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Articles by Oliver
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If you used to be fully booked, and now you're not.
If you used to be fully booked, and now you're not.
There's a specific kind of quiet panic I've watched a lot of genuinely talented people go through lately. A year or two…
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How I went from charging £800 to £8,000 for design projects
How I went from charging £800 to £8,000 for design projects
I used to charge £800 for a full design gig, the branding, the socials, the lot. I'd spend 40+ hours on each project…
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Activity
3K followers
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Oliver Johns shared this"The businesses that use AI have the least to lose." - You need to learn that. there's a market near me every weekend, and half the stalls have got AI-made posters up now. and for them, it's the right call.. it's quick, it's basically free, and people are turning up anyway. before AI it was canva, before canva they'd have drawn it on a bit of cardboard. nothing wrong with that at all. but those aren't the businesses you want to be pitching to. they've got nothing really on the line, so they'll always take the cheapest, fastest option going. the ones worth your time are the opposite. the ones raising money, protecting a reputation, desperate not to look like everyone else. they've got a lot to lose by getting it wrong.. which is exactly why they'll happily pay a proper creative who actually knows their industry.
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Oliver Johns shared thisSave this booklist, you'll thank yourself next time you're picking your next read
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Oliver Johns shared thisYou're levelling up and you probably don't even notice it. Being alone stopped feeling lonely. Your circle got smaller but it actually matters now. Old habits don't fit anymore, so you stopped forcing them. and your time.. you guard it like it's the most valuable thing you own because it is. None of it looks dramatic from the outside but you can feel it. It's like moving house, nobody sees the packing.. they just see you standing somewhere new one day.
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Oliver Johns shared thisI spent years charging like my work was easy to replace.. it wasn't, and neither is yours..
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Oliver Johns shared thisEveryone can make bread at home They’ve been able to for thousands of years. & yet the bakery down the road from me has a queue out the door this morning. same reason people spend $50 going out for breakfast when the ingredients are $10 to make at home. People pay not to think about it, they pay for a better experience, they pay for novelty, they pay to feel good they pay to save time. it’s the same with AI yes your client can try it themselves.. most of them still won't, & the ones who do end up with something that’s never as good as the baker.
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Oliver Johns shared thisAI isn't replacing creatives.. It's just showing who was actually creating and who was just consuming. The people who actually create instead of chase are the ones with a future here.
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Oliver Johns shared thisThe game is real, and 2026 isn't going to make it easier. Talent got you in the door. it won't keep you in the room. The creatives winning right now aren't the most talented ones, they're the ones who made themselves impossible to ignore. If you're tired of being under seen instead of underrated, comment 3424 and i'll send you the framework i use to fix this.
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Oliver Johns shared thisProof that the boring paperwork pays. Comment '3424' and get the guide mentioned in the last slide.
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Oliver Johns shared thisI used to drop my price the second someone flinched. £800 brands, 60 hour weeks, worst clients of my career. The discount didn't make me competitive.. it made me cheap. Save this. You'll need it on your next call.
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Oliver Johns liked thisOliver Johns liked thisone year ago today, i received this comment on one of my posts 😭 apparently i CRAVE likes and attention & my selfies added NO content and belonged on Instagram anyway, i continued posting them x in the year since, i’ve: ✨ grown my linkedIn community to over 24,000 people ✨ landed paid brand partnerships through this app ✨ worked with some pretty cool international brands !! ✨ made actual friends through purely posting on this app ✨ had opportunities come my way purely because i’ve shown up as ME!! i think there’s a bigger lesson in this though, NOT everyone is going to like the way you show up and build YOUR personal brand some people will think you’re cringe some will think you overshare some will tell you linkedin “isn’t the place for that” but the people who aren’t your audience don’t get to decide how you show up (!!) so happy one year anniversary to this comment 🫶 imagine if i'd of listened??
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Oliver Johns liked thisOliver Johns liked thisThere’s a messy side of AI. And I don’t think we talk about it enough (especially on LinkedIn). You’ve already heard hundreds of people tell you how amazing agentic AI is. And I definitely agree. But here’s everything I broke when using agentic AI. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes! ❌ I gave it too much to do on its own, too early on. I handed over a whole, very messy, project and just let AI run it. The agents are very confident, I’ll give them that. It’s often quite unfounded. So learn from me - guardrails, context, and walking through every minute detail to begin with work best when handing something over to an AI agent. ❌ It’s all about the first 80%. AI agents are hold-on-to-your-ponytail fast. But they aren’t finisher completers. The final 20% - the nuance, the judgement, the gut feel bit - has just got to be done by a human (for now anyway). Every time I’ve skipped my bit and tried to save myself 10 minutes, I’ve spent a lot longer unpicking everything that went wrong. ❌ AI whiplash is a real thing. I can get about five things done in the time it took me to do one in the days before AI. That doesn’t mean I’ve done 20% of the work I used to do in that time. I’ve flitted from hiring to processes to operations, only doing the hard bits that require some level of thinking. It can get exhausting so make sure you take a break! And I stand by thinking that breaking stuff is the fastest way to learn. I like taking action, and I can work out what went wrong afterwards. And now I need to know your AI mistakes. What’s the worst one?
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Oliver Johns liked thisOliver Johns liked thisToday marks my 1 whole year as Lara Acosta's COO. And no I'm not going to share a big fancy list of lessons. I just wanna say one thing... Two years ago, she was a name on my screen. Someone whose work I studied, whose posts I saved, whose level felt like a different planet from mine. Now she's someone whose businesses I help systemize and scale every day. So please, never forget this: The gap between you and the people you admire isn't as wide as it looks. Whatever it is you wanna do, whoever you wanna work with, stop thinking "I could never" - Take it from this small-town girl in a "3rd world" country: YOU CAN. ♥️ We live in an era where anything can be made possible. P.S. What’s one big goal you’re working towards? Share it below so we can root for you!
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Oliver Johns liked thisOliver Johns liked thisA client owed me £1,800 and chose to ignore my invoice. So I issued a CCJ. (𝘢 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘵 𝘑𝘶𝘥𝘨𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵) It was a one-off project. The goal was to generate downloads of their mobile app. And they wanted to test whether paid social was a viable channel. Here’s what I did (and almost didn’t get paid for): → Analysed their organic social data. → Built a data-driven strategy, wrote the ad copy and briefed new creatives. → Launched Meta ads, monitored performance and doubled down on what was working. Within just 24 hours we reached 70+ downloads. And by day 3 we had over 300. The founder was excited. They’d never generated that many downloads in a single day. He was expecting 50 in the entire month. But despite telling me he’s “not a mess about” and “supports small businesses”, he had the audacity not to pay. Rookie mistake. After 6 weeks of sending invoice reminders, I submitted a small claim via the gov website. He was given 30 days to pay in full. And he called my bluff. He 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 didn’t pay. So I applied for a CCJ. The threat of a CCJ on his credit file did the trick. He finally paid. Not everyone knows that if a UK client doesn’t pay what they owe, you can 𝘶𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 make a claim through the government’s Money Claims Service ⬅️ I’d rather spend my time creating campaigns than chasing unpaid invoices. But I’m not prepared to let someone walk away with £1,800 of my time and effort for free. P.S. If you’re in the financial sector, looking for paid social and actually pay your invoices on time, I’m available for new projects 👋
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Architectural Upkeep
Elvaston castle
- Present 13 years 9 months
Environment
A short course on the conservation of Elvaston castle with the upkeep of the exterior wall and surrounding gardens.
Honors & Awards
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AJ Student Prize
Architects Journal
Design Studio 6 - MArch
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Joseph Hunter Prize for Heritage Architecture
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Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Spanish
Limited working proficiency
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