Lately I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people wondering whether they should consult, freelance, start a business, or if it even matters which road you take so it seemed like maybe a post on the subject might help.
I stayed a consultant for 2 years before I formed Real Bullets Branding because when you first go off on your own you’re going to have to think about a lot of things that you didn’t before.  Like, “what does my schedule look like?”, “how am I going to structure my …

Instead of just the regular “here’s who we are” and “here’s what we do”, which I think you’ll agree can be boring, spend some time introducing yourself online.
I stumbled on this video for the Dare Agency in London and thought it was pretty cool.

This is Dare. Are you? from thisisdare on Vimeo.

I am sort of a phone addict.  Not in the ‘can’t have a conversation with you because I’m too busy eyeing up my phone’ kind of way (I cannot believe how many professional people do this incredibly rude thing) but definitely in the ‘check it when I’m bored’ kind of way.  Obviously, I’m not the only one that’s doing this sort of thing but here’s a scary graph to back it up:
The rest of the article goes on to outline all sorts of horrors about how tons of people are …

desk – $350 from a flea market.  Don’t you love the industrial / farm chic-ness of this?  The bottom is made of metal pipes.
deer antlers – $50 for 3 sets. Flea market.  I love, love, love these and was going to spray paint them white but decided that we liked them au natural.
So this is the first post from my new office.  Well, what should have been my new office until the New Jerseyite’s job went virtual and now it’s OUR new office.  I didn’t handle the news terribly maturely.  …

“Maybe this is a stupid idea”
I’ve been meeting a lot of new business owners lately.  Through groups, some that I’ve helped to start, some online, they seem to be everywhere.  When I sit down with them they are stressed out, worried, excited.  Some have business cards already, some have a client, some have just an idea.  I am not always sure what they want to talk about but invariably they will say “maybe this is a really stupid idea”.
I usually respond that the “stupid idea” feeling doesn’t go away.  Ever.  …

I walked in the door a few weeks ago after a day full of meetings and phone calls and flopped on the couch.  I was frustrated because I was actively looking to hire someone to help me with “work stuff” and was having a hard time defining what “work stuff” was and also a person who could do said “stuff”.  All I knew was that I could get all my work done but hadn’t been able to find time to get a haircut since March.
As I looked around from my …

photo credit – from moon to moon
When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after …

We’ve all been there.  You’re at some kind of meeting, event, phone conference and someone says “oh!  We’ve decided to try this new site… xyz.com, what are your thoughts on that?”
And you have no thoughts on that site because you’ve never seen or heard of that site.  You try to remember if you read Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, and Wired this month.  Then you start remembering all of the email  industry news updates that you archived instead of reading.  You suddenly become hyper aware of all of the new sites …

A few weeks ago I attended a happy hour for young professionals.  It was the usual array of business owners, marketing people, and tech folks and I was having some great conversations until one lady asked me what I do.
“Social Media strategy” I answered to which she said “oh.  I KNOW how to update Twitter.”  This happens a lot, and it’s ok, but it does bring up a really good point about social media expertise and who businesses should be hiring to complete it. To me, there’s a really distinct …

Having an event used to involve getting out the stamps and sending invitations but now there are so many online resources that help you manage your guest list (and some even make them look really pretty) that it’s difficult to imagine life without them.  With summer in full swing and events galore I thought it might be helpful to do a quick overview of the tools out there that I have used to coordinate an event (wish I had these when I had an actual events company).  Here’s the cream …