada Revenue Agency (which I still call Revenue Canada). A morning of paperwork lies ahead of me – the business side of being an artsy entrepreneur. In the beginning I...
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The 3 things you need to know about yourself… to land a great client
I’ve covered a lot of elections and over the years I’ve heard all sorts of strategies for how to win. There is one simple truth that has stuck with me. It was offered up by one of New Brunswick’s card-carrying characters – political operative, cabinet minister and now senator, Percy Mockler. He likes to say that the most important part of a campaign is what happens at a voter’s door: you have to knock on it and ask for their support.
Running a business is a lot like that too. You’ve got to ask people to hire you.
For a lot of us, self-promotion makes us uncomfortable, particularly if our work involves creating something that carries a piece of ourselves within it. As you’ll often hear an artist say in an interview; ‘I like to let the work speak for itself’. Ask me about the topic of one of my stories and I’ll happily blather on about what I did to get the story, the stuff I left out and my opinion of the situation. But ask me what I think of my work? I’ll stammer, look at the floor and mumble something about being so fortunate to make a living doing what I love.
This is no way to land a big contract.
The freelance marketplace is competitive. To get the best clients, you’re going to need to set yourself apart from others in your field. To do that, you’ll need to provide a very specific definition of what you do and why.
Ask yourself these three questions:
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