Business Black Holes

Business black holes, the cycles between them and how to jump your business into greater growth. The predictable problem of business black holes Some 20 years ago I interviewed around 700 small businesses to discover whether the growth and stall trends I’d previously been analysing in big business still occurred in the small business market. They certainly … Read more

8 simple steps you can take to get the confidence to go freelance

Lots of people dream about going freelance, but getting the confidence to go freelance is something else. Starting your own freelance business can feel like a big risk. There are lots of unknowns and you’re going to have to rely on your own knowledge, experience, judgement and plain hard graft to make your freelance business … Read more

How do you nurture your freelance network? 11 effective ways to grow your freelancer contacts

Ah, networking. Otherwise known as "talking to other people about what they do" or "collecting as many business cards / twitter / LinkedIn connections as physically possible". Have you ever read an article about networking that wasn’t full of common sense points and cliché? They mostly describe networking experiences as working something like this: In … Read more

Less freelancing, more consulting: how adding value leads to added income

I’ve been thinking recently that a lot of the success that I’ve had as a freelancer to date is that I’ve position myself as more of a consultant and less of a freelancer. Freelance work tends to be transactional, where you’re delivering directly on a service that a client had asked you to provide – … Read more

The importance of paper-based communication in a digital world

Being a digital marketing consultant, it can often be quite easy to forget that the world was once dominated by paper-based communication – and in many places, it still is. As our global society moves increasingly to digital-first formats, the art of writing letters, sending postcards or simply sending a thank you note is becoming … Read more