Create a vision board?! No, thank you! Truth is, I dislike making vision boards and making new years resolutions. I always have. From an early age, I vividly remember sitting at the round communal art table with my peers who were excitedly drawing out their deepest wishes for the new year, expecting that I’d be excited too. I wasn’t. I usually loved expressing myself. I enjoyed reading in front of […]
Funding ain’t easy. Technology makes it seem easy, especially with platforms like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and GoFundMe holding the promise of access to new fans with open wallets. Of course, it takes a tipping point of personal contacts funding a project to a certain dollar amount in order to access your yet-unknown audience. Which means outreach to friends, family, and colleagues is a necessary part of the phenomenon that is crowdfunding. […]
When I was raising money for Broadway shows, I was approached by a LOT of creatives who would ask me to consider raising money for their project. In many of these instances, these individuals would spend most of the meeting explaining to me how their show was a “surefire” hit and how if they just had more support they’d break through. Now in some cases, they really did have something […]
Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: you’re working to get your idea out there, so you sit down to write a marketing plan… because that is what responsible business owners are supposed to do. But what starts out as a valiant effort to lay out your marketing calendar for the next twelve months devolves into a flurry of cutting and pasting between quarters – an over-thought and overwrought undertaking […]
If you’re running a business, you are probably doing a lot of extra work you don’t actually need to do. Every business is full of waste. Even one-person businesses and side hustles suffer under the weight of an overabundance of ideas, messages, strategies, and tactics. If you’re lean and mean and moving fast, you can’t afford to be weighed down. There’s no way you can surge past your competitors while holding onto the […]
I peed my pants (no, really… literally… and not just a tiny trickle) the first time I ran a half marathon. The warm liquid gushed out suddenly during my final mile because I wanted so badly to finish it in under two hours that I had pushed my body into a desperate condition. I’ve shed frustrated tears trying like hell to do a stupidly simple move in dance class when my […]
“You just need to tune everyone else out and focus on what you know to be right,” my husband recently told me as I complained, again, about some writing that had been keeping me up at night. That sounded like sage advice; after all, how many times do we hear variations on this like “Follow your heart,” “Find your truth,” “You know yourself best,” etc? So off I went, tapping away at […]
You don’t get to be the phoenix rising without the burn. It just doesn’t work that way. For every successful business owner, entrepreneur, or founder, there’s a story of walking through the fire. Transformation, both personal and professional, comes at a cost. The price you pay is presence and perseverance on the journey. Joseph Campbell was an author and scholar renowned for his work in comparative mythology. He identified universal […]
In Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky speaks at length about the nature of power. He discusses various instances of creating leverage, thus creating power. One of his central tenets is the idea of not waiting for permission. In the struggle of radicals of any stripe, it’s almost a given that the establishment will be resistant to surrendering any of their power. Those who want to change the world and those […]
How are you? When is the last time you responded with anything other than “busy?” For all the conveniences our modern world has given us, it has also raised our expectations, forcing entrepreneurs to perform like corporations to remain competitive. Marketing a small business once consisted of offering a good product or service at a fair price and relying on the reputation you built. Our clients were once our neighbors; […]