Want To Vs. Have To

The famous fashion designer doesn’t have to pay a fair wage to the workers in the Indian village, who hand bead the $600 dresses she sells to affluent Melburnians. Her customers would never know—and yet she does. The busy graphic designer doesn’t have to make suggested improvements to the slide deck he’s working on. His…

Read More

Demographics Vs. Worldviews

It’s impossible now to presume everything about your customers just because you know their age, sex and postcode. In a digital world, that enables ever increasing possibilities and choices, people are no longer constrained by location, age, or gender, and they are not so easy to put into a box either. It’s far more helpful…

Read More

It’s Business. It’s Personal

When did business stop being personal and become an activity we engage in? It wasn’t always this way. In 12000 BC when Obsidian was used for trades, business was about making fair exchanges of value based on trust. When pioneer farmers traded labour with their neighbours to make harvesting more efficient, business was about working…

Read More

Valuing Creatives. When Love Is Not Enough

No business owner would expect to rent an office for half the going rate, or buy a delivery van for far less than it was worth. Not even a fledgling, bootstrapping, startup founding, entrepreneur. And yet every day designers, creatives and freelancers are asked to drop their rates, do a deal, or consider some special…

Read More

How Can I Make Money From My Idea?

Asking this question is a terrible place to start. I don’t know of many great ideas where the first question the creator asked was, “How can I make money from this idea?” You’ve got to care about the idea and understand the problem you are setting out to solve first. Not in a naive ,…

Read More

Don’t Follow The Money, Follow Your Heart

I know how to guarantee a spike in ‘traffic’ to my blog. All I have to do is write a post about how to build a six figure online business, or how to drive traffic to your blog! Of course you know this already, you see from your website analytics which posts are magnetic. The…

Read More