Brutally Honest: No-bullshit business strategies to evolve your creative business by Emily Ruth Cohen gives you the tools you need to whip your creative business into shape. It’s full of advice, insights, and best practices for everything from new business development to proposals to staffing and everything in-between.

Brutally Honest is:

• Opinionated, direct, and, at times, downright painful. Don’t agree with everything? Great. Use it as a tool to stimulate deeper thinking about your business.
• Real-world smart. Emily didn’t read about these strategies in business books; she’s lived and breathed them for 20+ years as a consultant to creative businesses.
• Inspired by Emily’s clients and colleagues and a direct result of the learnings she’s gathered from the mistakes they’ve made, the challenges they’ve encountered, and the innovative business ideas and strategies they’ve experimented with, refined, and implemented.
• Written by someone that loves design and cares about our industry.

Brutally Honest covers the who, what, when, why, & how of:

• Evolving and positioning to stay competitive and remain sustainable
• Marketing and promotional strategies
• Writing effective case studies
• Building new relationships and pursuing new opportunities
• Qualifying and winning the best prospects
• Evaluating and refining your organizational structure
• Recruiting and managing staff
• Crafting effective, value-added pricing strategies
• Writing winning proposals
• Crafting retainer relationships
• Understanding must-have industry terms and conditions
• Improving project and client management strategies
• Learning about industry trends and peer-created best practices

For a limited time any Brand New reader that orders Brutally Honest will get an enamel pin, initially available only to Kickstarter supporters, using the code BRANDNEW19 at checkout (expires 2/20/19).