I’ve Spent My Career On Both Sides of Creative Business
I started my career as a copywriter. I wanted to make great work, solve interesting problems and build a career around being creative.
Over the next twenty-five years, that career took me much further than I expected.
I became a global creative director, built and led multidisciplinary teams across multiple countries, mentored creative leaders and worked with some of the world’s largest brands.
I've led and scaled independent and network creative businesses, including an organization that I helped scale from roughly 300 people to more than 1,600 and $500 million in revenue.
Along the way, I learned that creative ability and business success aren’t opposing forces. But building a business around creativity creates a unique set of challenges.
Your creative work must have a purpose and you must find people willing to value it. You have to balance creative ambition with clients, revenue, pricing, perceptions and profitability. And as the business becomes more successful, you have to decide what you actually want that success to become.
I’ve experienced those questions from both sides: as a creative business leader, and as a client partnering with great creative talent.
I’ve been the creative who wanted to make my best work. The creative director responsible for helping other people make theirs. The leader responsible for people's livelihoods, client's budgets and hitting growth targets.
And I’ve been the one deciding which creative partners to trust with important work and what made their expertise worth paying for.
Today, I bring those experiences together as a Creative Business Advisor.
I work with established creative entrepreneurs, founder-led businesses and organizations supporting creative communities to help them see where new opportunities exist, their realities, and provide the clarity to make better decisions about what is worth pursuing.
Because sometimes the most valuable thing you can bring to a creative business isn’t another framework.
It’s a different way of seeing possibilities.
Why I'm Doing This Now?
After nearly three decades building brands, teams and businesses, I left advertising. I took time to reconsider what I wanted to do with the experience I’d accumulated.
I realized I was less interested in helping large organizations become larger and much more interested in helping independent creative people and businesses realize more of their potential.
What I Bring to the Table
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25+ years in creative leadership and business
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Global creative leadership across brands, agencies and markets
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Creative organization growth from roughly 300 to 1,600 people and $500M in revenue
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Creative talent development across multiple disciplines
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Client-side perspective hiring and partnering with creative professionals
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A practicing artist, author, photographer and designer
"He who looks outside himself dreams. He who looks inward awakes."
- Carl Jung
What I Believe About The Creative Business
Better doesn’t always mean bigger.
A stronger creative business might mean more revenue. It might also mean fewer projects, better clients, higher margins, more creative freedom or a smaller team.
Creative and commercial ambition don’t have to compete.
The right business should create more opportunity for great creative work, not gradually crowd it out.
There’s often more potential in a business than its owner can see from inside it.
Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t something new. It’s recognizing greater value in something you’re already doing well.
There is no universal model for a successful creative business.
The right business is the one that creates the commercial value, creative opportunity and life its owner actually wants.
