Creative Business Essentials: 9 Tips for Finding Success as a Freelancer | DKNG Studios | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Creative Business Essentials: 9 Tips for Finding Success as a Freelancer

teacher avatar DKNG Studios, Design + Illustration

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Introduction

      1:43

    • 2.

      Let's Get Started!

      1:23

    • 3.

      Lean Into Becoming a Specialist

      7:11

    • 4.

      Refining Your Portfolio

      5:25

    • 5.

      Provide Insight Into Your Process

      6:36

    • 6.

      Our Keys to Marketing

      6:49

    • 7.

      Landing & Nurturing Clients

      12:21

    • 8.

      What Should I Charge?

      7:22

    • 9.

      Diversifying Your Income

      7:08

    • 10.

      Become Your Own Client: Make Your Own Products

      9:38

    • 11.

      Being Your Own Boss: Time & Accountability

      7:23

    • 12.

      Class Conclusion

      1:06

    • 13.

      Want to Learn More?

      0:37

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

687

Students

2

Projects

About This Class

Want to learn how to find success as a creative freelancer?

A question we get asked most often is what advice we have for creatives who are just starting their freelance careers, or looking to make the jump from a day job. This class will cover our top tips for how designers, illustrators, and creatives of all types can get started as a freelancer or start their own creative practice.

Join DKNG, the design and illustration duo of Dan Kuhlken and Nathan Goldman for a 9-lesson class revealing the most helpful steps that have helped them kickoff their own creative career over 15 years ago. 

In this class you’ll get a peek behind the curtain to see how DKNG has built their business, sharing real world examples from their own company and portfolio to demonstrate how they've put these lessons to use in their own work. You'll learn everything from how to:

  • Find your niche and refine your portfolio
  • Land new clients & nurture existing ones
  • Price your work and services
  • Diversify your income and make your own products

And much more!

This class is designed for any creatives curious about striking out on their own, or those that have already started their creative freelance career and want ways to level up an existing creative practice. The only things you'll need to get started are a sketch pad or tablet for planning/sketching ideas, and an existing portfolio or business idea to review. 

The tips covered in this class can be applied to a wide variety of creative careers. Because each lesson deals with a standalone topic, you can easily come back to revisit specific techniques as you find the need for them in your own business. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

DKNG Studios

Design + Illustration

Top Teacher

DKNG is a full service graphic design studio with a focus on the entertainment industry. We work directly with bands, venues, promoters and a range of independent and corporate clients.

Dan Kuhlken and Nathan Goldman were both drawn to music and design at an early age, but didnt combine their talents until 2005 when the duo founded a design studio with the goal of fusing these two creative avenues. The pair has found a niche in linking a personal and unique aesthetic to the worlds most talented musical artists.

With dynamically different skill sets ranging from fine art to film production, Dan and Nathan bring diverse talents and artistic perspectives to every project. DKNG strives to provide their clients with the image and recognition that they deserve. Their past client... See full profile

Level: All Levels

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Class Introduction: Are you a creative looking to start your own business or side hustle? Want to quit your day job and break out on your own, but not quite sure where to start? Well, neither did we when faced with the same decision about 15 years ago. But after working together to build a thriving business, we've learned what it takes to find success at creative freelancers. In this class, we'll be sharing our top tips for starting your own creative business. F DKNG. We're a design in illustration studio based in California. I'm Dan Culkin, this Nathan Goldman. And we've had the amazing opportunity to work with some pretty incredible clients, like packaging design for Hines and Cliff Bar, for working with bands and festivals like Dave Matthews Band and ***** o. The movie studios like Disney and Marble. The course of our career, we've learned new ways of nurturing our business, providing security for ourselves through multiple streams of income, and keeping ourselves organized and accountable as just a two person team wearing lots of different hats. In this class, we'll cover the nine most helpful tips we've learned to help kick off our own creative career, including becoming a specialist, refining our portfolio to attract the work that we want, using our process as a marketing tool, making our own products, landing new clients, keeping existing ones and so much more. There's one thing we hope you take away from this class. It's a clear sense of how to take the next steps in getting your creative practice off the ground or elevating the freelance career that you already have in motion. So if you're curious about striking out on your own or you've already started your freelance career and want to level up your creative practice, this class will cover our most helpful advice to keeping the business side of your creative deter healthy. We hope to see you in class. 2. Let's Get Started!: In this class, we'll be sharing our top nine tips for getting your creative business started and thriving, whether you're just starting out or looking to level up your existing practice. The nine lessons we'll be covering are leaning into becoming a specialist, refining your portfolio, provide insight into your process, our keys to marketing, finding and nurturing clients, what to charge for your work, diversifying income streams, becoming your own client by making your own products, and keeping yourself accountable as your own boss. For this class, it might be helpful to have a sketch pad or a tablet for dotting down ideas or notes. And if you have it a portfolio or business idea to review. We'll be sharing examples from our own business and portfolio to demonstrate how we've put these lessons to use in our own work. For your project for this class, we encourage you to try some or all of these tips and share your progress, experiences, and outcomes in the project gallery. You can easily get started with the lessons that include downloadable worksheets which you can find in the projects and resources section. If you have your own tips that have worked for you in your own creative career, please feel free to share those as well. We hope that the project gallery and discussion boards can be an active exchange of information where we can learn from you as well. With that, let's jump in and get started. 3. Lean Into Becoming a Specialist: If you're right out of college or you're just starting your career, you might consider yourself kind of a jack of all trades because that's what school basically taught you to do. Dabble in a bunch of different types of projects, figure out what you like, what you don't like, kind of prove yourself in different areas. But what we've found is that one, you may not love doing every different type of project, and you may be better at some than others. And that actually works out great in the real world. What we've found is Oftentimes, as specialists, we could be more in demand and charge a higher rate than a similar type of designer or creative who might just dabble in lots of different things, but doesn't really have a clear specialty. I kind of learned this mentality in college, creating my portfolio. I applied to the Graphic Design program at Long Beach and realized very quickly that I had specialties. Like, I was really into illustration. Not so much into classic graphic design, but the combination of both of those really excelled in gig poster work, specifically just like posters. But I wasn't as good at making, like, you know, logos or editorial design or just kind of the random stuff that you're asked to do in college. So as I was applying to the program, I realized that my portfolio was all over the place, but a couple teachers pointed out that I had, you know, better work than others in certain categories, and it was the gig posters, no surprise there. So they actually recommended that, you know, maybe college isn't for me anymore, and I should kind of just lean into this small niche. I actually applied to the program and didn't get in, but at the time, I was working with Nathan and making gig posters for the Troubadour, and I was really enjoying that work. And so I kind of just decided at that point, like, I'm kind of done with college. I got my degree that I needed, and I'm going to just lean into making gig posters as a freelancer. Yeah, so it was really our passion for the intersection of music and art that led us to seek out poster jobs, and getting to work for the Troubador was one of those first examples where we were able to start building our portfolio in the thing that we cared about. At the time, it was kind of just a hobby, and we submitted our first three poster designs to the Troubadour, this historic venue in LA. And it was a way for us to kind of build our portfolio for what was really a hobby at the time, but slowly was starting to become our job. And I think our passion for the work is what helped us excel at it. And over the years, we were able to make hundreds of posters for the Troubadour, start to make connections with other clients. So even though we weren't offering everything that we thought we might based on college courses, we were really starting to make a little bit of a name for ourselves in this one particular specialty. What happened throughout this process, too, as you can see, we also dabble in a bunch of different styles. So even though we had a niche, and we were specifically only making gig posters in our portfolio. We really trained ourselves to work in all types of ways, even though it was a very narrow avenue. Another thing that we actually ended up doing in our career was exploring other things outside of gig posters, and at the time, website design was a really popular thing. So we dabbled in it with a bunch of clients, and we realized that, you know, we were good at it, but we didn't necessarily like doing it, nor did the work that we create was, like, super impressive. Yeah. And so we decided even though websites felt like a no brainer, you have to offer that as a designer, especially back in the early 2000s, when making your own website wasn't really a thing. We found that we were becoming more website maintainers and not designers, and we had so much enjoyed the closure of wrapping up a gig poster, whereas these website projects just kind of went on forever. So we decided to eventually just remove websites from what we advertise that we do and started to narrow down our specialties more and more. And I think we're much happier today and more successful because we're not just trying to offer everything to everyone. We're just trying to offer the things that we're good at and that we want to pursue. So I think the main thing to kind of remember here is that there's kind of a ven diagram of things that you're good at or things that you enjoy. And the merger of those things is really a good sign of what your niche, your genre that you should be choosing to be a specialist in. And for us, you know, gig posters was that. I kind of realized this when I was in high school with, like, let's say, being on the track team. I was really good at running, and I was really good at going fast. But I truly hated it. It was exhausting. So I could have chosen to pursue that and, like, go into college and being a track, you know, runner. But I decided not to because even though it was something that I was good at, I knew that I wouldn't be happy doing it. So I leaned into other things. Obviously, I'm glad I chose art, but that's kind of a good example of, like, you know, choosing your specific things very carefully. It's not necessarily something you're good at or something you enjoy. You have to try to find the merger of both those things combined. Professionally, one of the things for us that we found that was the merger of those worlds is working in icon design. In gig posters, we had done so much detailed work. It was kind of a nice breather to almost do the opposite of that and start to think about, instead of highly detailed illustration, how can we distill elements down to their most basic? So icon design was something we got really interested in. And it actually today is one of our main calling cards for kind of bigger corporate clients doing brand illustration for them, which is often in the form of doing these big sets of icons. So, again, something that kind of started as a passion, something we like doing for ourselves, but then the client started recognizing, and now it's one of our main specialties. So now it's your turn. We encourage you to the VN diagram worksheet for this lesson where you can take 5 minutes to brainstorm about your own skill set, look at the things that you like doing the most, and look at the things that you're best at, and hopefully there's some intersections there, and you can start to narrow down a specialty for yourself. 4. Refining Your Portfolio: Along with the Jack of all trades mentality that a lot of us leave school with, our portfolio can sometimes reflect a similar quality of outdated work, work that we're not interested in doing anymore, maybe just one of everything. And after reviewing hundreds of portfolios in our career, we've found specific ways that have helped us refine our own portfolio. And these are some of our top tips. Have our portfolio open here, and you can see that the landing page for our work section is basically our featured work. And this is a way of just displaying the best of the best, a very small amount of work that's been chosen. Our mentality is to keep things really clean, really simple, and show just enough variety, but also show our current standards in terms of our capabilities. So nothing too old pretty up to date. And if we want to get more specific with it, if there's a client looking for more specific work, our work section has a drop down menu where you can see specifically posters or art prints, but the landing page itself is kind of like a sampler of everything that we can do. We try to limit it as much as we can because this is not meant to be an archive of everything we've done. I use the analogy of a photographer who might have taken thousands and thousands of photos throughout a career, but maybe the web portfolio only has ten photos. And the benefit of that is that anyone who visits that site will assume that all of their work is up to that standard. So we really encourage you to limit your portfolio to the fewest number of examples thing to keep in mind is that it's not about just displaying your work, but how it can be displayed in the real world. This is an example of the work we did for Cliff Bar. We made all these illustrations for their packaging. So we might as well show digital mock ups of how that packaging actually looks in the real world. So here's an example of that. And it also goes into, you know, not only showing the actual full art, but showing how it looks like on the box. So think about your work in terms of all the different ways that can be displayed. Feature the work itself as the most important, but show real life usage of it in the real world. Of course, if you have access to photos or videos of the actual thing that was produced, that's great, but it's not always possible. So oftentimes we use resources like yellow images.com or different online sources for photoshop mockups. Illustrator has some built in mock up features now. So there's various ways that instead of just showing the flat art that you created, how to give it more life and show what the final deliverable actually looked like. And another thing to keep in mind when it comes to kind of taking deeper dives on your work. We do find that it's important to show the process behind it. On your main portfolio page, you may show kind of the featured projects, but you can actually make it linkable to another part of your website where you can show case studies of how the project was made. You can show the sketches, the mood boards, you know, stuff like this, the frankid w right art print that we created, not only are we showing the actual art itself, but we're showing a bit of a behind the scenes. So We've made process videos for stuff like this. We're showing the inspirational photography that we used to create the work, the original sketch. And we find that when you show the process behind something, you're also showing the value behind it. So you're showing the work that was put into it. And it's not necessarily you want to have something like this right on the front page of your portfolio, but try to make space for it in your website where people can take a deeper dive and understand the work that you put into your work. If the portfolio piece that you want to share doesn't exist yet, then create it. There's no rules that you can't create something for yourself, even if you haven't had the opportunity to create it for a client yet. We have some friends that really wanted to get into design for the beer industry. So they made up their own brewery to make a logo for, design the packaging, show an example of what the tap room might look like. By creating that project in their portfolio, it led to real work for actual paying beer clients. So, by all means, feel free to carve out some time to make the projects for your portfolio that you want to share. Think of the stuff that you want to do again and make that your portfolio. Don't put stuff in your portfolio that you didn't like doing, then kind of get pigeonholed into the fact that you might get hired to do it again. Now it's your turn to evaluate your own portfolio, so you can use the worksheet for this lesson to walk through your own portfolio. Use that checklist to determine how you can refine, how you can remove extraneous older work, and just overall make a better impression. And if you get stuck, feel free to ask your fellow classmates for their opinion. Often, we find it's really helpful to take a step back, have someone else give their impression, and that can be really helpful to make a really refined and effective Portfolio. 5. Provide Insight Into Your Process: A lot of our success has come from not only sharing the final product of our work, but also our process along the way, both as a teaching tool for fellow designers, but also as a way of showing our process to potential clients. Our first process videos were really just a passion project. I had worked in film and TV, and recording our process and making videos was just kind of a way to keep afoot in filmmaking. But what we found is that some of our first process videos that we made for posters we designed for the Black keys and for explosions in the sky, that these videos started going kind of viral and became a calling card for us and a way for us to advertise ourselves on social media. So it was kind of a happy accident that something we were passionate about doing also became one of our best marketing tools. Yeah, we use process videos all the time in social media, and we use it for our art prints, or gig posters. Our process videos are essentially time lapse documentation of our entire process, both illustrating and designing, usually a poster. We'll oftentimes start with, like, the sketch, and all the way through, we'll show the vector illustration and all the way down to sometimes even the separations for screen printing. The way we do this is we use apps that create screenshots of our screen and compile it into a sped up video of the process. We often find that that's a bit helpful to compile into a process video in the end. The other option is to do more of a real time recording using Quick Time. The only problem with quick time is that it will take real time recordings of your screen, and that can make really large files. So depending on the length of the video you're plan I'm making, that could be a little bit more cumbersome that way. And another thing that we kind of keep in mind with process videos. And this might be tough if you've never done before, is that it does kind of feel like Big Brother is watching you because you literally are recording your screen as you create something. And that can oftentimes make you feel a bit watched and a little bit harder to be creative when there's documentation of what you're doing in real time. So, we find that it's helpful just to kind of, like, forget about it and kind of let it go in the background and, you know, look at that footage much later. And let yourself be free in the creative process. But you'll be happy in the end that you have that documentation. And our process videos aren't just that raw screen recording. We do take the time to edit. We use final cut pro, but whatever software you're comfortable with. And we do edit for time. So typically, we pick a song in most cases, we're making process videos for gig posters, so we'll pick a song from that artist, kind of cut out any unnecessary footage, things that are really kind of boring or monotonous. We try to highlight the parts of our process that might be more interesting for people to see and cut together a video that's usually in the five minute range. We show these process videos on our YouTube page or website. You can see here, this is our homepage to our YouTube channel, and we have both process videos and another thing that we call Deep Dive videos, where the Deep Dive videos are kind of like showing our entire process video, but showing it in such a way that we can kind of do a play by play of how what's happening in the actual process video. So Nathan and I will sit down, watch our own process video, and kind of answer questions that people might have. We often find that, you know, after posting these four minute process videos, a lot of people are like, Oh, I want this to be slowed down. Can you tell me what you just did there? And these deep dives are kind of a way to get into that? Process videos aren't the only way to share a peek behind the curtain of how you work. We also use case studies as a way to show our process, and again, to give potential clients a look at how working with us might go, and also just a way to show off the work in a more in depth way. So this is an example of a project we did for the US Open. We got to design the key art for the event in 2022. And this kind of takes a look at both the final illustration we made, but also trying to show it in specific real world settings of how it was used. In this case, the photo of the program here is actually a digital mock up that we compiled from a stock image and placing the art. So when we have the opportunity to use digital assets like that, it can be really helpful to kind of put your best foot forward, even if you don't have a photo from the event. Luckily, for us, for this particular event, we actually did have photography from the event. We were invited to go, and we took video, we took photos. We actually even used photos from other photographers. So it was a way for us to really feature the artwork in lots of different ways. So if you do have the opportunity to have your work displayed in real life, and you can take photography of it, we find that's a huge advantage when it comes to showing the process behind it and case studies, for example. So whether you choose a process, video, sharing your sketches, photographing your work, or otherwise documenting your specific process, we find that showing a bit of how you work can help garner more attention from potential clients, make them feel good about working with you because they understand a bit more about how you work and just create an overall impression and value to the work that you do. So now it's your turn. You can use the case study checklist that is downloadable as part of this lesson and take a look at how you might be able to best share your process for the type of work that you do. And it will also be helpful to keep this worksheet as a reference so that when you start on a new project, you can start to keep in mind the types of resources that you want to hang onto as you go. So hopefully by the time you complete that project, you'll have a bunch of assets that you can use to compile a case study or other ways of showing you. 6. Our Keys to Marketing: In our line of work, it can be difficult to use traditional marketing channels like advertising to bring in new business. But congratulations, if you're already following any of the previous steps in this class, you're technically already marketing yourself. That's because we've found that just organically sharing our process and sharing our work has been the best way for us to bring in new business and get our work in front of potential clients and potential customers. We mainly prioritize channels that we own. So when I say that, I mean, having a website with a portfolio in your work, and also a newsletter is really, really important. There's also traditional social media marketing, but oftentimes we find that that's not going to guarantee to go to the audience that you have in mind, or oftentimes it's inconsistent. Another thing to keep in mind is when think about marketing yourself, too, it's not just about marketing your work. We're kind of getting better at that. We've spent a lot of our years kind of showing the final product of what we created, but kind of forget that we're human beings behind the process. So it's also important to market yourself as an individual, as an artist, whoever you are, because you are intrinsically linked to your work. Yeah, and when you're thinking about that, it's important to think about your brand voice and what's going to be authentic to you. Is it a humorous voice? Is it more serious? Your audience will be able to tell if you're playing a character or not. So it's important to play to your strengths. And, for example, if you feel more comfortable talking about highly technical information rather than the abstract, then focus on what feels good to you. And when it comes to showing your work and advertising yourself, we think of our website as kind of the hub for all of it. Social media, the newsletter that we have all leads to our website. And our website holds everything you need to know about us. It not only shows our work, but also shows a bit of an introduction and information about ourselves as individuals, who we've worked for, and some more more recent projects, any events that we're going to be part of. So it's really important that our website has everything that's there that's needed for people to understand who we are as a company. When it comes to the newsletter portion of our marketing, we find that this is super helpful because it literally will put information in people's in boxes, and they immediately will have access to information that we're willing to share with people. When it comes to social media, it's a little bit more of a different story. You know, Sometimes you might be kind of shouting into the darkness and you're not even sure if anyone's seeing what you're posting. Um, we're constantly dealing with different algorithms. Every social media platform slightly different. But with a newsletter, you actually have direct control over your audience, and even, like, a designated sign up page that has its own URL. So this is an example of our sign up page that we have on our website, and we'll use this as, like, a linkable content that we'll share elsewhere. And an example of our newsletter is something like this. We try to advertise ourselves, I think the term we use is pleasantly infrequent. So, we oftentimes will try to show just enough information and not do it so much so often that it starts to feel like spam. And it's kind of treating your audience as if, you know, you are your audience and how you would like to be treated. So this is an example of you know, three topics in our newsletter. We're going to be talking about our one on one sessions with Skillshare, for example, a new product. This is a digital download that we created. And oftentimes we'll talk about, like an event that we're going to be a part of. So this would be when we visited South by Southwest for Flat stock. That all being said, we do still rely on social media for part of our marketing, albeit without having as much control, but we still find that it's important. So, in addition to networks like Instagram and Dribble. We also have been using YouTube quite a bit lately, and that's been great because we're able to share a bit more about who we are and our personalities show some longer format content, like deep dives into our work, tutorials. And there's also the opportunity with YouTube to monetize your channel once you have a certain amount of minutes watched and viewers. So there's a few opportunities there. And as useful as online marketing can be. Also remember that God ld fashion in person networking is super useful as well. Some of our strongest connections with our friends, our colleagues, our clients have been through in person networking. So going to events where like minded people are gathering is hugely beneficial. There's design conferences, there's craft fairs, there's workshops. And we often find that those connections that you make with people in real time are going to be the longest lasting and the most beneficial. Another way to advertise yourself at events like this is to bring business cards, or get more creative with it, bring giveaways or something that you've actually created yourself to handle somebody to tell them, this is who I am. This is what I can do, this is what I can make, and they'll remember that a lot more than just fighting you online. As far as what hasn't worked for us, more traditional forms of paid advertising, like paying for social media ads or paying to be part of directories of illustrators or designers. We've tended to stay away from that, and we found that the more organic forms of just sharing our story online have brought us much more attention. And it's kind of win win because we don't have to pay for those things. So that's what we would recommend You don't need to pay for commercials or paid advertising in order to effectively market yourself. A lot of it can come from just organically sharing your process and authentically sharing who you are. Do what you can to focus on the ownable parts of marketing, like a website, an e mail newsletter or a blog. And don't be afraid to test out the latest social media as well by kind of using a combination of all those things is where we've found sus. 7. Landing & Nurturing Clients: One of the toughest and most elusive parts of being a freelancer is knowing where your next project might come from. Finding new clients can be a challenge and often keeping them can be a smoother and more reliable path to future work than starting the process all over again, trying to find a new client. In this lesson, we're going to talk about some of the best tips we've learned from working with new clients and also continuing to work with the ones that we love. And we've mentioned this before, but one way to acquire new clients is just putting yourself out there at live events. One circumstance that worked out for us was going to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. We were exhibiting our gig poster work at Flattock, and, you know, we're surrounding ourselves with like minded people, but we're also, putting ourselves out there to the general public. And during this time of year, There's a lot of music related people out there walking the halls. And we noticed somebody that was looking at our work and he said, you know, I really like your posters. Are you available for hire? And, you know, we were kind of just like thinking, Yes, who are you? And he basically said, I'm a manager of a band. Don't worry about it, but he eventually, you know, disclosed that he's the manager of the Black keys. And Nathan and I were like, blown away when we heard this, because obviously, you know, we're big fans of the Black keys in their music. But, you know, we grew up playing music ourselves, and Nathan's a drummer. I'm a guitar player, and it's, like, very serendipitous that this happened. And what ended up happening is that, you know, we ended up working for this person, this manager, for Black H Keys poster, and we were thrilled. We got to make our first Black Keys poster, which actually ended up leading to our next Black Keys poster. So it all starts off from putting yourself out there and doing things in person. And in addition to in person, just putting good work out into the world, in general can be the best way to land new work. I'd say 90% of our clients that come to us are referencing something that we've already created and asking us to put a unique spin on it for them. Colt calling can be another way of reaching out to clients, it can have a low success rate. So in order to set yourself up for as much success as possible, trying to not just send generic template e mails or random phone calls, try to customize as much as you can. We receive a lot of e mails that are clearly not meant for just us. They're kind of going out to bunch of people. So as much as you can research your client, put some specific information about how you could be helpful to them specifically can be a huge help. And, of course, if it can go beyond an e mail and there's an opportunity to have a meeting, a Zoom call, get on the phone with someone, it can go a lot further to building a relationship as opposed to an e mail that would be easy for them to ignore. And another way to gain new clients or even cultivate your client relationships that you already have is sending out gifts, specifically gifts that you create. And when I say gifts, I know immediately think about the holidays. So Nathan and I kind of came up with this plan of creating merchandise that is self initiated by us, and we created a series of greeting cards that showcases our design and illustration skills. They showcase what we can do in the printing world. So these greeting cards were letter pressed. And they used foil. So when you see them in person, they're a a little extra special. But when a client receives this, they also have our information on hand, and they're kind of reminded of our work. And they can always refer back to our website or if a project's about to come up, they might think of us. Another thing we did was recreated teselation patterns. If you've taken any of your previous skill share classes, you might know that teslation patterns are things that we got into at some point, and we thought it'd be really fun to make wrapping paper using these actual patterns. And again, like, this is one of those holiday gifts that we can send out to clients or even potential new clients. And it kind of works two ways. They receive it, but then at some point, they're going to wrap gifts with this wrapping paper and hand it to someone that they're giving a gift to. And that's another set of eyes that get to see the work. And we kind of hope that, you know, naturally, someone might say, who made these, and they might find our work that way as well. So, we find that, you know, making work that can be given as gifts goes a long way. We also try not to underrestimate the importance of relationships and building relationships with all people in our world in addition to existing clients because you never know where your next client might come from. We're getting to the point in our career where there are students that we've taught who are now in positions where there's the opportunity for them to hire us. And that was actually the case when we got to work with in and out and design their annual T shirt. It was kind of a dream job for us. And that came because a talented graphic designer who worked there had taken some of our classes and knew about our work and was able to pass our portfolio along to the CEO and eventually land us the job of working with them. So it's important to make connections as random as they may seem on day one, they may come around in the future to be a potential client. Another concept that we use a lot when trying to acquire new clients or just new work in general is the idea of faking it till you make it. We've been in circumstances where a client will ask, Have you done this kind of work before? And the short and quick and honest answer is sometimes no. We've never done that before. But that doesn't really lead to doing the work for this client. So we've oftentimes usually just answered, we'd love to and figure out a way to make it work. Example of this was when we were asked by Almanac if we can make a mural. And at this point, we've never really made a mural before, but we knew kind of the ins and outs of how it can be done. And we've made work for them using this isommetric style, and that was the request that they wanted for this mural. So, we originally made this can series and it had this isommetric style. So we used our skill set that we had and made something even larger. One of the largest, like illustrations we've ever done, was a 40 foot wall, but it was all done vector based. It was in our wheel house. And by asking people around and how murals are made, we found that there's a vinyl distributor that can make this actually stick onto a wall and turn it into a mural. And ended up being something in the real world. So it all started off with previous work, saying yes to an opportunity that might have felt new or scary and making something completely new out of the whole situation. Another tip for landing new clients is to know your value and charge accordingly, it may be tempting to kind of low ball a price just to make sure that they can't say no to such a great offer. But the truth of the matter is that clients might be kind of scared off if your price seems too good to be true. So what we try to do is just be aggressive with our pricing, but try to charge accordingly and hope that the client sees the value in our work. Often easier than landing these new clients can be to simply nurture the relationships you have and hope to continue working with those clients. So there's a few ways that we do that. Dan mentioned the gift ideas that we've done. So every year, we try to send something from our work, a portfolio piece, a product that we've made as a gift to our ongoing clients to just kind of keep us fresh in their mind. We also try to just keep in touch with them. These people become our friends, we enjoy working with them. So if we keep an eye on what's going on in their world, if we can comment on it or find a reason to reach out to them, we try to just keep that conversation going. Then lastly, like we talked about with having something new, we can offer like a mural. Once we do something new for one client, we can then go to other clients and say, Hey, check out what's in our portfolio. We have some new offerings. Maybe you could benefit from some of these new things that we're doing. So there's lots of ways to keep in touch with those clients and keep that conversation fresh and ongoing. So hopefully more repeat work comes from that. Oftentimes, too, when it comes to acquiring new work, it's helpful to kind of let go of expectations. I think if you focus on I'm going to be successful, and that's your main prerogative, then you'll often find that it's much more hard to get to that point. But if you focus on the right things, which is things you're interested in, things that you enjoy, your passions, then organically, that could lead to more work. An example of this was when we submitted art for a design contest for the Flight of the Concords. The flight of the Concords was something that Nath and I both mutually really loved. We loved their music, their comedy. They were coming out with their new HBO series. Out of 1,000 submissions, we were actually picked. They picked our poster, ended up being on the home page of HBO, which was super exciting. Big milestone for us. And, you know, this led to so much more beyond that moment of success. We actually ended up working directly with Bretton Jermaine of Fly of the Concordes. And we found out that they were really into screen prints, and they wanted to convert the poster that we created for the show to be something that they bring as merchandise to a local show in Florida. And that led to kind of this ongoing relationship of making more posters for them. So we ended up making something for the Hollowood bowl, which was super exciting because that's where we were living at the time in LA. And this led to international shows and even, you know, working with them on their New Zealand show, which is where they're from. So, long story short, like, it's kind of important just to lean into what you're interested in and kind of let the universe bring you work as it may. As far as what not to do as far as finding new clients, we have steered away from things like paying for lists of leads or e mails, things like that. Another thing we've chose not to do is to hire an illustration agent, and that'll be kind of a decision on a case by case basis. We've decided to kind of take on the role of managing our business and reaching out to new clients and making that part of what we do. But if you're the type of creative that just wants to be heads down in the work and hire an agent to handle those things, that could be an option for you. However, we'd just recommend that you do your due diligence, ask for referrals, find out if the rate the agent is charging is applying to just the work they're bringing you or existing work as well, because in our world, that can be up to, like, a 30% commission, so it can get very expensive very quickly. So just make sure you do your research. So to sum up, there's no secret trick to landing several new clients all at the same time. You just have to be patient, put yourself out there and nurture the current relationships that you do have. The more reps you get in putting work out there, the more paths you'll have for potential new work, as well as repeat jobs from existing. 8. What Should I Charge?: When first getting started working for yourself as a freelancer, figuring out what to charge can be one of the trickiest decisions to navigate. The fear of losing out on a job can force us to charge less than we think we should and leave money on the table. But on the flip side, it's also important to understand your client's budget range and what's going to be realistic for them. For example, just because you get hired by a huge multinational corporation, doesn't mean the specific division you're working for has an unlimited budget. So when dealing with figuring out how to price our rates, these are some of the tips that we found to be most useful. There's a couple of schools of thought when it comes to figuring out your value and how much you should charge. A great way to start is thinking about hourly rates. Hourly rates can be, you know, fluctuated based off of your lifestyle, where you live, what your expenses look like, and if you're solo or if you have a partner, so kind of figure out what you would have want to charge per hour. Is a great way to start. But as you become more of a seasoned professional, you'll find that it kind of punishes efficiency. So let's say it takes you a week to create a logo, and five years down the line, you can create the same logo in a couple days. You shouldn't be charging the same rate per hour. You should be thinking about your logo prices as kind of like a per project rate. And we kind of call that value based pricing. So when it comes to value based pricing, it's really based off of you growing as an artist and understanding what you're going to charge for specific deliverables, specific projects. And it really depends on who your client is, the amount of time and labor you're willing to put into the project. And also the deliverable. Like, we've found that branding is a huge spectrum. You can be charging $500 for a logo or if your pentagram design for the same, you know, idea, which is a brand, you can charge $1,000,000. So that spectrum is huge, but there's also a smaller avenue where it's like, we work in the gig poster community where you have to make merchandise, and there's usually a cap when it comes to how much a client is willing to spend on specific deliverables for that. So it's a bit of understanding your client as well. C. Another thing to keep in mind is usage based pricing, not everything just has to be a flat fee as far as a project. There could be a way to give your client some flexibility if they're going to use a piece of work just in a certain region or just for a certain amount of time. Of course, if it's something like a logo, that's typically a full buyout because they're going to want to own that outright and not just license it for a short period of time. But if you're doing maybe an illustration or packaging or part of an advertising campaign that's only going to be used for a certain amount of time, then usage based pricing can really be your friend. Great resources on that are an article by Jessica Hisch called the Dark Art of Pricing. She's also turned that into a full workshop that she offers. And that's a great way to start to understand what you could charge for just a presentation fee, all different types of usage scenarios based on time, region, number of impressions, things like that, all the way up to a full buyout if the client wants to own the work outright. So sometimes that can be the gift that keeps on giving where we might have a client come back to us after their usage term expires, and they want to either re up or get a full buyout. One other resource to check out is a book and workshop called Business and Freelance and stuff by HotSpa, and that also has a lot of great pricing resources. And if you're unsure what the budget is for a certain project, don't put it all on yourself to come back with a number to a client saying, this is what it costs. Have the confidence to ask the client if they have a budget. Oftentimes you might be surprised that the client that they're working with does have a set budget for this project. And then you can understand how to stay within that budget given the deliverables and the amount of time they're willing to put into it. So we often find that asking the client upfront if they have a budget can be helpful. It helps not leave any money on the table, and, you know, you'll be surprised that it can actually help the process. Also, don't be afraid to throw out a number that's a little bit higher than what you're used to. We're always working to increase our rates, and what we've found is that if we throw out a number that's higher, it's unlikely that that potential client is going to completely ghost us. It's more likely that they come back to the table and try to negotiate So if the client does come to you and they want a lower rate, there are some good techniques to pursue. Rather than just devaluing the work immediately, you can look for ways to decrease the scope. So reducing the number of deliverables, you could reduce the number of rounds of revision. Maybe if it was going to be a rush job, you could ask for more time on the project. So ways to lessen the workload rather than just devaluing the work. Over time, you will realize that it's important for you to also have a minimum rate when it comes to value based pricing, for example, how much you're willing to take away as a cost on your work. For us, we have, like, a minimum rate on a poster design, for example. And that rate has actually grown as we've grown as a company. So you're always want to have the intention to grow your minimum rate. There's also exceptions to this as well. You know, This whole, you know, video is about pricing, but there's also the opportunity to donate your time and to do things technically for free for the right cause. You know, we've done work for friends and family, and we offer our skills to help them out. We've also donated our time and efforts, our design and illustration for charities. But those are exceptions that are kind of outside the realm of pricing. There's a lot to think about with pricing, but we hope these tips help set you on the right path and feel more confident about charging a going rate to a client. When in doubt, check out those resources that we mentioned, also be sure to ask the client up front for their budget, and hopefully they will provide that or at least a range or an idea to get everyone kind of on the same page. And then also just kind of do that exercise of figuring out what you want your personal hourly rate to be, not to share with a client, but just to know as a gut check, kind of what you need to be charging for project to make ends meet. And with all those things together, you can be in good. 9. Diversifying Your Income: As a two person team, or if you're a solo freelancer, it can be hard to figure out how to sustain a repeatable or consistent income that you can rely on. So we've been looking for ways to diversify our income, so we're not solely reliant on when the next client project is going to come in the door because we don't always know. So these are a few ways that we have have been useful to diversify our income. And one of the biggest sources of income that we have is something you're viewing right now, teaching. We work with Skillshare, obviously. We do in person workshops. And even within skill share, there's other things that are more unexpected. We do one on one sessions, where we do kind of, like, consultation with people, one on one, where we go over portfolios or maybe their business plan if they're just starting as a freelancer, we have a whole section on our website that's dedicated to this, which we call our learn section, if you go to our website and click on Learn, you'll see that we have every skill share class we've ever done. But in addition to that, we have our one on one sessions, our process videos, and even a podcast that we've been doing for a while. So we find that sharing our knowledge has actually been hugely beneficial for us. And I think when we started off kind of showing our process videos or or teaching what we've learned an illustrator, the first instinct was, like, why are you giving away the secret sauce? But I think the concept of gate keeping is actually hurting our industry a bit. We actually feel that we actually learn more when we share more. So, oftentimes when we come up with a new class and we have all these tidbits to share with everyone, we find throughout the process that we're learning a lot through other people that are viewing our work that we're sharing. So we find that by being more open about your process, it elevates our industry as a whole. Licensing is another option for diversifying income. And really, for any type of creative, if you are painting, drawing, a photographer, a designer, there are ways to license your work to be sold in stores, clothing. There's lots of different ways that an art piece that you create one time could go on to have a long lifespan being used in lots of different ways. One example from our career has been working with 59 parks, and for them, we made a couple different Grand Canyon art prints that originally were sold just as art prints, and we would receive royalties as those prints were sold. But over time, that art has also been licensed onto things like field notes, notebooks, and even hand soap that's sold at Target. So there's all these unexpected ways that that art has found a second life. Another way that we've experienced licensing in the world of making money from royalties has been our art of play playing cards. Again, we designed a deck of cards one time, but then we were able to release those cards in different color ways and special editions. And every time those cards are sold, we receive royalties from those sales. So it may differ for you and what type of client or licensing deal might make the most sense. And for that, we recommend checking out our friends at Good type. They have a lot of great learning resources about how to get into licensing, licensing your work, whether you're going to do it independently or work with a licensing agent. We're still learning a lot about this world, but we're finding it can be a great source of passive income, because, although it might be a lot of upfront work to create the work and cultivate those relationships with the licensees, eventually, this can kind of get a flywheel effect going of having income from licensing that repeats over time. Another source of income for us that works well is selling physical products. And we learned this through kind of an organic way, starting off in the Gig poster world, we would sell actual gig posters through our website. And then that kind of led into us making officially licensed movie posters for companies like Mondo. And although there's a lot of success there in terms of being able to sell those kind of products, we also learned that there's an IP attached to it. So either a band name or a movie name that kind of elevated, you know, the value of these posters. And we wanted to create our own IP. And so nowadays, we're focusing on releasing products that are solely self initiated, so making our own art print series, enamel pins, and we'll go more into what that all means in the next video, but it doesn't just stop with physical products as well. Yeah. So because physical products have their own limitations, we've been getting into digital products as well, things like texture packs and fonts, where it can simply be downloaded rather than having to deal with the logistics of storing inventory and shipping. So both can be create avenues with different perks, but we'll talk about that a bit more later. And lastly, we live in the digital world where social media is a way to make income. It's something that we dove into very lightly. We're still kind of learning the ways. We're by no means tik talk artists at this point. But we have started to look into ways to monetize our YouTube channel. And this kind of relates back to the gate keeping conversation of sharing your process and being more open about how you work and finding ways to monetize that through social media, whether that be using ad space and getting advertising money based off of videos on YouTube. Or having a situation where you can actually have a paid wall through another social media platform. So we hope that gives you a better sense of some ways that we've found to diversify our income, but you can also download the worksheet for this lesson and work through the checklist of figuring out what might make sense for your specific freelance role and how you can diversify. 10. Become Your Own Client: Make Your Own Products: You won't always know when a new client is about to knock on your door, but in the meantime, there are ways to take the fate of your business into your own hands. You can take control of your own destiny by making your own stuff. Become your own client before you have them, expand your portfolio and make a little income on the side with your own product line that's specifically suited to your own skill set. When Nathan and I were thinking about starting our own product line, it almost kind of happened naturally. We thought about what is our specialty? Our specialty at the time, and kind of still is was creating gig posters. And in the world of gig posters, those are produced in a very specific way. They're screen printed. So we took it upon ourselves to learn how to screen print, and we did it the hard way. We created screen printed posters in Nathan's garage, and that led into our interest to produce screen printed T shirts. And we learned that, you know, that was a whole process in itself as well. Um, this eventually led into us making art prints, enamel pens, other printed goods, but it all started with thinking about what our specialty is. Now, you may be asking if I'm going to make a product like this, what about the upfront costs of ordering a bunch of inventory and storing it? So there are alternatives, and we'd recommend when you're first starting out, maybe think about a print on demand option. There's plenty of options online for things like that. You could also consider doing a pre order, and that's something we still do. Like, we'll do a time edition release of art prints. And basically, during a specific window, prints are available for sale as a pre sale. And then by the end of that window, however many prints have sold. That's how we determine the addition size. So we know we're only ordering as many prints as what has sold. So there's a few ways to kind of factor in and guard against ordering too much. But you can basically use those as learning experiences, and over time, once you start to understand your customer base, start to place bigger orders to try to get your cost down. So that's something we do now with a lot of our more evergreen products. We'll order maybe what we think will last us a year as far as inventory, and then we can get a better Another way to kind of understand your customer base is to get in front of them, go to live events and actually put your work, you know, in a booth and see how they sell. Some of the first things that we did when it came to this sort of stuff was applying to craft fairs like Renegade craft fair or Unique LA and getting our work put on a wall and kind of seen what the public feels about them and seen how they sell in person. And we found that, you know, posters do sell, which is good. But there's also another thing that we learned was that people have a finite amount of wall space. So there's only so many posters you can sell to an individual. And what it told us was that we need to create other types of products that can sell that have less limitations. So we started making our prints are a bit more on the smaller side. We started selling postcards. And then eventually we now sell enamel pins and playing cards and patches, but it expanded based off of the customer's needs, not necessarily what we are interested in doing. There's a whole world beyond physical products that you can sell in your store. We've now just tapped into this, but there's digital products, things like texture packs or fonts. DKNG just released our very first texture pack. It's an editable texture pack that you can use an illustrator. And the beauty of digital downloads is that there's no storing of inventory. There's no shipping or packing materials. There's no possibility of it getting damaged in the mail or having to deal with returns. So what's really nice about it is just the passive income aspect of it. You do, obviously need to put the upfront work to make a quality product, but once it's live on a website, you can wake up to orders and realize that there's nothing else to do other than know that you sold a product. And so we highly recommend thinking about your skill set and how it can be applied to the world of digital downloads, because it's the easiest way to make passive income these days. We also recommend talking to your peers about what has worked for them. In our case, we kind of felt like we were late to the world of enamel pins and thought maybe we shouldn't jump in. But our peers kept encouraging us and thought it would work well for our style of artwork. So eventually we gave it a shot, and to this day, enamel pins are one of our best selling items. So don't be afraid to use your network of fellow artists and creatives, even the folks in this class as a resource to get some ideas on what you might want to create. And when you make your own products, not only can they be a source of income, they can also be a way to lead to new client work. One of the biggest ways this happened for us was when we decided to make an icon series of art prints. This was part of a self initiated gallery show that we did. Um, that again, was really just a product that we were planning to sell ourselves. But what ended up happening is we started getting hired by other people to design similar things. So the first time that ended up coming to reality was with Paramount pictures hiring us. Paramount hired us to design a poster featuring icons of 100 of their most iconic movies. And it didn't end there. We got hired by other studios to do similar work. And then eventually in the corporate world, more needs for icons arose. So we got hired by USA today. In addition to the main USA today paper, they have a network of newspapers, regional papers around the country. So we designed icons for all of those. And the work that we did for our self initiated icon work, it's kind of the gift that keeps on giving in our career, making 50 different icons for movies and television that we love and enjoy, based off a passion led to ironically doing something very similar for the company Hines. We actually ended up making 50 different Hines condiment packets, representing every state in the United States. And had we not taken the risk of making a self initiated project like the ICO show, we wouldn't have seen something like this in our career. And it also kind of proved to ourselves and to the client that we're capable of creating a large series like this. So I think the main takeaway is to think about what your specialty is and also being able to take the risks of, like, making something for yourself and kind of just letting the universe kind of bring back work to you based off of the amount of passion you put into the work up front. Now, you might be thinking, how do I price my products? It's a good question. There's definitely a couple of schools of thought. You can price it based off of how much you're willing to spend. So, let's say an enamel pin, you want to be able to spend, $3 to make it, or that's all you can spend on it based off the quantity that you want. And then you have to kind of start to think about not only retail, but also the option of wholesale. So we highly recommend thinking about wholesales part of this equation because it's another opportunity to make income. So if you were to buy pin for, let's say $3, then you probably want to wholesale it at a Keystone markup, which is six. That also means that in order for you to be profitable, it makes sense for you to try to sell that pin for $12. Now, what happens is you might find that the going rate a customer is willing to spend on an enamel pin might not be as high as $12. Ten is kind of like the going rate these days. So another school thought is to kind of think backwards. You can think about what the rate of a product is in terms of what a customer expects and go backwards from there and try to find what your cost is. So let's say an enamel pin is $10, and you need to wholesale it for five. That probably means you need to find a cost for you at 2:50. And in order to get a price that low, that might be about, you know, buying in bulk and trying to get that enamel pin ordered and not just like 50 or 100, but maybe ordering like 300 at a time to make sure that you're profitable. So now it's your turn to start on the path to your own product line, you can download the product development worksheet and get started on brainstorming what products you might want to create, and also where you might be able to solve. 11. Being Your Own Boss: Time & Accountability: Working for yourself can come with a lot of challenges, especially without a boss or co workers to help provide the structure of a workday or the larger company culture and how your business operates as a whole. So we've learned a few things over the years about how best to manage our time and hold ourselves accountable working for ourselves and as just part of a two person team. And one particular struggle when it comes to working for yourself, especially in the creative field is finding inspiration, especially if you're solo. We find that, you know, forcing yourself to be inspired is not going to work. It's actually going to kind of slow you down, and you're going to get a little bit too tense about it. So one kind of trick that we use is giving yourself space to get it inspired. Having a good work life balance where you can walk away from your desk, walk away from the task at hand, and do something else. You'll find that new ideas kind of pop in your head. Then inspiration kind of naturally comes when you kind of give yourself the space that you deserve. And another thing to kind of keep in mind when it comes to doing your own thing, being your own boss, it's going to take long hours. It's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of dedication. And what makes that go as fluid as possible is finding something you're passionate about. We found that, like, we were really interested in what we did. We loved illustration, we loved design, and we put a lot of work into what we did, but it didn't feel like work at the time because we were passionate about it. On the flip side of putting in long hours into your passion, burnout can also be a real thing. And inspiration really requires a bit of balance to, you know, not just force yourself to have to be creative on demand every moment of the day. So we try not to define ourselves by our work solely. It is a huge part of who we are, but it is just a part of it. So, along with that, we do try to set boundaries and have specific hours dedicated to work and reserve time to be away from our desk. When you work for yourself, it's easy to think that any time of day is fair game to be working on the project, but we find that we do our best work when we're fresh, and we can have that balance. As far as how we manage our work calendar. Because as we talked about, we mainly deal in project fees, we don't have to overwhelm ourselves with keeping track of specific hours. We try to schedule our calendar on a day to day basis and what parts of projects are we working on on those days. And we've also found that there's always going to be unexpected things that pop up last minute requests from clients, things we need to deal with our vendors. So we try to leave moments of open space in our calendar as well, because we know they're just going to fill in with those unexpected things. Yeah, and when it comes to our calendar, it's one of the biggest tools we use for time management, especially as a visual person, it's helpful to see what's next and kind of lay out your day to day week by week. Nathan and I every Monday, basically lay out our priorities for the week and decide on which days those things are going to be taken care of. Being your boss can be challenging when it comes to this, especially when it comes to not only working for clients, but in addition to that, making stuff for yourself, self initiated work, for example. One way we kind of reframe being your own boss is kind of treating yourself as your own client. Kind of think about it as let's say you're making something for yourself like an art prints. You want to basically treat that as a project as if you are making it for a client, but the client is you. And one way we manage that, both from the client's perspective, like working with a client or working on a self initiated project is take a huge project and think about it in terms of smaller chunks. Don't want to just kind of start off and say, Okay, this poster is due on this day, and that's it. You're going to kind of feel the tension of that. And even if you have four weeks to work on it, it's going to feel kind of daunting. But one way to kind of break it up is to break it up into a small amount of pieces as possible. For us, we kind of think of it as you know, all the stages that lead up to that due date, and how many tiny pieces we can make out of that. So, if it requires sketches or some inspiration or research in the very beginning, kind of break that up into a couple of days and specify when you're going to do it. And then there's like the middle part of it. You know, Maybe you're going to colorize those sketches, or you're going to revise those sketches, or you're going to choose your chosen concept, M that a part of it. Then beyond that, there's the actual building blocks of creating your project. We kind of think of that as a whole other part of the section, and kind of think about it as a way that you can break it up into as many pieces as possible, and you'll find that that due date doesn't feels daunting anymore because you actually can see in your calendar how it's going to get done. Now, Nathan and I have a very fortunate circumstance where we work together. We're two different people. We're very different people, and we actually collaborate on everything we do. It's a fruitful partnership, and it's really worked for us in our career. And we highly recommend collaborating if you can as an artist. Even if you work solo, it doesn't mean that you necessarily have to fight a partner, but you know, share your work with others and get their feedback. It actually helps elevate your work. So when Nathan and I work together, we try to be as honest as we can with our feedback, helpful, constructive, and we're just really good sounding boards for each other. We take advantage of the fact that we're very different people when it comes to our design thinking and how we see the world. And that contrast between each other actually helps bring our work to another level that would be unexpected as just a solo artist. And another part of partnerships or collaboration is just kind of keeping yourselves accountable. You can do this with yourself as well. Just kind of remember that you have your limitations, but you also have your skill sets that you can lean into. And Nathan and I will actually kind of keep each other accountable in terms of what needs to get done and kind of watch each other's calendar and schedule and kind of check in on each other. Like, how's it going? Can I help in any way? And we find that things go way smoother when we keep that communication line open. Now it's your turn. Take stock of how you plan to manage your time and who you might be able to rely on as a sounding board to keep your business on track. And we also encourage you to download the project task worksheet, which will help you break down large, daunting projects into more manageable steps. 12. Class Conclusion: We hope this class inspired you and gave you the confidence to start your own creative endeavor, and can also serve as a reference point if you want to return to revisit just a specific tip that might come in handy as you get underway with your creative practice. We're excited to see how your business evolves. So please try one or more of the tips and share your experience in the project gallery. And if you have your own business tips that you want to share, the more the merrier, we're excited to learn from you as well. If there's one thing we hope you take away from this class. Even though the idea of starting a business or becoming a freelancer can be daunting, there are specific steps you can take to rip the band aid off and get started. Starting our own business has been the most challenging, but also rewarding decisions we've ever made. It's allowed us to steer the course of our own career and take true ownership of how we spend our days. We hope you enjoyed this class, and we'd appreciate you leaving a review. You can also learn other techniques from us in our other skill share classes like Rock poster design and productivity for designers. Thank you for joining us, and we hope to see you in another class soon. 13. Want to Learn More?: Hey, are you still looking for even more skill share content from DKNG? Well, we also offer personalized one on one sessions where we'll meet with you and talk about ways to help your business. We're offering three types of sessions. The first being a portfolio review. The second is a business consultation, and the third is a design or illustration instructional session. So if you're interested, you can learn more from us on our website in the learn section or check out our page on skill share where you can sign up for one on one with us.