MAEKAN Sessions are thematic online panel discussions hosted by MAEKAN featuring guests in various creative fields. Sessions allow us to have longer, in-depth conversations on single topics where we bring together interesting people from around the globe, in a format that is open for anyone to listen in and ask questions.
In this MAEKAN Session we spoke with David C. Baker on the primary concerns of creatives when it comes to business and money. David C. Baker lives in Nashville, Tennessee. He speaks to, writes for, and consults with the expertise marketplace via ReCourses, Inc. Under that umbrella, he has worked with over 750 firms and in-house departments. David also owns RockBench Publishing Corp., a traditional and electronic publisher of thought leadership insight. He is the author of Managing (Right) for the First Time, Financial Management of a Marketing Firm and The Business of Expertise.
We were first connected with David C. Baker because of the podcast 2Bobs which he co-hosts with Blair Enns. 2Bobs covers a wide range of subjects related to creative entrepreneurship. A 2Bobs episode that particularly resonated with the MAEKAN team and the MAEKAN community was “Truths and Myths About Money” which aired in March 2017. Around the same time that we were chatting with David C. Baker about doing a MAEKAN Session, we noticed a rise in questions in the MAEKAN Slack Community revolving around the idea of how to get better at business as a creative person.
In our previous Session School Smarts, Street Smarts our panelists talked about how educating creatives should expand beyond their craft and include practical real life applications. This MAEKAN Session gave us an opportunity to turn to David for expert insight from his vantage point of greater experience. We hope this Session might better prepare creatives with need-to-know all-purpose business knowledge and help fill in the commonly seen gaps in a creative person’s skill set when it comes to negotiations, pricing and management. David’s thoughtful answers are not only practical, but help frame a creative’s role in a clearer context. He also throws a couple challenging questions back our way.
Get in touch with our panelist:
David C. Baker on Twitter @ReCourses
“I don’t find that the problem is making bad decisions in leadership. The problem is not making enough decisions.”
— David C. Baker on a common difficulty of having multiple principles in a firm
Books by David C. Baker.
“People who are making constant compromises at the beginning, they tend to make constant compromises all along but for different reasons. It’s better to charge more and to live very very frugally at the beginning and not make those compromises anymore than you have to.”
— David C. Baker
