We recently connected with Megan Dotson and have shared our conversation below.

Megan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

Depending on the stage in my career, I have several clients I consider to be my “first.”

I hadn’t taken on non-family freelance clients before 2023—which by no means discredits what I consider client work. Family members can be a great source of income for creatives were trust and credibility is preestablished. In most cases, accepting a family member client is great low-stakes practice where creatives can gain experience and—equally as important—revenue. These projects can be great additions to your portfolio, and help build your personal brand and network. A client is a client and just because you’re blood related doesn’t discount that. If they are paying for your services and expertise in a particular area, they shouldn’t be considered different. Plus, you don’t have to note this in your portfolio of work if you fear it will be considered “lesser”.

My parents’ business was technically my first client. I created a simple typographic logo, business cards, print and digital advertising, developed social accounts and posts, and restructured and redesigned their website. I was a payroll employee while gaining valuable experience in a wide-open creative playground.

Then came my first freelance client. While I was a full-time Brand Identity Designer in the tech industry—approaching nearly five years with that company—the director of our in-house creative team referred me to a friend who owned a law firm in the greater Washington, D.C. area. This group had recently restructured and with one of their partners leaving the firm, there was a need to update their company name and logo. I wanted to ensure I was acquiring this client in a legitimate way, so I soon filed an LLC for The Mega Creative Company.

Over the course of a month, I developed the law firm client’s new logo along with a simple usage guide, physical and digital business cards, email signature, mailing labels, letterheads, and other various assets to support their rebrand. Once the client was set up for success with new branding, I set the LLC aside and it drifted into the back of my mind. I placed it on a metaphorical shelf, should a similar referral situation ever arise, but by no means was I actively seeking out clients or intending to.

From there, I earned my first clients as a full-time business owner. I grew unhappy at my corporate 9–5 due to fundamental organizational changes. Two months after acquiring my first freelance client, I quit my job. I left without another opportunity lined up. It wasn’t a hasty choice, but a decision I thought long and hard about as my love for design was quickly diminishing on the daily based on the organization’s current climate and wider institutional environment. I made this move for self-preservation, mental health, lifestyle, and believing that I deserved better. This certainly was not without fear of the unknown, job-seeking anxiety, and confusion on if I was doing the right thing. However, this was all outweighed by the fear of complacency in an organization that didn’t value design and marketing to the fullest. I began applying for anything that seemed relevant on hiring sites and after just a few days I was exhausted. Then a eureka moment occurred— I own an LLC. Maybe I could do something with that?

One problem: I feared networking and more importantly, wasn’t sure how to effectively do it. However, it turned out I was doing it all along. I passively grew my personal brand just by showing up to work every day. I invested in my day-to-day work and executed all projects based on high standards I uphold. I am an effective communicator and a reliable team member who can effortlessly juggle multiple stakeholders and a wide range of projects. I forged what became my future business connections without even realizing in the moment. I did this without actively “trying” (aka going to networking events or manual self-promotion). I didn’t need to convince any strangers that I was good enough, I proved it every day which ultimately led to the best recognition possible: my inbox was flooded with requests after sharing the news of my new business with my LinkedIn network.

My last day of corporate work was on a Friday, and the following Monday I was a full-time business owner of The Mega Creative Company. My first clients as a fully-fledged business owner were former co-workers who had left the same organization prior to my departure. Funny enough, the company that I quit quickly re-hired my business as a long-term contractor as they valued my institutional knowledge and proven skillset. It was truly a rewarding realization that my business was succeeding due to my work ethic, the values I uphold, and the expertise I bring to the table. My rolodex of clients continues to be former co-workers, friends, family, and referrals from those key groups within my broader network.

Megan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I graduated from George Mason University summa cum laude as a member of the Honor College with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. I have over seven years of design and marketing experience in the corporate world. I have won four graphic design awards in recent years for hardware catalogs, brand guidelines, and visual identity system build outs. I started my own creative business, The Mega Creative Company, last year out of a dire need for more out of my own life. I knew I could achieve more for myself if I stopped climbing the corporate ladder and instead paved my own path. I harnessed what I learned during my time in an office setting to build efficient creative processes, communicate concisely and effectively, and produce end results that push boundaries and move the needle.

I believe what clients want may not be what they need. I listen deeply and carefully to client’s design and marketing related business challenges, and work with them as partners as I implement industry expertise to create truly impactful work. I foster an open and collaborative workspace where ideas thrive and visions blossom. I design with strategic marketing tactics while contextualizing the overall business goals to elevate brands. I believe a distinct and thoughtfully curated visual identity system that supports a brand significantly increases the chance of brand recognition and brand commitment within target audiences. In other words: good design is an investment for a company that can return that investment tenfold.

At The Mega Creative Company, we strive to move quick, but we don’t compromise quality along the way. Client projects and businesses are always a top priority with our boutique creative agency experience because their brand is our brand. We have a diverse clientele history with a passion for lifestyle brands such as social media influencers, film + tv, and beauty + skin care brands. Our wheelhouse also lies within the tech, security, smart home, green living, and government spaces as we are based out of the Washington, D.C. area where these brands are prevalent. Our clients range from all sizes and points in their business journeys. We have experience collaborating with established mom + pop shops and brand-new small businesses who need help from the ground up with support along the way. We’ve also worked with publicly-traded 1,500+ employee companies to help implement brand refreshes and to provide continual marketing support.

The projects we work on fall into several primary categories: brand development, generalized branding, stationery, print collateral, advertising, web/user experience, and multimedia. Examples of work that live under these branches further include logo design, rebranding and refreshes, brand guidelines, large-scale event displays like tradeshow booth displays, websites, packaging design, long-format pieces such as hardware catalogs and publications, wedding invitations, and digital presentations. Anything that can be designed, we can do.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

My creative career began at a very young age. I was fascinated with dolphins and by the time I was two years old, I was drawing dolphins that were much more than scribbles on a page. As I grew up, my parents continued to foster the idea of creativity and supported my artistic endeavors—gifting art supplies, encouraging me to enroll in high school art and photography classes, and eventually financing much of my college education.

However, the decision to major in an art adjacent field didn’t come without initial skepticism. When I first explained to my parents that I wanted to pursue design, my dad associated it with the idea of a starving artist lifestyle. Even though he didn’t agree with the path I saw for myself, I oddly understood in that moment why I was being met with this aversion. They wanted a sustainable, reliable, and generally “safe” career option for me. However, once I pulled together financial statistics and career trajectories for graphic designers and let them digest, I got the green light.

Immediately after getting my degree and securing a full-time job, I found myself often answering the same two-part question in social settings. The first one was easy… “what do you do for work?” And the second was innocent from the asked but would fill me with rage as I searched for words to answer it: “did you go to school for that?” I worked unbelievably hard to earn my degree—it’s something I am very proud of. I went to George Mason University’s School of Art where I earned my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design. During that time, I worked at the school’s newspaper: Fourth Estate. I started as Visual Editor and worked my way up to Art Director. I also interned at a tech company and went on to work part-time as a Multimedia Specialist while I finished out my degree. I was a teaching assistant for both Typography and Corporate Design & Branding courses. On top of all of this, I was in the honors college and graduated at the top of my class. The design classes were serious and rigorous with my days often ending into the hours of the morning while finishing projects for critique and submission. This career choice wasn’t a fleeting hobby I fell into, but something I aspired to do for a long time.

At the same time, I don’t think a degree should be required to be a part of the greater creative career field. It gives you a leg up on how to use design programs, common terms and lingo of the profession, the tricks and trade of the industry, how to navigate the world and your future clients as a designer, and perhaps most importantly a chance to build your portfolio and make connections with professors and peers. Going to school for design isn’t an end-all-be-all scenario to reach your dream, but if you have the finances and freedom to pursue a college degree or an accreditation program, it can help get you on track faster with better opportunities.

Now, fast forward to immediately post-college. I have a degree and need to find a job. I again was lucky enough to have my parents support and lived with them while I applied all over. After 50+ applications, 13 interviews, and two offers I found a place to begin my career three months after graduation.

I attribute the offer from my chosen employer to my own authenticity. One question I was asked during the interview process was “what is your dream job?” Being the avid competition reality TV watcher that I am—think Survivor, Big Brother, The Challenge, Amazing Race—I didn’t hesitate to say, “I would love to work for CBS one day.” My hiring manager had probably heard “this company!” a thousand times from other interviewees, and my honesty (among other things) set me apart from the pool of applicants.

While at this company, I was promoted from Visual Designer to a more focused role of Brand Identity Designer. I worked with an incredible in-house Creative Team. I had the best manager, and a great director. One of the first things they asked me was, “what do you want to work on while here?” I told them branding specific projects and large-scale event tradeshow booth displays to allow my work to shine. For nearly five years I worked on over a thousand projects, was awarded employee of the month out of 1,000+ eligible peers, won three design awards while there for brand guidelines and hardware catalogs, and won an tech industry-relevant award for my solo work on a 40’x60’ tradeshow booth.

Have you ever had to pivot?

There was a point in time where the pubically-traded company I formerly worked for was investing financially in the brand, with marketing dollars going towards advertising and building a path to a complete brand redesign. As the company’s Brand Identity Designer, I lit up with excitement and saw this project as the greatest opportunity of my career thus far. I was given the chance to lead the logo redesign project, which would then be a capstone project to shine in my portfolio. Unfortunately, that’s where things took a turn for the worse.

The scope of the project began as a full-fledged redesign. Everything was to be changed, from top to bottom. The look of the brand, the feel, the tone, and voice. Slowly but surely when the C-level suite involvement increased, the reins started to get pulled back. They were unsure if timing was right and frankly, didn’t fully understand the value of design and brand in the tech world. It was an uphill battle from the start, attempting to get the buy-in that was desperately needed for this project’s true success.

The project eventually diluted from a brand redesign to a refresh. This is a crucial distinction, both with their own merit. A brand redesign strips a brand from top to bottom, challenging the foundational structure. A brand refresh examines how it can be made better with the general framework still intact. The news of the scope narrowing was disheartening, but I was immediately reengaged to tackle this updated task and execute to the best of my ability. I spent over three months working independently on the refresh, while tagging in team members along the way for feedback and review.

It wasn’t “just work” for me, it became a passion project. I saw this work as such a huge piece of my portfolio, an accomplishment that I had been perusing for nearly five years at that point. I was going to give it all I had.

Tensions began to heighten from there. Processes and points of leadership throughout the company began to falter. People quit, got laid off, were fired, and the marketing team began to drift with no real direction and financial support from upper management. There was major internal restructuring at every level, and it had teams on-edge about making big moves. The buy-in from the C-levels wasn’t present like the Creative Team thought it was.

Enter: the worst meeting of my career.

The three months of blood, sweat, and tears came down to a single meeting with a “higher up” that would determine the overall success of the refresh. I was also built up to believe that this presentation was a formality to check in on progress as we ramp up to implementation. However, this person approached the situation with such hostility and dismissiveness that ruined any ounce of positive outlook I had on the greater organization and my career trajectory there. The project was immediately put to rest—and not because of the design work, but from the ignorance of others and a general timid approach to business. I almost wished it had been an issue with my work—I can always absorb feedback and reach a visual compromise. A fracture within the institution and loss of company vision wasn’t something I could realign from the bottom-up.

I left that meeting deflated, disheartened, and disappointed. Everything that I was working towards crumbled around me and I had no control of it. I wished for the simplest courtesy of recognition for my investment and commitment for the betterment of the company, which never came. I got too close to a project and got burned by it. I didn’t have the personal gain of the portfolio piece I was eager to include. I became truly miserable—this couldn’t be my life. I realized the company and I no longer had a mutual mission. Over the following month, I asked for help from my manager and director for a solution, in which they both worked incredibly hard on my behalf. With direction from HR and corporate policies, my options were to continue as-is or quit. In that moment, with zero hesitation, I decided to exit my full-time position…with nothing lined up afterwards. This was terrifying.

My last day of corporate work was on a Friday and the following Monday I launched right into full-time work for my own business, The Mega Creative Company. My clients are primarily former co-workers, friends, family, and recommendations from those groups. I absolutely crushed the first calendar year of my business. I exceeded my own personal and financial goals, and along the way got to work on projects with many companies that I found of interest, and had causes that aligned with my moral compass. I worked on hundreds of projects throughout the year, allowing me to expand my portfolio to what was previously unattainable.

My story is about a linear beginning becoming untangled, and straightening out again on its own new path. My story is about recognizing that something is wrong, and then doing everything I could to fix it for self-betterment instead wallowing in the misery. My story is about believing in myself when I thought I didn’t have the spark. My story is about defining and discovering success: working for myself, remotely, alongside my husband and dog. My story is about prioritizing my health and an alternative lifestyle over a rigid corporate 9-to-5. My story is about jumping in headfirst and never looking back.

The one piece of advice I’d give to anyone that wants to invest in themselves to become a business owner in the creative field: go work in a corporate environment for a period of time. Even though it almost broke me, I gained valuable experience,
learned about processes, and acquired the proficiency to talk the “business talk”. My advice is to absorb every second of it—the good and the bad. Use it to fuel your knowledge to propel yourself forward on your own path. Believe in yourself…because you are so worth investing in.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.themegacreativecompany.com/
• Instagram: @TheMegaCreativeCompany
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-mega-creative-company/
• Other: Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-zendek-dotson/

Image Credits
Megan Dotson