Ep 140 – Michael Janda, More Creative Academy – The Creative’s Guide to Growing Up: From Portfolio to Profits to Peace of Mind
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Featuring: Michael Janda, More Creative Academy
In episode 140, I sit down with Michael Janda—agency founder, bestselling author, and one of the most respected voices helping creatives master the business side of creativity. Michael built and sold Riser, worked with giants like Disney and Google, and later led creative teams at Fox before dedicating his career to teaching creatives how to price, position, and run their businesses without burning out.
We dig into the mental and operational “growing up” that every creative eventually faces: getting past portfolio thinking, charging confidently, understanding value, eliminating chaos, and building a more peaceful (and profitable) creative life. Michael’s straight-talk wisdom hits every agency owner exactly where they need it—no fluff, no ego, just clarity.
Key Bytes
• Why creatives struggle with pricing — and how to fix it
• The mindset shift from freelancer to business owner
• How Michael positioned his agency to win massive clients
• The surprising relationship between process, profit, and peace
• What creatives get wrong about value
• Why “portfolio thinking” holds owners back
• How to build a business that supports your life, not the other way aroundChapters
00:01 Welcome + Michael’s background and agency journey
04:12 From creative chaos to building processes that scale
09:45 Why pricing is emotional—and how to make it objective
14:30 Portfolio vs. business owner mindset
19:58 Finding ideal clients and positioning that works
25:21 How Michael sold his agency and what he learned
31:44 The psychology of creative profitability
38:10 Achieving peace of mind as an owner
44:22 Michael’s advice for creatives who feel “stuck”
Michael Janda is an award-winning creative director, agency founder, and bestselling author.
He built the creative agency Riser with clients like Disney, Google, Warner Bros., and ABC, then sold the business after 13 successful years. Before that, he served as a creative director at Fox. Michael
is the author of Burn Your Portfolio and The Psychology of Graphic Design Pricing. Today, he shares practical, no-fluff strategies to help creative professionals master business, pricing, and growth.
Connect with Michael through his Community, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Website, or explore his Courses.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.334)
Welcome to Agency Bites. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outside, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. My guest today is Michael Janda, award winning creative director, agency founder, and bestselling author. He built and sold his agency, Riser, after 13 years working with powerhouse clients like Disney, Google, and Warner Brothers. And after that, he was a creative director at Fox. You probably know him from his books, Burn Your Portfolio and The Psychology of Graphic Design Pricing.
These days he's helping creatives master the business side of creativity with straight talk advice on pricing, positioning and growth that actually works. Michael, great to have you.
Michael Janda (00:37.07)
Thank you, Steve, I'm excited to be here. We're doing the Twitter, middle-aged, gray beard, bald man look. If people don't pay close attention, they won't be able to tell us apart.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:39.606)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:47.798)
Love it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:51.916)
They've got to jump into the YouTube to see it because it's uncanny. Who's who? Yeah. Who's... I feel like a lot of really creative successful or successful creatives have our vibe. The low beard, the bald head. Yeah. It's popular. Yeah, man. It's good to have you. Yeah. Well...
Michael Janda (00:54.83)
They do, yeah. I can't even tell. Am I looking at you? Am I looking at me? I can't even tell.
Michael Janda (01:10.348)
Yeah, yeah. My beard is on and off. I don't. I shave it off. I can't take it and then I try and keep it for awhile. So but this this winter, which is my start right now, I'm going to try and see how far I can go this time. So we'll see. We'll see. Could be could be one week. Could be one month. We don't know. Could be the rest of my life. Who knows? We'll find out.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:18.582)
Keep it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:29.26)
Alright, report back.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:37.034)
Love it. So for those that don't know, give you the quick kind of backstory on like the agency, the exit, what led you to what you're doing now and what you're doing now.
Michael Janda (01:48.046)
Yeah, I, yeah, so I was a creative director at Fox Studios over Fox Kids, Fox Family Brands and on the digital side and then the dot bomb hit in 2001. They started downsizing our team of 50 went down to a team of six at the end, finally got laid off in 2002. The last six of us.
in HR getting our papers that day. And I started freelancing. And while people were getting laid off, they started calling me from their new job saying, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? And so I was doing freelance work, moved from LA to Salt Lake after I realized I was doing everything over the phone and chat. And then my freelance, I spent a couple years resisting growth.
But my numbers were great and I was just got to where I was working the 80 hour weeks and I was afraid to hire. And finally got kind of forced into it by stress and just hanging by a thread. Hired my first person one year later, had office space and five employees. A year after that, I had a dozen employees and hit the seven figure mark. And once I, once I let the horse run, it just took off and growth happened and
figured out all the business side of stuff. I'm a designer by nature and I had to learn the business side of things. And while I was building my agency, I realized, man, what I really love is that creative director role, that mentoring role, that education role. loved my company staff meetings. I put together decks and teach people the mantras of my agency.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:15.926)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Janda (03:40.724)
And I realized that that was the thing I loved the most. And so when it came time to hang the, hang the hat on my agency, that was part of the reason I had my first bookburner portfolio had come out. I was getting invited to speak at places and I started thinking what's next in my career. Cause I had climbed all the agency mountains that I wanted to climb and had an opportunity to sell, sold my agency, stayed at the agency I sold to for two and a half years.
during my buyout investing. And then I left there and started doing what I'm doing now, which is the best thing of my whole career. I just love it. I love making content. I love going on podcasts. I love coaching people. I love my community, mentoring people. I just love what I'm doing from a career standpoint. It's awesome. So that's, yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:29.311)
Yeah, I'm right there with you, man. We have very parallel paths. And I love hearing that. I was on the phone with an agency yesterday and helping them go through an exit. And she said, I've seen you for 20 years run through your agency, get out of corporate, run through your agency, sell your agency, all these things. You've never looked happier. was like, I absolutely love what I'm doing now, helping people. I do a lot with students and people entering the industry and people trying to get their businesses better. So yeah, man, right there with you.
Michael Janda (04:39.128)
Yeah.
Michael Janda (04:57.07)
Yeah. Yeah. I love it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:58.463)
Talk about, that exit, you know, a lot of people I think are attracted to like, I want to sell too. And, you know, talk about like what advice you might give to founders about like, what's that exit path look like.
Michael Janda (05:11.384)
You know, I didn't even think to sell it until I had made all the money I wanted to make out of it. I had climbed all the mountains. I had put my flag in the top of the mountain. I had won all the awards I wanted. had sick studio space with my wood floors and my exposed beams and all the junk glass walls, our whiteboard room. We had a company boat. Like I was just like check, check, check, check all the things that I would dream for a cool agency I had done. And then I looked at my bank accounts and I had
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:17.931)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:37.259)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Janda (05:41.006)
a few million dollars. And I'm like, I don't need the risk of this anymore. I don't need the burden. There was nothing left driving me. I did not want to go, I had a team with 20. I didn't want to go to grow it to 50 or start a satellite office in New York or in LA. just didn't want that next piece that it would have taken to get out of, to get bigger or better or whatever than where I was. I loved the boutique agency that I built.
and I didn't need the risk anymore. So I think the advice is, man, make a business that makes money for you, fill your coffers with that money, and then choose what you wanna do. You can shut it down, you don't have to sell it. Shut it down and do something else. Keep it going and enjoy doing it for the fun of entrepreneurship, not because you're trying to build your net worth.
or look for somebody to sell or merge with another agency, which is what you see very commonly, all these conglomerates of, know, Sally, John and Dexter design. It's like three agencies that merge together because at some point they all wanted something new and something fresh. And maybe there's a path for you there, but do it after you've checked all the boxes. They say build to sell, but I don't believe that in agency world. say,
Build it to make you money and then you'll have a lot of choices on what you wanna do with it after you hit whatever number you're looking for.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:17.129)
Yeah, I love the built to sell model because if a business is running good enough to be sold, then you've got those options. It's running so well, I can turn down offers, I can put a CEO in place and step back. So yeah, I'm fully there with you. You and I were... Yeah.
Michael Janda (07:30.104)
Yeah. Well, if it makes you money, if it makes you money, then somebody might be interested in buying it to make them money. But you get people who they go all in trying to just invest and grow and grow and grow and they don't make their money themselves. It's gonna be a tough sell on a creative business to try and get somebody to buy it if it hasn't made you a lot of money. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:55.616)
Yeah, and too many owners put everybody else first and they pay themselves last. you know, yeah, it's, that was one of my challenges was, I got to pay myself. minimum wage looks pretty darn good after working 100 hours this week. So a lot of owners don't prioritize that. You and I were both kind of accidental agency owners, designers, creative directors, et cetera. And Burn Your Portfolio, you talk about creative talent.
Michael Janda (08:08.503)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yep.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:20.425)
alone just isn't enough anymore. And I'm curious, what do you think like the biggest blind spot you see in like creative founders that are struggling with today?
Michael Janda (08:29.422)
Okay, well, creative founders struggle by not running their business like a business. They run it like a freelancer. You want to run a business like a business, then start tracking your data, start analyzing it, deriving insights, make pivots because you're looking forward on your business, intentionally running your business as if you were a corporation. Now you don't have to get all crazy about it, although I did, but you got to be tracking something and
A lot of agencies that struggle to break out of the one founder with three contractors model, which is so common, they struggle to break out of it because they're just not tracking anything. They're not working on the vision. They're not working on the plan to get there. They're not tracking their financial data. They're not looking for trends that happened last year that are happening again this year. So they have some foresight on what might.
be happening in their business now and what they need to do, they don't track anything. I think it's a big, big, big blind spot. And it's one of the things that I did well. I became obsessive with that. Just all the minutiae and details and SOPs, another thing. I mean, man, you got a lot of freelancers, freelancer with three contractor models that are just everything operates out of the founder.
Instead, make your SOPs and let the SOPs run those people. And now you have a scalable model that you can hire more people in and slot them into your SOPs and have the business function the way that you would make it function. And I think that's a miss too. There's too much operating like a freelancer. I call it the overgrown freelancer model. And a lot of or most agencies that are stuck in the
one to five employee size are just overgrown freelancers. They're not a business. So you gotta change the way that you look at everything in your business and be business. Put your business hat on more often.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:41.621)
So I guess two follow-up questions on that. One is, the things that they should be tracking. So is it, in your experience, cashflow, projected sales, profitability, what are those key metrics?
Michael Janda (10:54.54)
Yeah, I tracked. Well, I tracked a ton of things more than I needed and I tracked it for the entire run. In fact, when I started tracking data, I started about 2006 and I had my office manager go back the four years earlier and retro track all of the stuff from before. some of the pieces of data that I got the most insights from the first one was the monthly profit and loss.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:57.823)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Janda (11:24.162)
based on accrual accounting, meaning, did you invoice more than the cost of your business this month? Did you last month? Did you the next month? Are you projected to next month? This kind of tracking keeps you focused on running your business to a profit in the short terms, which will inevitably make you profitable in the long term.
I had a dry erase board in my office where we tracked it. And every month that the revenue number exceeded the expense number, would color in the square green. And my goal, the game I made was keep my green line going as long as I could. And then every once in a you hit a red thing and I'd be like, crap, we just ruined the streak. But if you saw that board, and I wish I had a photo of it, but if you saw that board, was like overwhelmingly green lines.
and then a stretch of red, and then another stretch of green, and then a stretch of three or four months in red. ironically, those red times often happen in the same quarter every single year. Q1, yeah, can see because I track the data, I can see that my January, February, March, one of those months will be the smallest month of revenue every year.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:35.723)
Seasonality, yeah.
Michael Janda (12:48.758)
I can also see that August or September is almost always the biggest month of my year in revenue. And so I could see those trends and then it helps me project what's gonna happen in the future. So that was a big data point that I got a lot of insights out on. Proposals sent or proposals pitched versus proposals won. What's your win rate?
And how many do you have? So if April this year had five proposals and April last year had 12, well, you might have a little data point that could cause you some concern about what your revenue might look like in June or July, because that's when those things will bill out if they're getting pitched in April. So you start seeing those trends. So proposals won versus lost and number of proposals sent.
was a big one, leads that came in, what is my lead quantity? Every single month, and we'd actually track it by week, how many leads are coming in? What are the sources of those leads? So you can see what's working in your marketing. It helps you see what's gonna come. Because if you see that your lead volume is down compared to last year, and your proposal count is down compared to last year, you will be likely.
down in your revenue a month to three months ahead. So it just creates, the data creates a crystal ball for your business. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:21.803)
Yeah, love that man. I'm a big dashboard guy and I love building these out. You know, I did a lot for my agency. I do a lot for clients of helping them kind of crystal ball out what you're exactly what you're talking about. The other thing that you mentioned that sparked something in me, the, the, you know, sub five, sub seven people agencies, the bottleneck is the owner. And I have a lot of thoughts on that. do a lot of talks on delegation and things like that. What's your thought on like what's holding them back from getting out of the way?
Michael Janda (14:31.586)
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Janda (14:50.35)
Not having SOPs, obviously, and I already mentioned that, not having SOPs, not being able to let go of the quality of the work. And I'm not talking about whether the work is good or not. I'm talking about the 20, 10 or 20 % that is subjective on the end. So you hire somebody to be an art director in your seven person agency, and you as the founder would have made a different creative decision than that person.
So you go and you critique it and tell them to change the thing. Now the thing that you ask them to change so often will not change the effectiveness of the work. It's just your preference versus their preference. But the work will still work for the end client and the target audience. And I think a lot of founders can't get out of their own way in realizing that their preference is what they're critiquing in.
So they feel like they have to be in the weeds of everything when in reality, if you hire good people, you got to take a step back and realize they're 80 % of what I would have done is good enough to get 100 % of the results. And the rest is just subjective preference. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:06.155)
Hell yeah, love that. Yep, love that. And so that's a difference in like hitting the ceiling of that million dollar mark, mindset, operational. mean, all of that plays into it. to me, the million dollar mark is just kind of, we put a lot of emphasis on seven figures, seven figures, but a lot of it is the mindset you're talking about, the getting out of the way, the delegation, trusting people to have the autonomy to do their frigging job that you hired them to do. You're paying them.
Michael Janda (16:11.107)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:33.845)
God knows how much, let them do it, man, and clear the way for you to do your own job. Yeah, I love that. Think about pricing. I know you have a lot of resources on pricing. Talk about some of these mistakes or pitfalls or whatever that instantly tells you that, all right, this is definitely an agency that's run by a creative professional that just hasn't matured yet.
Michael Janda (16:36.397)
Yeah.
Yep. Yeah.
Michael Janda (16:56.248)
Yeah. I mean, people cave on their pricing without really knowing what their cost to do the work is. I'm a big fan of that's calculation. Number one, how much is it going to cost you to make this website for the client? Now you have one metric. That's not the price you charge, but that's your, that's your floor. You're never going to go below that. And then you got to understand what is the market charge for things like this? There is a market value. If everybody is charging.
$7,000 for a brochure site that competes with you, then you cannot likely charge $70,000 for a brochure site unless you are selling from a different position, which is one of reputation, relationship. That's where those things change. So you gotta understand those kinds of things. You gotta understand where the client's budget will be. You're never, I think I use the $10,000 logo as an example a lot because
I think there are a lot of creatives out there that think that they have to keep upping their price, up their price, up their price, but for many or most businesses that are small businesses, they will never get a return on their investment for a $10,000 logo. Take the barber on Main Street in your town. You cannot charge that person 10 grand for a logo. There is a ceiling.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:20.555)
Yep.
Michael Janda (18:22.558)
of where it makes sense for them to spend because they will never get a return on investment for a logo of that price. Now, there are plenty of clients that will pay 10, 20, seven figures for rebrands. just saw several this year, Cracker Barrel being one that was big, millions of dollars spent, ended up abandoning the thing, which could be a whole other conversation. think they got unfairly reprimanded by the market and they bailed too quick.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:45.329)
Ha ha ha.
Michael Janda (18:52.362)
my opinion, but anyway, so I think that there's, there's some of that in the world of pricing. Another thing I too, I think this is an error that a lot of creatives that can't get unstuck don't realize you got to track your win rate. So take your last three website projects, if you make websites for clients and you pitch them all for your normal rate of let's say $12,000.
and all three of them said yes. Well, that tells me that you have room to push up your price. So now your next one, you're gonna bid it at 15 grand and you're gonna see if you get a yes. If you get no pushback, then try 16 grand on the next one. Try 18 grand on the next one. I don't recommend, and this is contrary to what some other people teach in our space, I don't recommend you go from 12 grand for yeses
and then say, I got to charge my worth and bump to 24,000. That's craziness. I did not do that in my agency. In the early years of my agency, a $12,000 project was a big one. You go fast forward 10 years and anything under a hundred grand engagement, I probably wasn't even in the meeting. So it was, was the scaling happened without any kind of dramatic, I'm gonna double my prices or I'm gonna triple my prices.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:04.512)
Yep.
Michael Janda (20:19.118)
It's a consistent pushing the price ceiling over time is the safe way to do it without completely destroying your revenue. So track it and push the price ceiling up. You got too many yeses, you don't wanna win everything. So if you're winning 80, 90, 100 % of your bids, that is a bad business. You gotta price it up so that you get some resistance. Find where that resistance is, then that's your new price.
And now you go and market yourself, adjust your marketing, adjust your reputation, work on winning some awards or whatever it's gonna take to get you known enough to push to the next level above that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:02.985)
Yeah, I love that. absolutely true, man. If the win rate is too high, you're giving it away. So yeah, incrementally upsell. Talk about burnout. Prior to selling, was that something that you were experiencing? What do you see kind of now for your life? What adjustments have you made to kind of protect your energy?
Michael Janda (21:23.8)
That's a good one. When I was running my agency, I had so much burden on the overhead and the clients and the demand. And we were doing a lot of revenue and a lot of clients, a lot of employees. And I never let myself feel burned out. I just kept going. I was just like grinding, just grinding. And until it all just hit ahead and then I
This is in year like 12 and I just, I was like, man, I just, I couldn't do it anymore. I just broke. I broke from it. I do not recommend that piece, but that's the way that I did it. And I try and help my people that I coach and work with to realize, okay, it is okay to take your foot off the gas for a month or two months or a quarter. It does not mean you're going to stop moving the car, but you don't have to have pedal to the metal.
It's okay if you're feeling burned out to let your foot up a little bit on the gas and coast for a few months until you catch your breath. Take all those things that you're feeling like, I gotta redesign my site. I gotta get these case studies up. I gotta redo my proposal process. I gotta add SOPs and all this burden of stuff that you're hearing on podcasts of people like us telling them this is what you gotta do. Take it all and say, I'm not gonna do any of it for three months. I'm just gonna keep my deadlines hit and do the work that comes in.
Not even gonna push selling for right now. Do a little to keep something happening, but I'm not gonna be like daily going and trying to do the thing. That is the advice that I give and I did not let myself do that nearly enough, if ever, until I just crashed from it. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (23:07.583)
Yeah. So how has your kind of view or definition of success, I put that word in air quotes, shifted since selling your agency?
Michael Janda (23:16.75)
okay. The difference in for me now, I'm, fortunate to not have that financial burden of feeling like, I make so much money so I can pay my bills or whatever. I'm out of that. And now I'm an entrepreneur for the fun of entrepreneurship. I love playing entrepreneur game. I love it. I love trying to understand my audience. love trying to figure out my messaging, my marketing, adding
services, doing retreats, adding stuff to what I offer that's just so fun for me to play entrepreneur. It's so fun. So I think that that for me is the success. When you get to a level where you're picking and choosing what you want to do for your job, quote unquote, man, it can be so fun to be an entrepreneur. Now in there.
Earlier time success for me was, okay, if I have 10 employees, then I'm successful. If I have this cool studio space, then I'm successful. If I land this client, if I win this award, if I have X amount of money coming in revenue for the year or in my bank account, in my business account, in my business investments, whatever it was, I always had these little check boxes of this and then I'll be successful. Then I'll be successful.
And the irony is that, and I just told this to somebody yesterday, after you're making 120 grand a year in revenue for yourself and you have a million dollars of net worth, anything bigger than that has not affected my happiness level at all. I feel exactly the same. You can have 10 million in the bank and you feel the same happiness about your money.
as when I had a million. You can have 400,000 in revenue for yourself and income, and you feel exactly the same as 120 grand living in the United States where most of us can live on 120 grand, pay our bills and make ends meet. Now, many places, I suppose, I lived in LA for a while, 120 grand was not gonna get it done there, not in Manhattan, but most people can live in a place where that is
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:28.533)
Can't do it there. Yeah.
Michael Janda (25:36.694)
sufficient income to make them have a comfortable life in the United States. Anything bigger than that does not move the needle on happiness. So I think that that's my kind of perspective on what success looks like. Don't miss the mark. I didn't feel more proud of my business after checking all the boxes. Every box I checked for success, quote unquote.
just made me see the five other boxes that I hadn't checked yet and I just keep going after those and I just never let myself enjoy the moment that I was in. Shame on me. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:17.589)
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's a good perspective to have now. All right, I wanna shift gears, wrap up. I wanna stay on schedule. So gonna wrap up with a couple of rapid fire questions for you. The first is, other than your own books, what's one book that every creative should read?
Michael Janda (26:27.95)
Okay.
Michael Janda (26:34.082)
The E-Myth, Michael Gerber, game changer, life changer. is, it literally changed my entire career. That book, book. Yep, yep.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:36.203)
100%.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:43.839)
Yeah, love it. Love it. What's a client you would drop everything with to go work with again?
Michael Janda (26:52.856)
You
Michael Janda (26:56.224)
Okay, if I could go back in time, ABC Family was my biggest client for the first like three or four years. The people who were running ABC Family at the time were good friends of mine from Fox Family when I was working with them at Fox. It was so fun. I was doing work with my friends. They were calling me up and saying, I have the budget. Here's my budget number. We have the assets. I didn't have to sell. I didn't have to pitch. It was just like, Mike, here's the budget. Here's the work. Here's the budget. Here's the work.
Did seven figures of revenue with them in the first few years of my agency. And it was just so fun. I just love working with people who I love working with. And I recommend that to every creative entrepreneur. Man, turn your clients into friends. It's a game changer on how you feel about your day-to-day business. It just changes everything. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:46.335)
Yeah, love that. And then finally, what's the most overrated piece of advice that you hear in the creative industry these days?
Michael Janda (27:55.758)
Okay, I have a piece of content that is brewing for years, but value-based pricing is not the game for most creatives out there. It is not how you should be pricing your work. Meaning, I do believe in pricing for your value, but the pitch of how much revenue do you think you'll make off of X work that I do for you?
I will charge you why percentage of that work. I look back, I did 30 million in revenue in my agency run, and I don't think I could have value based priced anyone that entire time based on that model. And I've seen that model get taught. I just, I just, it's not the only way to get to your number and you can make millions of dollars pricing in a more traditional fundamental way.
than that. So be careful how much you go all in on a model like that. There are other ways that I actually.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:03.03)
Yeah, love that. Michael, man, I really appreciate you spending time with me, getting to know you. All the wisdom. mean, you've got a vast amount of experience and you just give it out freely on books, podcasts, tons of.
Michael Janda (29:22.68)
Thank you, Steve. So fun to be with you. Thank you.
Michael Janda (29:28.216)
Alright.