I ran my own mini-advertising agency during college. They don't take much to start and ended up with a very, very nice salary (middle $100's). I even lived for

I ran my own mini-advertising agency during college. They don't take much to start and ended up with a very, very nice salary (middle $100's). I even lived for free for two years exchanging services with collegiate complexes in the area. Here's what I concluded: 1. Top-notch creative counts for big accounts, but not necessarily local (local small businesses micro-manage) 2. Great Account Service (people want honesty and good work ethic, bullshit excuses are transparent — you'd be surprised how many designers/freelancers don't get this) 3. Automate Remedial Tasks (don't waste hours on proposals, revision orders, etc. most of them are the same anyway). The ad agency I left to start my own spent ~$100K+ a year on employees to do this crap. Waste. I was learning PHP/SQL at the time so I built my own extranet for the business. Wrote a script to generate 6+ page proposals in a matter of minutes. And had a backend system built so I could simply upload images to the FTP and it would categorized and auto-thumbnail for the clients to preview, etc. Due to the demands of college, I usually contracted initial concepts to freelance designers and then handled most of the revisions, etc. This kept me mentally sane as the initial conceptual process is usually the most draining. When I closed it all down after ~3 years to chase a dream in a video game startup, I had utilized about 20 contractors from all over the world during that period.