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Keep on learning. Hire good help. Balance business tasks with creative work as you’re planning your schedule. These themes emerged recently when we asked a handful of CIA’s many successful alumni what it takes to thrive as a self-employed artist or in running a creative company. Recess Creative, owned by 2005 graduates Chris Jungjohann and Tim Zeller, answered these questions as part of a larger video interview.

Tell us about your business.

As a full-service advertising agency, we do everything for the initial brand strategy for any type of company. We build websites, we make mobile apps. We do everything from social media to SEO, and anything and everything you can do in the advertising and marketing space, from the technology all the way to designing cakes.

Designing cakes?

We design cakes for the Cleveland Airport, some of which have won cake design awards.

What have you learned about business by being in the trenches?

HR is hard. That’s definitely the hardest thing.

Finish this sentence: You’re not cut out to be an entrepreneur if you—.

You’re probably not cut out to be an entrepreneur if you can’t be confident in the decisions you make. You’re going to be pressed up against a wall, and you might not have the support of anybody else, so you have to be able to be confident in those choices.