Getting less clients because of AI? I just landed a £15k project. Here’s how I’m still getting hired:

slavery didn’t go anywhere, it just looks different now. nobody’s in chains. but look at how most people actually live. up at 6 to sit in traffic, 8 hours building someone else’s dream, home knackered, two days off to recover, repeat it for 40 years until you’re too old to enjoy the freedom you finally get handed back. we just dressed it up nicer, called it a salary, a job title, a little pension at the end.

9 times out of 10 any time you feel flat, it’s just a result of a bad routine. Try waking up earlier and going on walks. Only then if that doesn’t work, fly to a different country.

Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm

MOST CREATIVES HAVE a great product and a terrible marketing strategy.

Use AI instead of a designer. You can also cut your own hair, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

8.6/10 Self dev book review (Never Split the Difference) Really good techniques, gripping in how it’s wrote too, applies to calls, pricing, hiring, and helps any friction with me and Beth 😂 FBI Negotiations and all about emotional decisions and how to understand people. Good to focus on how others feel first before you say or think anything.

Just invested an amount larger than my old boss’s salary. -I never got straight A’s -I never read until I was 25 -I never studied finance at uni Funnily enough, most of my income came from being a designer. But not design on its own. it came from learning how to position myself properly and how to sell to leads once they came. and if I had to rewind time, I’d try learn that even earlier than I did in this life.

“Elite Designer” “$100 test” Some people have no idea 😂

quietly worried about AI taking your job? you might have had a client mention they “had a go in ChatGPT” and you start wondering if they still need you. and if you look at the output on its own, it’s getting close. but there’s a study that shows the work was never the only thing they were paying for. let me show you.. researchers showed 1,634 people poems written by AI mixed in with poems by famous poets like Shakespeare, and asked them to spot which was which. they got 46.6% right.. worse than flipping a coin, and they actually rated the AI poems higher. but the second they were told “AI wrote this”, the ratings dropped, even when a human had written it. people care about who made it, they like knowing a real person put the thought in for them. make the human part obvious. in my own agency we testing running a loom video as part of the initial phase, sometimes a little audit, sometimes for the moodboard.. but explaining the thinking. made project win rates go up, and revisions go down. now I make sure all the students I help are doing the same. it’s like a handwritten birthday card, the words might be the same as a printed one, but you know someone sat down and thought about you. so next time it comes to it, make sure you're showing the decisions behind the work and making it human.

Genuinely relieved AI exists for the clients who wanted a $50 design with 9 rounds of revisions.

Real ‘creatives’ are becoming rare. When everyone can design a company in a day, the only thing left to compete on is how good it looks.

Here's one for you. Restaurants that let you watch the chefs got 22.2% higher quality ratings, and the food came out 19.2% faster because the cooks felt appreciated & worked harder. Most of us do the opposite, we go quiet for 2 weeks and then send a finished file.. Since I first came across this, I made sure my team provides an update every 24-48 hours on where things are at. Clients LOVE it.

I made her quit graphic design. Isla came to me and she was second guessing her career choice. she’s been doing this years, but the record months had dried up and she couldn’t work out why. everything she used to rely on had gone quiet. and the honest answer was a bit uncomfortable.. in an AI era, “graphic designer” has become one of the easiest things in the world to replace. the second you’re labelled “a graphic designer,” you’re competing with a $20 tool and a thousand others saying the same thing. so we kept her core but changed everything around it. mostly what she was selling and how she was positioned, so she stopped looking like “a designer” and started showing up as someone who solves an actual business problem. she’s made more this month than she has the past 5 months.. and I’m confident she’ll hit a brand new record in november.

Today’s office required a new city

I run my creative agency the exact same way I help other creatives. people assume they’re two different businesses, but the model I use is exactly the same. in both, I’m not chasing the sale. I’m trying to build a relationship where both sides actually win. I do the work properly, I get the person a result they can feel, and then they stick around because.. why would they go anywhere else? most businesses treat a client like a single transaction. deliver the thing, send the invoice, start hunting for the next one.. and then live month to month. I’d rather have ten people I’ve looked after for years than a hundred I billed once and never heard from again. the first lot refer me, re-hire me, and grow with me. if you build the relationship first, then the money always builds on top.

Just turned a cold lead into a $9k project. not for me, but for a girl I mentor. felt like a really warm lead but then went silent, so instead of the usual needy "just checking in! any update?", we went a different route. feel free to copy this. "morning [name], sorting out my October workload, thought I'd give you a heads up before I offer your slot to someone else. are you still keen? (would genuinely love to get stuck into [brand])" and just like that, the slot was sold. $9k, back on. the science is that it's not chasing, but it's showing authority and availability, you can't hold that slot forever and it's a soft deadline to see if they're still keen.

2024: - learn how to design 2026: - learn how to sell it

weekends are made up. for years I used them to escape reality when I was 9-5 as an Architect.. the week was the slog and the weekend was where I actually lived. now I’m not escaping reality on a saturday, I’m extending it. I do the same thing on a weekend that I do on a weekday, overpriced coffee, walks, gym, tinkering on the laptop. the best goal I ever set myself, was to design the perfect day, and then repeat it as many times as possible.

Working with a creative right now who was doing 15k months.. entirely off Upwork. sounds like the dream, right? and in some ways it was. but he came to me genuinely worried, because it was all riding on one platform. one algorithm change, one account issue, and the whole lot's gone overnight (scary af) 15k a month, and still not sleeping easy. because deep down he knew it wasn't really his.. he'd nailed Upwork, but it wasn't a proper business. so we opened up two new ways of getting clients, completely outside Upwork. and in September alone they brought in 12 leads, all keen to jump on a call and work with him. now the Upwork income is a bonus. if your whole business runs through one channel you don't control.. it doesn't matter how good the numbers look right now. build a second way in before something forces you to.

Best ROI? Good food, good wine, couple laughs.