Find Direction and Advice

Becky and Jesse Morquecho, business coaches and owners of Idealust, discuss effective and ineffective trends in the creative industry, how to figure out the next step for your business, and how to know what’s actually moving the needle forward.

Shanna Skidmore, a business strategist, financial coach, and founder of the Blueprint Model, shares how a background in finance, psychology, and art led her to coaching creative entrepreneurs on business principles that help build profitable and sustainable businesses. In today’s interview, she shares about the common pitfalls she sees when it comes to managing finances, tips for overcoming those mistakes, and how to price your services.

A few years ago in our wedding photography business we realized the importance styling details plays on a wedding day. The ability to style and shoot details beautifully not only helps us serve our couples better by capturing their carefully chosen details in a beautiful way, it helps us get more weddings featured in publications such as Style Me Pretty and Martha Stewart. Not only do our couples love being featured, those features send traffic our way that can turn into more clients.

Kat Schmoyer, founder of Dear Sweetheart Events and the Creative at Heart Conference, shares how she started her business, what life looks like now working alongside her husband, and how she diversified her offerings to increase her bottom line. Listen to, watch, or read the interview here.

Makayla Jade of The Harris Company shares how selling products and prints transformed her business, and she shares some tips for getting started with in-person sales in your own business. Listen to, watch, or read the interview here.

Make more money on each client project by optimizing customer value. When we think about growing our business, we often think about booking more clients. But that’s not the only way to grow your business.

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the Facebook News Feed was going to start looking quite a bit different in 2018. He recently elaborated, saying we should expect to “see less public content, including news, video, and posts from brands.” That doesn’t sound very good for businesses on Facebook.

There are few things more discouraging than responding to an inquiry and never hearing back. Whether you’re finding that this where you lose a bunch of leads in the booking process or if you’re just looking to up your email game, this post is for you.

In the years that we made it a point to find coaching, we were able to make the biggest jumps in our business. This included booking more work while raising our prices, building an audience, and getting to a point in our businesses where we both could go full time.

Everyone wants a unique website that feels like them, attracts ideal clients, and illustrates an amazing brand. But figuring out what to put on your website? That’s where the overwhelm starts. It’s okay to be inspired by someone else’s brand or website, but there is a fine line between imitation and inspiration.

I think fiction books tend to get a bad rap in the business world. Most the books I see on reading lists and most of the books I see friend sharing about on social media are non-fiction. I love reading and I’ve read several life-changing non-fiction books already this year, but as creative business owners, we sometimes tend to underestimate the power of a good fiction book.

When Krista started our photography and design business shortly after we graduated from college, I didn’t think it was something I would also do full time. But I admired her grit in starting the business. As anyone who has ever started a business knows, there are a lot of false-starts and obstacles along the way. […]

For those of you who follow Krista or me on Instagram, you may have noticed that I started the new year with a 3 day fast. As someone whose known to suffer from the occasional bout of hangriness, Krista wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea.

The New Year means new reading lists. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of great books out there to help us get 2017 off to a great start. These are a few of the books that Krista and I plan on reading as we usher in the New Year.