I’ll admit it, I’m a control freak.

When I used to print out and mail cartoon packets to publications I had a way I liked to do it: Letter on top, return envelope folded thusly, mailing label centered but up just a bit.

As I got more successful and was sending out more and more packets every week, my wife was kind enough to help stuff envelopes occasionally. I remember watching her work and offering suggestions (correcting her every move) and her eventually getting fed up.

“Oh for (blankety blank), I can fold something in half you know! Really! I can!” She growled, “Also, stamp placement? Maybe not as big a deal as you think.”

She was totally right. Now I email out my cartoons and I don’t have to hassle her anymore.

But I also like those emails just so…

The post Are You a Bit of a Control Freak? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Sometimes when you’re stuck for an idea, the best way to get unstuck is to paint yourself into a corner.

This cartoon, for example, came out of a particularly poor writing day. I spent probably a good 3 hours alternating between staring blankly – and taking little naps. (All that staring really drains you.) I finally broke through when I imagined a guy with a guitar in a meeting. What would he say? Why does he have the guitar?

That seemed to loosen things up in my head a bit and I got this cartoon, which, incidentally, is one of my recent favorites.

It reads even funnier if you imagine it in a southern drawl.

The post Hard Times Call For A Fast Talking, Guitar Playing CEO appeared first on Small Business Trends.

You know, when you think about it, being in front can be downright dangerous.

Cutting edge?

Great. But have some band-aids handy just in case.

Pioneering?

OK, but if the Oregon Trail taught us anything, it’s that pioneer life isn’t all fun an games. (Measles, snakebite, dysentery…)

And of course…

Ahead of the curve?

Awesome. Just maybe give a glance behind you every so often.

The post Ahead of the Curve? Watch Out appeared first on Small Business Trends.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” right? I think, however, a good case could also be made for panic being the father in that equation.

Being a cartoonist means having deadlines be they from a client or self-imposed. Early on, they really stressed me out. But these days, I’m pretty comfortable with them because I recognize them for what they offer us creative folk – a good kick in the pants.

In fact, just last week I was completely out of ideas and had just two days until I had a new batch of cartoons due.

Funny how all of a sudden – the ideas started flowing.

The post An Innovative Way Out Of This Mess appeared first on Small Business Trends.

For a long time I deisgned my own websites. I could never code them, but I always felt like I could design one. I’d spent hours in Photoshop pushing pixels, choosing colors, finding fonts (and apparently alliterating), only to find myself irritable and frustrated.

A few years ago, I finally gave in and started working with a really good designer who’s instincts I now trust (even if I still like to tinker a bit). One of the things I learned about was white space and the idea of letting things breathe a little bit instead of cramming as much as possible into a space.

That being said, if your sales graph’s white space is getting bigger – maybe you’ve got bigger problems.

The post The Plus Side to Low Sales: More White Space appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I don’t tend to do a lot of musical jokes because I put a lot of pressure on myself to get music right. My mom was a piano teacher and I majored in music in college, so I take music seriously.

And I knew going in to this cartoon that a lot of people wouldn’t know what forte and crescendo mean (forte means to play at a loud volume, and crescendo means to increase volume) or even that they are musical terms, but I just couldn’t resist drawing that cresecendo in a presentation slide.

The post Not Our Forte, But Where the Crescendo Comes In appeared first on Small Business Trends.

What’s a good name for a cute little business conference cartoon dog? It’s more work than you think.

Here’s what I went thrgouh before landing on Fifi:

• Pookie
• Snookie
• Mr. Waggles
• Buttons
• Snuggles
• Duchess Ophelia T. Wigglebottom
• Snoofy
• Monet
• FrooFroo

Some are servicable and some are too “trying-to-be-a-funny-name” and some are confusing. I’d originally thought Fifi would be overdone like Fido, but in the end it was the best shorthand for a little tiny dog in this business conference cartoon.

The post Little Fifi The Incompetence Expert appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I read something in the paper recently about how an employer in an interview wanted to be “wowed” by an applicant.

Listen, I give a good interview. I’m a funny guy; I know what to say and I think I know my stuff. But if you want me to “wow” you. . .I don’t know how to do that.

So I took it to an extreme in this job interview cartoon.

Note: I don’t know why this guy wants to be made to feel sad at one point, but for some reason once I’d written that into the caption, I couldn’t take it out.

The post Wow Me, Dazzle Me and Impress Me appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Sometimes the ideas just sort of present themselves in a tidy little package for you.

I was perusing some articles online and ran across “at a crossroads” so I wrote it down.

The next article contained “uncharted territory” and I wrote that down right underneath “at a crossroads.”

Then I looked at what I’d written and thought to myself, “It can’t be that easy.”  Then decided that it was, in fact, going to be that easy and this cartoon came out the other side.

That’s a good day.

The post At a Crossroads in Uncharted Territory appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I fundamentally don’t understand the stock market. Things go up and down for reasons that sometimes make sense to me, and sometimes they seem to move the exact opposite of what I would expect.

Could I in theory understand it? Sure. Do I really want to dig into it? Oh, good lord no.

But to go along with news and data (and this is the stuff that makes me crazy) there’s also a lot of conjecture about how something thinks someone might feel about something:

“Happy investors were afraid that the markets weren’t wary enough about the apparent sunniness of blah blah blah…”

So I played with that idea in this business cartoon and basically gave the markets the blahs.

The post Declining Markets: Tired and Need a Day Off appeared first on Small Business Trends.