🎯 Challenge for today: What’s ONE metric you’re going to start tracking that will actually move the needle? This could be creative hours worked, outreach attempts, scheduling, accounting— whatever matters most to you & your goals Drop it below. Let’s hold each other accountable for the next few weeks.

Big welcome to @Eleanor Elean & @Heather O'Laughlin . @Eleanor Elean is an author & @Heather O'Laughlin is one of my business partners & owner of The Drop Comedy Club. I welcome both of you with open arms & look forward to making this community a strong resource for entrepreneurs & creatives to expand their reach as well as learn.

What is dropshipping? - You sell products online without holding inventory. - Customer orders → supplier prints/ships → you keep the profit. - You focus on design + marketing, not shipping or storage. Why it’s great for creatives: - No upfront costs. - Scales easily (1 order or 1,000). - Lets you focus on your brand instead of logistics. Why Bonfire? - Free to start, no inventory. - High-quality apparel customers actually wear. - Print-on-demand fulfillment + global shipping. - Fundraising tools for projects, launches, or tours. Bonfire makes it easy to turn your creative work into wearable merch that builds your brand and funds your projects. Stay tuned for when we cover dropshipping more in depth. There are lots of vendor options & Net30 is a way to develop strong vendor relationships while building credit! 👉 Start here with my referral link: Bonfire Signup

When I first started out, I thought I was killing it charging $30 an hour to film and edit video. Thirty bucks. Looking back, I basically paid people to let me work. Like most creatives, I kept doubling my prices. $30 became $60. $60 became $120. And while that looked good on paper, it was also exhausting. I was stuck in a short-sighted game of “how much can I push this number up before someone tells me no?” If you are like me, negotiations are awkward. You have to ask for the sale & around this time, I STRUGGLED with that. Then one day, everything changed 👀 A client from Pennsylvania reached out by email. I was so green, I didn’t even ask how they found me (ALWAYS ASK!!!!). They needed editing services. At that point, I was charging around $60 an hour. When I quoted them $50 an hour JUST to edit, I braced myself for pushback. But here’s the crazy part: they didn’t bat an eye. They approved a $500 invoice on the spot. The project? A nightmare puzzle. They had a commercial where the original pricing was shown on an iPad screen. No green screen, so no easy swap. That meant I had to digitally remove numbers while balancing shades of gray and blue reflections on the glass. It took me 12 hours of tedious editing, frame by frame. At the end they OFFERED ME MORE MONEY for final revisions!! I politely declined because I have a soul.... Was it worth only $500? No. But here’s the truth I learned: 👉 Success is binary. Either you figure it out, or someone else will. And I did. That project taught me the most valuable lesson of my early career: 👉 Your location doesn’t determine your potential for ascension. Especially in this digital era. Just because I lived in Indiana didn’t mean I had to sell in Indiana. Other places have other budgets, and the right customer makes the difference between a business that’s surviving and one that’s thriving. For example: - Median household income in California: ~$91,000 - Median household income in Indiana: ~$67,000 - Median home price in California: ~$740,000 - Median home price in Indiana: ~$230,000

Let’s get cooking!